A Four-Model Framework
for Grief-Informed Practice
Our professional training brings together four connected models for understanding how loss affects a person, how grief becomes reactivated, how integration may be supported, and how multiple losses can be carried across a lifetime.
Together, the models offer professionals a more nuanced way to understand grief — beyond stages, prescribed timelines, and assumptions based solely on the type of loss.
Four Connected Ways of Understanding Grief
Each model offers a different lens. Used together, they help professionals understand both the immediate impact of a loss and the broader context in which grief is being experienced.
Grief Experiences & Impact
The Four-Quadrant Model
Explore how losses may primarily disrupt identity, safety, roles, or relationships — and how those shifts can affect a person's sense of self, reality, and quality of life.
Grief Activations
The Grief Activations Model
Understand how memories, reminders, and experiences of re-shock can reactivate grief. This model helps professionals recognize grief as an ongoing process of activation, processing, and integration — not a linear progression or evidence that someone is moving backward.
Grief Integration
Four Steps of Grief Integration
Explore a relational, compassion-based approach centred on awareness, relational acknowledgement, compassion-based processing, and the realization of an integrated self. The model is informed by contemporary grief and trauma literature, relational practice, and clinical experience.
Grief Event Mapping
Mapping Grief Across the Lifespan
Explore how death, non-death, chronic, and cumulative losses can interact across a person's life. Grief event mapping helps professionals place the present loss within the broader landscape of what a person has experienced and continues to carry.
Level 1: Understanding Grief
Through Four Integrated Models
Level 1 introduces the complete four-model framework and establishes a foundation for grief-informed professional practice.
Participants will develop a more nuanced understanding of how grief affects identity, safety, roles, relationships, and quality of life; how grief becomes reactivated; how integration may be supported; and how losses can accumulate across the lifespan.
This live online training is designed for professionals whose work brings them into contact with grief and loss. Participants do not need to specialize in grief.
As the inaugural offering of this training, participants will have opportunities to provide feedback that will help inform future cohorts.
What You Will Learn
By the end of Part One, participants will be better able to:
- Recognize how loss may affect identity, safety, roles, relationships, and quality of life.
- Understand grief activations and re-shock without interpreting them as regression.
- Consider death, non-death, chronic, and cumulative losses within a broader life context.
- Use relational and compassion-based language when responding to grief.
- Apply the four models to reflection and professional practice.
Format
Live online training
Who it is for
Professionals across disciplines whose work brings them into contact with grief and loss.
Enrollment
Inaugural cohort — limited enrollment.
Dates & Schedule
To be confirmed. Join the interest list to receive details once available.
Cost
To be confirmed. Details will be shared with registered participants.
Continuing Education
Continuing education approval is pending. Credit information will be shared once formally confirmed.
Level 2: Applying the Framework
in Professional Practice
Level 2 will build on the conceptual foundation established in Level 1. The training will focus on applying the four-model framework to professional reflection, case conceptualization, relational responses, and grief-informed practice.
Level 2 is currently in development and will be offered after the inaugural Level 1 cohort has been completed and reviewed.
"Professionals do not need to specialize in grief to encounter it. They do need a thoughtful framework for responding."
Professionals Across Disciplines
You do not need to specialize in grief to benefit from this training. If your work brings you into contact with people who are grieving, this framework was designed with you in mind.
Mental Health & Social Service Professionals
Social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and community practitioners
Health, Hospice & Palliative Care Professionals
Nurses, care providers, and professionals supporting end-of-life and bereavement needs
Chaplains & Spiritual Care Providers
Hospital, hospice, faith-community, and community settings
Educators & School-Based Professionals
Professionals supporting students, families, and school communities through loss
Community & Human-Service Professionals
Professionals whose work regularly brings them into contact with grief, change, and life-altering loss
Build Your Grief
Competency.
You do not need to specialize in grief to respond with greater knowledge, confidence, and care.