End of life therapy: the course

This week’s guest blog is from Nick Owen.

I’ve spent more than thirty years as a psychotherapist working with people in Health and Social Services to private practice, and training psychotherapists and counsellors. I’ve written a course in “End of Life Therapy” and Barbara’s invited me to tell you something about it.

The course is relevant to nurses and doctors and social care practitioners as well as therapists. It explores the physical, social, emotional and spiritual dimensions of dying. Building on the well established concepts of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross it moves into an exploration of the ideas of Stanislav Grof, who has done pioneering work relating to different methods of counselling as they affect people who are dying.

The course invites a student to consider expanding the concept of counselling to embrace working with partners, family and community members, who all have a part to play in this process of living and dying.

Doing psychological therapy with people who are dying is often difficult and demanding.

A therapist may need to try to work with a client in a strongly altered state or in various levels of coma. Pioneering work by Arnold Mindell has shown us that it is possible and even desirable to attempt to do such work. One of the lessons focuses on this process of dancing on the edge of eternity.

People who have already done a first training in counselling and/or psychotherapy will find it both interesting and challenging, since it asks all sorts of fundamental questions and attempts to address a number of practical problems which stretch the normal boundaries of professional practice. It explores those big existential questions of the nature of reality, life and death. It aims to prepare counsellors and a wide range of professional care givers for the task of responding therapeutically, sensitively and creatively to end of life issues in their work. It provides helpful theoretical frameworks for thinking, feeling and understanding psychological processes specific to the end of life.

Find out more about this and other end of life support and training on Final Fling.

Real death movement grows

Tradition meets cutting edge

I’ve recently been contacted by a young man – only 24 – who is desperate to get into the funeral industry. At every turn he’s been told: “you need experience”. I thought those days of closed shops were gone.

And so when I sent a plea round all the great people I’ve met through the Good Funeral Awards, I was able to send him back a link to training that Jane Morrell and Simon Smith of Green Fuse offer.

Green Fuse have trained around 50 funeral arrangers and nearly 200 funeral celebrants and help people find jobs. Theirs is the only full funeral director training available for people who don’t already have a job in the sector.

Award winning funeral directors and trainers they have more than a decade’s experience to bring to bear. Their company Green Fuse has a vision to modernise funeral arranging to provide services that better fit the changing world we live in. A world where only 6% attend church regularly. A world where 1 in 3 of us live on our own. A world where pensioners include Helen Mirren and Mick Jagger and our dying may have danced naked at Woodstock.

Their groundbreaking training, Modern Funeral Directing, has helped people to set up new funeral directing companies of their own, not only in the UK but also in Australia, NZ and the US.

“The Green Fuse course was exceptionally rewarding and responsive to our needs,” said Hitesh Solanki. “It has helped me grow and develop as a funeral director. I am now the proud owner and director of Shanti Asian Funeral Services in North Harrow.”

“So far around a dozen new funeral businesses have developed with the help of our training,” Simon told me. “It’s very exciting. We’re helping create a new wave in the funeral sector. Funeral directors need to be able to listen closely and work creatively with families to create an individual funeral every time. That’s what our training covers.”

It’s not about creating Woodstock-themed funerals. It’s just about rites of passage that have meaning instead of the current conveyor belt approach.

We were so inspired, we’ll be on their next Caring for the Body course. Look out for more to find out how it went.

FIND OUT MORE about the training Jane and Simon run throughout the year.