Death, Dying, and Grief

The Modern Therapist's Survival Guide with Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy

An interview with Jill Johnson-Young, LCSW about how we have been trained to handle grief wrong. Curt and Katie talk with Jill about what the Kubler-Ross model is useful for (and what it’s not) as well has how therapists can better deal with grief – for themselves and in their practice.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. We are human beings who can now present ourselves as whole people, with authenticity, purpose, and connection. Especially now, when therapists must develop a personal brand to market their practices.

To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

Interview with Jill A. Johnson-Young, LCSW, Grief educator, and CEO of Central Counseling Services of Riverside and Murrieta

Jill Johnson-Young, LCSW is a dynamic and engaging presenter. She is consistently noted for providing thorough and useful information to meet the needs of the audience. Professional and community seminars have returned reviews thanking her for being the best seminar of the conference, for being personable and including questions from the participants, and for both the lecture content and the interactive portions of the programs. Jill is available for presentations about the following issues:

• Grief and loss: all ages, all kinds of losses (pets, family, friends, chronic illness and sudden losses, hospice and what to expect, new ways to see grief, coping, how loss impacts the grieving person, others)
• Dementia: Losses, involved, coping for those with dementia and those impacted by it, recovery after a loss form dementia, family dynamics in coping with dementia

When she is not out speaking, which is one of Jill’s favorite parts of her career, she is the CEO and Clinical Director of Central Counseling Services in Riverside, California. She is a certified Grief Recovery Facilitator and specializes her private practice work in grief and loss, dementia, trauma, and adoption issues. She has more than a decade of experience with hospice and trains therapists and social workers in areas that include correctly treating childhood trauma, grief and loss, and dementia care. She holds a BA from UC Riverside and her MSW from the University of South Florida.

In this episode we talk about:

• Jill’s story and how she has been nicknamed the grief whisperer, the rebellious widow, and a black widow and how she is a grief rebel disruptor
• How Elizabeth Kubler-Ross is used incorrectly – it was designed for anticipatory grief
• The “common knowledge” about grief that is not really common knowledge
• How our society commonly avoids death, dying, and grief – even therapists are afraid of funerals
• What normalizing death can do to help your clients, especially children
• The importance of integrating a lost loved one into your sense of self
• The unexpected consequences of grief
• Physical, cognitive, emotional, and relational effects of grief
• Therapists’ responsibility when treating a griever
• The concept of reconstructing your life after a loss
• The differences between typical loss and traumatic loss
• How people grieve differently, especially related to roles, development, family dynamics
• Why to pull back from deifying the dead
• How therapists can handle when their own grief comes up with grieving clients
• What therapists (and all people) do wrong when interacting with a griever
• How celebrities dying can impact our clients