Free Webinar Offered to Frontline Providers
A free archived webinar, Grief and Managing an Opioid Death, focuses on frontline workers in the opioid crisis and the complexities of grieving an overdose death. In addition to describing the many faces of grief and working with loved ones left behind, it also presents self-care strategies designed to help care providers manage their own cumulative grief in response to dealing with repeated loss,
It can be difficult to comfort someone who is experiencing an overdose death because, in addition to sadness and despair, the survivor may also be experiencing shame, blame, and stigma. A number of approaches are presented in the webinar for working through an overdose death with clients including:
- Four Task of Mourning (Worden)
- Dual Process Model (Stroebe and Schut)
- Therapeutic Bereavement Rituals (Rando)
- Trauma Processing Techniques
There is a lot of good information reviewed in the presentation and slides, but the best advice for frontline providers comes toward the end:
“We cannot heal someone else until we know how to heal ourselves … We start by acknowledging our own woundedness. We enter that woundedness and work through it. By entering that woundedness and working through it, we learn how to heal ourselves, and we learn how to assist in the healing of others.” (Being a Wounded Healer, Douglas Smith)
The webinar is a Providers Clinical Support System for Opioid Therapies presentation that can be accessed for free at any time. Click here and follow the prompts for the video presentation and click here to access the presentation slides.