Grieving, while a process of letting go, is also one of holding on — to a relationship with the deceased that is sustainable and gratifying, regardless of the quality of the previous attachment with that person. For Neimeyer, it is critical that clinicians help their grieving clients to integrate rather than segregate their tragedies, so they can be enlarged rather than diminished following the loss. By watching this master with three grieving clients, you learn how to sit bravely yet comfortably with grieving clients. And you will come away with a trove of evocative and creative therapeutic techniques including role play, empty chair, imaginal dialogs, letter writing, somatic awareness, and visualization that you can immediately apply in your own clinical work.

Ingrid, now 40, lost her mother— a hardworking, somewhat emotionally unavailable “iron lady” the likes of Margaret Thatcher — to cancer over two decades before. Believing that time would simply heal her wounds. However, walling off her feelings only deepened her pain and sense of isolation within her own family into what diagnosticians might consider a “Prolonged Grief Disorder.” By bringing Ingrid’s mother into the room (on the actual day of her birthday) through Neimeyer’s calming here-and-now presence, a powerful guided visualization exercise, the empty chair technique, and letter writing — the combination of which he describes as analogic listening — he supports Ingrid in the exploration of her inner world and embodied relationship with her grief. In doing so, Neimeyer helps Ingrid to stand by rather than be engulfed by her grief, relinquish its paralyzing hold on her, and enlist her mother as an ally in healing and moving forward in her life.

Christina is tormented by a nightmarishly improbable set of circumstances. A Cypriot, married to a Dutchman, she was transferred to the Philippines when COVID descended on the world. Unable to travel home to Europe to give birth to triplets conceived through fertility treatments, the couple lost two of their three babies — one in utero, and another, Melina, post-partum after contracting a deadly bacterium from the equipment used to express Christina’s breastmilk. The remaining child, Zoe, suffered irremediable brain damage from the same bacteria that claimed the life of Melina.. Neimeyer invites Christina into a fully embodied and quite literally “touching” experience of the inner world she shared with Melina and that has been replaced with deep emotional pain, so she can begin to construct a living bond through which she can move forward.

Loretta, age 80, while described by Neimeyer as a “case study in adaptive grieving,” is stuck in the aftermath of the loss of her husband of 56 years three years earlier. Having never lived alone in her life, and feeling sad and alone, she bravely navigates her inner terrain with Neimeyer in a medical auditorium in front of 200 professionals, materializing him as a person rather than simply a problematic absence. Helping her to search within her body for cues of what it needs, and sharing loving memories of her husband, Neimeyer invites her loneliness into the room so she may have a conversation with it. Loretta poses challenging questions to this humanized form of her pain, and by doing so, Loretta begins the task of helping her to reweave the story of her life in the physical absence of her husband.

So, join Robert Neimeyer as he helps these clients weave the painful stories surrounding their losses into meaningful self-stories from which they can move forward and outward in their lives.