Healing The Grieving Heart: Effective Strategies For Helping Clients Heal From Grief, Trauma Break-Ups, And Other Losses While Creating Renewed Meaning In Their Lives
Course Content
Healing from grief doesn’t have to be slow or painful. This workshop will show you how to help clients navigate the journey of grief more easily and view loss as a pathway to greater compassion, deeper relationships, and more meaningful living.
You will discover why the face of grief and loss has changed over the last decade and acquire a host of contemporary strategies you can use to comfort grieving clients and help them move forward in positive, healthy ways after loss.
Through lively discussion, video examples, and engaging experiential activities, you’ll learn about scientific breakthroughs that have led to better treatments for grief and loss as well as practical, creative applications of these discoveries. For example you’ll learn how to accelerate healing using creative tools such as imagery, ritual, music, and mindfulness and engage positive systems in the emotional brain. You’ll also learn how to incorporate your client’s unique cultural and spiritual values and discover surprising techniques for resolving complicated grief and difficult emotions such as guilt, resentment, and despair.
You’ll learn methods for assisting children through loss and how to help clients successfully navigate ambiguous losses such as breakups, divorce, infertility, miscarriage, job loss, and the declining health of aging parents.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify 2 new discoveries that have led to better treatments for grief and loss.
- Explain factors that can complicate the grief process and how to manage them.
- Outline a simple 6-step process for guiding clients through the journey of grief.
- Demonstrate how mindfulness, imagery, ritual, and music can relieve grief.
- Describe strategies that help clients cope with relationship break-ups and divorce.
- Explain how to help children process loss with age-appropriate strategies.
- Recognise ambiguous or disenfranchised losses and ways to help clients cope.
- Identify spiritual and cultural values that impact the grief and loss process.
CPD Information For Mental Health Professionals
Enjoy complete flexibility with 100% self-paced learning you can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Pay once for lifetime access.
Course Duration: 5 learning hours
Certificate and CPD hours: On completion you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion to support your CPD records.
Assessment: Complete a short quiz at the end (80% pass mark), which you can resit as many times as needed.
Lifetime Access: Your access to the course does not expire, so you can revisit key concepts anytime you want a refresher for practice.
CPD Eligibility: This program may be suitable for CPD for professionals such as:
- Psychologists
- Counsellors and Psychotherapists
- Social Workers
- Community Workers
- Mental Health Nurses
- General Practitioners (GPs)
- Occupational Therapists
CPD requirements vary between professional bodies, so please check with your association or credentialing body to confirm you can claim CPD hours/OPD points for this program and what evidence they require.
Meet Your Instructor
Trauma and grief cases that resist traditional therapy approaches often transform rapidly when clinicians learn to work with the brain's natural healing mechanisms. Courtney Armstrong has spent over two decades pioneering trauma-informed hypnotherapy, becoming an international authority on memory reconsolidation and attachment-focused trauma treatment.
As founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Hypnotherapy and author of three bestselling books - including Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory Reconsolidation, and Resilience - Armstrong has trained thousands of clinicians worldwide in brain-based approaches that accelerate healing. Her recognition as a National Board Certified Fellow in Clinical Hypnotherapy and American Society of Clinical Hypnosis Approved Consultant reflects her mastery of therapeutic techniques that access clients' innate capacity for transformation.
Armstrong's expertise spans trauma-informed hypnotherapy, grief therapy, memory reconsolidation, attachment repair, and experiential therapy approaches. Her innovative methods combine clinical hypnosis with current neuroscience research, showing practitioners how to help clients process traumatic memories without retraumatisation. She specialises in cases where traditional talk therapy has stalled, teaching clinicians to engage the right brain and somatic systems that store traumatic material.
What sets her training apart is practical accessibility. Armstrong is renowned for her warm, engaging teaching style that transforms complex neuroscience into immediately usable techniques. Her "Therapeutic Aha!" approach helps clinicians create breakthrough moments that unstick clients from repetitive trauma patterns, while her memory reconsolidation methods show practitioners how to help clients update traumatic memories with new, empowering information.
For your practice, expect to gain specific hypnotherapy techniques for trauma processing, practical tools for working with complicated grief, and brain-based interventions that create rapid therapeutic change. Her methods particularly benefit clinicians working with clients who intellectualise their trauma, struggle with traditional exposure therapies, or need somatic approaches to healing.
Quick Win: Armstrong's "resource installation" technique helps clinicians quickly establish internal safety and stability in traumatised clients before processing difficult material - a foundational skill that prevents retraumatisation and accelerates treatment progress.
Qualifications
- M.Ed., Counselor Education, University of New Orleans, 1995
- BBA, Marketing and Psychology, Georgia State University, 1990
- Licensed Professional Counselor, Tennessee
- Approved LPC Supervisor, Tennessee
- National Board Certified Fellow in Clinical Hypnotherapy
- American Society of Clinical Hypnosis Approved Consultant
- Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies, Trauma Center at JRI Boston
- Trained in EMDR with Somatic Attachment Focus
- Trained in Biofeedback and HeartMath
Selected Books (All W.W. Norton)
- Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory Reconsolidation, and Resilience (2019, bestseller)
- The Therapeutic "Aha!": 10 Strategies for Getting Clients Unstuck (2015, bestseller)
- Transforming Traumatic Grief (2011)
Teaching & Roles
- Founder & President, Institute for Trauma Informed Hypnotherapy, 2018–present
- Chief Inspiration Officer, Courtney Armstrong Counseling and Training, 2010–present
- Author & International Trainer, Real World Therapy, 2015–present
- Education & Training Committee, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis
- Former Owner/Director, Tamarisk: A Center for Change and Growth, 2007–2017
Speaking & Training
- International presentations: Australia (2019), Europe, Asia
- Psychotherapy Networker Symposium presenter
- Developed clinical hypnosis training programs for U.S. Veterans Administration
Professional Memberships
- Member, Chi Sigma Iota Counseling Honors Society (1995)
- Professional affiliations: ACA, CAPA, TLPCA, AMHCA, ASCH
- Past President, Chattanooga Psychotherapy Association
Ready to help trauma survivors access their natural healing capacity? Discover how Courtney Armstrong's trauma-informed hypnotherapy methods can transform your ability to create breakthrough moments and accelerate client recovery.
Feedback & Reviews
This course includes:
- Lessons 1
- Topics 5
- Duration 5 hours
- Quizzes 1
- Language English