Dear Community,
We as the committee would like to offer you, our members of the ASCP community an opportunity to participate in a Grief and Loss Group Processing session in relation to the terrible loss of one of our mentors, Andrew and all the consequential fallout from this untimely ending.
We, as the Committee have made a commitment to organizing this opportunity you all, and ourselves, to further processing our grief and loss by enlisting the support of Greg Roberts. Greg is well versed in the complex nature of grief and who can offer a space to come together or even individually in relation to the grief and trauma we all experienced. (Please see below for some history as to his story). We feel this has the potential to bring benefits to each of us individually, to our community and to contribute to our understanding of grieving and integrating loss as a therapeutic process within our world of psychotherapy.
Naturally, as time has passed since Andrew’s death, there have been noticing’s about recurrent ongoing feelings of deep loss and sadness affecting us personally and professionally. The impact comes up in supervision, in preparation for trainings, in committee meetings, in collegial chats. Questions, feelings, tears, tiredness, waves of or even inability to engage the work we do as we did before including the wondering of whether it is even possible to believe in the work.
We can begin to understand that in the grief and loss of our bereavement we have suffered “traumatic” loss and the loss of an intimate attachment figure in our personal lives and that the grief and sadness we bear is normal and understandable. Even while we have rallied together in mutual love and support with each other and with and ‘around’ Kaalii ’s profound loss, there has been understandable fall out and consequences as well. The sale of 71 Barkly St, representing the loss of the physical home of Soul Centred Psychotherapy – Kairos Centre as well as Kaalii and Andrew’s home being one example.
Having said that, in the last 18 months the cohesion of our community, with each other and with Kaalii has been remarkably functional. And we have been able to continue our professional life as a community, regrouped and reorganized in a way that sees the beginning of a reconstruction of a world of Soul Centred Psychotherapy in the absence of Andrew’s physical presence. We have worked with Kaalii in a process of reconstructing a new “home” for The Kairos Centre and Soul Centred Psychotherapy, setting up a library, creating a new website for the ASCP community and completing the beginning steps to a new training course.
So in conclusion, we invite you to take this opportunity to join in an individual and community space as we continue the journey of healing, gathering, naming, finding meaning, re-membering … awakening Osiris.
Greg Roberts: PhD, BSW Hon’s, MAASW Acc’, Grad’ Cert’ Bereavement Counselling
Interventions, Cert IV TAE Counsellor & Educator
http://www.cep.net.au
Christine met Greg Roberts as a teacher in a Grief and Loss training last year as part of the Centre for Existential Practice. The phenomenological approach to bereavement, loss and grief is coherent with the values and principles of Soul Centred Psychotherapy and is the basis for her suggestion of talking with Greg about our experience. Christine had further discussion with Greg while at the grief therapy master class recently held by Robert Neimeyer and he would be honoured to offer us this opportunity.
