Facilitating Resilience and Life After Loss

Webinar Overview

Facilitating Resilience and Life After Loss: Using the Twin Lenses of Two-Track Model of Bereavement (TTMB) in Clinical Work.

The loss of a close family member has the potential to be a catalytic and / or cataclysmic, life-changing event. In this webinar, our focus will be on understanding this model and its applications and utility in working with the bereaved. The early formulations of the Two-Track Model of Bereavement (Rubin, 1981, 1999), sought to clarify and chart a pathway to make sense of the tremendous variation in response to loss.

The passage of time has added clinical and research data underscoring the importance of maintaining a bifocal approach for the examination of response to loss across the life-cycle (Rubin, Malkinson & Witztum, 2012, 2020). The first track of the response to loss addresses the biopyschosocial response to loss over time. The Track I domain focusses on response to traumatic and extremely stressful life events.

All such events require adaption, change and integration, and all can result in variable mixtures of positive, neutral and negative influences on those affected. The second track, focuses most powerfully on the nuances of the relationship to the deceased. Track II places the preloss experience of the relationship, and the post loss bond to the deceased, at the centre of attention. Together with the Death Story, understanding the nature of the bond with the deceased both prior to and following the loss are critical to understanding the challenges of working with the bereaved. In this webinar, I will present new insights and perspectives based on the model, its evolution over time, and some of its relevance for those working in the field today.

We shall consider this model’s relevance for focussing assessment and interventions related to continuing bonds, traumatic and non-traumatic loss, and overall resilience. To do so, we shall use art, film and clinical material along with theory and research data in our meeting.

This webinar is designed to engage clinicians, researches, the bereaved and those who support them, in our shared quest to facilitate resilience following loss and bereavement.

Learning Outcomes

What can participants expect to have learned after attending this webinar:

• A clear understanding of the Two-Track Model of Bereavement (TTMB) and its implications for theory and practice.
• A paradigm for applying the insights of the model in assessment and intervention and suggestions for deciding how to balance and when to prioritise Track I, Track II, or both tracks of the TTMB.
• How to interplay between subjective and objective elements of how loss impacts the bereavement experience in “traumatic bereavement” and how to use the TTMB to assist in assessment and intervention.
• Presentation of several intervention strategies and techniques and their connection to particular elements of the TTMB with the goal of fostering resilience in the bereaved.