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This article summarizes the author's keynote address at the 2020 International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society. It is a narrative of her 25 years of work with the bereaved, with the explicit goal of illustrating how her understanding of grief, her therapeutic approach and her views regarding the role of a grief therapist have evolved throughout her career. Factors in this evolution include the de facto, continuous collection of data on the grief experience that clinical work provides, and efforts to make sense of this data by turning, on a regular basis, to the literature on the roots of normative and complicated grief and on progress in addressing the needs of the bereaved. In this edited version the author considers the impact of the current pandemic on individuals and communities, and on the provision of clinical services to the bereaved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 20 years advances in neuroscience have made it possible for us to observe and describe how the brain develops in the first two years of life and how it continues to change over the course of our lifetimes. Findings from this research provide new evidence of the impact of environmental factors, among them the quality of early caregiving, on the development of neurological structure and functioning. This paper suggests that these findings, particularly findings concerning the impact of early caregiving on the developing brain and the consequences with regard to affect regulation, can help us account for the variation observed in adaptation to loss in adulthood. The significance of what we now understand to be the brain's ongoing ability to grow and change will also be discussed, with an emphasis on implications for the practice of grief therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss the question of how my own early experience of loss influenced my professional choices, as well as the ongoing influence of that experience on my work as a grief therapist. Like many of my colleagues who work with the bereaved, my interest in death and dying can be traced back to an early, significant loss. My mother was ill for much of my childhood and she died when I was nine years old. Her death shattered my world and I spent many of the years that followed trying to avoid falling to pieces myself. The issue of self-disclosure is considered here, as is the reciprocal influence of my work on the ongoing reconstruction of my personal narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]