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Full Course Description

Pregnancy and Infant Loss: Effective Strategies to Support Grief and Treat Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression in Bereaved Families

While it may be tempting to see reproductive loss as rare events that you probably won’t encounter in your practice, it’s much more likely your clients or patients already have or will experience a pregnancy or infant loss — though they may not be talking about it. Join us for our FREE focused 1-day training with reproductive psychology expert Dr. Julie Bindeman, who will teach you how to work effectively with pregnancy and infant loss and modify clinical interventions for trauma, anxiety, and depression for grieving parents.

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Evaluate three differences in client responses to pregnancy and infant loss and their clinical implications.
  2. Formulate two ways that loss interrupts the developmental tasks of pregnancy.
  3. Devise two strategies for responding to relationship conflict after loss.
  4. Distinguish grief from postpartum depression.
  5. Utilize two cognitive therapy strategies to decrease clients’ self-blame related to pregnancy and infant loss.
  6. Demonstrate one therapeutically effective use of countertransference.

Outline

Gradations of Grief: Types of Early Bereavement

  • Intake assessment strategies for obtaining reproductive information 
  • Nuances of loss in early pregnancy - miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, abortion, medical termination, stillbirth 
  • Developmental tasks of pregnancy and how loss interrupts them 
  • Coping with NICU admission and neonatal death 
  • Medical factors facing bereaved parents 
  • Infertility grief 
  • Disenfranchised grief - the loss of possibility and what could have been  

Tools to Help Grieving Parents and their Communities 

  • Individual, couple, and family phases of grief - and when to be concerned 
  • Living children and loss 
  • Clinical management of higher rates of relationship conflict and divorce after loss 
  • Distinguish grief versus postpartum depression 
  • Language around loss - key things to say and not to say 
  • How culture supports or does not support grief and loss 
  • Best practices for managing grief milestones and establishing mourning rituals 
  • Grief management during subsequent attempts to conceive 

Therapy after Pregnancy and Infant Loss

  • Exploring clients’ reproductive journey and narrative 
  • Crisis interventions to help shift clients out of shock  
  • Stabilization phase - resourcing tools to manage the expected flood of emotions  
  • Tailor existing evidence-based interventions to this clinical situation 
    • Cognitive strategies for assisting parents with neutralizing shame and self-blame 
    • Behavioral techniques to manage loss-related triggers 
    • Mindfulness and values-based interventions to assist parents with creating meaning  
    • Trauma processing techniques for resolving PTSD-related symptoms 
  • Clinical strategies to support bereaved parents during subsequent pregnancies and the postpartum period after loss 
  • How and when to end therapy when pregnancy or infant loss was the presenting problem 

Clinical Considerations 

  • Therapeutic use and management of countertransference  
  • Self-care and burnout protection for therapists’ whose own symptoms or grief is activated  
  • Moral injury around limited resource availability  
  • Establishing cultural competency - inclusive practices for all individuals and family systems 
  • When and how to refer to couples therapy and support groups 
  • Research limitations and potential risks 

Target Audience

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  • Social Workers  
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  • Marriage & Family Therapists  
  • Addiction °ä´Ç³Ü²Ô²õ±ð±ô´Ç°ù²õ &²Ô²ú²õ±è;
  • Other mental health professionals  
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  • Occupational Therapists  

Copyright : 09/26/2025