Artful Grieving

This essential resource is a must read for all clinicians. Artful Grieving provides an innovative and creative framework to facilitate conversations around and promote healing from grief and loss. – Carolyn Brown Treadon, PhD, ATR-BC, ATCS, Graduate Program Coordinator, PennWest UniversityArtful Grieving– written from the heart and the mind– expands and elevates how art therapists can view and approach loss and grief through these inspiring, innovative, and beautifully illustrated exercises. – David E. Gussak, PhD, ATR-BC, HLM—Florida State University, Professor of Art TherapyAlicia Seymour writes passionately and shares honestly, addressing a known deficit in art therapy approaches to working with grief. She sensitively addresses grief as an unpredictable but normative response to loss, in the wake of death and also from other life experiences. This book helps make art-making an accessible tool for clinicians helping grieving clients heal. – Dr. Rachel Brandoff, Ph.D, ATR-BC, ATCS LCAT (NY), LPAT (NJ)Artful Grieving offers a compassionate approach to navigating loss. The art therapy directives inspire a fresh insight into processing grief; addressing everything from reframing nightmares to confronting mortality and exploring unspoken words. The consistent and comprehensive activities make conversations around grief approachable and empowering. Importantly, Alicia Seymour shares ways of supporting the bereaved without imposing expectations, allowing clients to express whatever they feel in their own way. – Pamela Hayes Malkoff, LMFT, ATR-BC, author of The Creative Cognitive Therapy MethodThe author’s integration of Worden’s grief model with artistic creation in the context of art therapy forms a powerful and resonant connection, as both embody an active agency in the grieving individual. Thus, the synergy between these fields facilitates a profound journey of processing grief. The detailed introduction on grief processes, expanding the scope for the reader and making significant therapeutic knowledge more accessible. The directives are accompanied by the author’s own artworks, adding another layer of inspiration and hinting at the soul’s depth in its journey through grief processing. The range of directives itself serves as a testament to the diverse landscapes of the grieving soul, as well as the opportunity to grow from it into creative living. – Michal Bat Or, PhD. Art therapist, the School of Creative Arts Therapies at the University of Haifa

Alicia Seymour holds master’s degrees in both Art Therapy and Clinical Counseling from Pennsylvania Western University, Edinboro. In her counseling work, she specializes in grief from an existential, humanistic, and spiritual perspective. She has previous experience working in hospice with both patients and families, and as a court-ordered family therapist and primary counselor working with adolescents in a partial inpatient setting.