The Grieving Therapist: Caring for Yourself and Your Clients When It Feels Like the End of the World

For readers of No Cure for Being Human and Simple Self-Care for Therapists, a witty and compassionate field guide to the 10 realms of grief--and how to navigate them yourself and with clients.

How do you practice good therapy when it’s the end of the world as we know it…and no one feels fine?

The  planet is burning, friends and family are falling to cults and QAnon,  and we’re all living through the collective trauma of a global pandemic.  Among therapists and healers, burnout is rampant; hopelessness and  despair are, too. In The Grieving Therapist,  psychotherapists Larisa Garski, LMFT, and Justine Mastin, LMFT, give  voice to the difficulties of therapising in today’s world--and offer a  grief-informed framework for taking care of yourself as you take care of  others.

Informed by narrative, internal family systems, fanfic,  and trauma-sensitive therapy, Garski and Mastin examine what it means  to be a therapist at the end of the world (or what feels like it). They  break down 10 realms of grief that are critical to understand and work  with today, but likely weren’t taught to you in therapy school. Each  chapter includes:

• Grieving tools that can be adapted for both client and therapist
• Tips for supervisors and supervisees
• Skills for maintaining healthy outside-the-office relationships
• Support for current therapy students (and therapists new to the field)
• Advice on how to hold space and work with clients who have the same questions—and are navigating the same issues—as you
• Meditations on love, life, death, and connection

Garski  and Mastin also share helpful guidance around working with clients  whose social or political beliefs differ from yours; when therapeutic  self-disclosure makes sense; honoring the information that  countertransference is trying to give you; and how to sit with (or step  away from) triggers in your work.

With humor, compassion, irreverence, and more than a little whimsy, The Grieving Therapist shows you how to show up for yourself, and your clients--in your own full humanity, amidst it all.