Complex and Traumatic Loss Fostering Healing and Resilience

In this needed practice and training guide for all mental health professionals, Froma Walsh presents a research-informed, resilience-oriented approach to help individuals, couples, and families who experience profound loss. Walsh guides therapists to understand and address the impact of complicated and traumatic deaths in relational systems and social contexts. She provides core principles and illustrative examples to foster healing and adaptation; help clients mobilize vital social, cultural, and spiritual resources; and find pathways forward to live and love beyond loss. Essential topics include death of a spouse, parent, child, or sibling; ambiguous and disenfranchised losses; death by violence, suicide, or overdose; collective trauma; and reverberations of past loss in life pursuits, other relationships, and across generations.
 

Froma Walsh, MSW, PhD, is the Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professor Emerita in the Crown Family School of Social Work Policy and Practice and the Department of Psychiatry, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago. She is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. Dr. Walsh is an internationally respected clinical scholar and a foremost authority on family resilience. Integrating developmental, relational, sociocultural, and spiritual perspectives, her resilience-oriented systemic approach with individuals, couples, and families fosters healing and positive adaptation. She is past editor of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and past president of the American Family Therapy Academy. Dr. Walsh is the recipient of many honors for distinguished contributions to theory, research, and practice, including the Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association and awards from the American Family Therapy Academy, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, the American Orthopsychiatric Association, and the Society for Pastoral Counseling Research. She is a frequent speaker and consultant internationally, and her books have been translated into many languages.
 

I. Overview
1. Facing Death and Loss: The Human Predicament
2. Working with Complex and Traumatic Loss: A Resilience-Oriented Systemic Approach
3. Cultural and Spiritual Influences in Suffering, Healing, and Resilience
II. Death, Dying, and Loss: Individual, Couple, and Family Challenges
4. Approaching the End of Life: Challenges and Resilience
5. In the Wake of Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience
6. Loss Across the Family Life Cycle: Death of a Spouse, Parent, Child, Sibling
III. Complex and Traumatic Loss Situations
7. Ambiguous, Unacknowledged, and Stigmatized Losses
8. Loss of a Cherished Companion Animal
9. Violent and Traumatic Deaths: Fatal Accident, Homicide, Overdose, Suicide
10. Addressing Complex Relational and Transgenerational Dynamics: Reverberations from the Past
11. Collective Trauma and Loss: Fostering Individual, Family, and Community Resilience
12. The Shared Human Experience of Loss: Professional and Personal Influences in Our Therapeutic Engagement
Appendix: Suggested Resources and Readings
References
Index