Artful Grieving: 50 Expressive Arts Directives to Creatively Inspire Your Practice with Grief and Bereavement

Grief is so often a strange, wordless thing that refuses to be categorised or explained. Through art therapy, people struggling with loss can find ways to explore their feelings freely, and express the parts of their grief that are hard to put into words.

Based on empirically supported, award-winning research, a renowned grief model and proven clinical experiences, Artful Grieving provides a collection of 50 grief-specific art therapy directives to address the wide range of potential emotional responses and life adjustments for the grieving client. The topics draw from a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives to facilitate the grieving processes necessary to prevent complicated grief.

This is not a how-to manual. Designed to facilitate Worden’s four tasks of mourning, it is an adaptable and accessible framework to inspire and encourage clinical intuition through art-based prompts that guide conversation and goal setting. An essential, critical, and effective guide for the well-being of those experiencing profound loss and grief.

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. She can be found at www.artfulgrieving.com and on Instagram as @artfulgrieving.