Mourning Practice: A Grief Workshop for Clinicians
Saturday, June 20, 2026 | 12–3pm | 150 W 28th St, Suite 1402, NYC | $175 | 3 CE Credits
We are living in an atmosphere of loss. Not just bereavement — loss of safety, of a world that ever felt coherent, of what never got the chance to exist. Your clients are bringing all of it into the room. And most of us were never trained for grief that looks like this.
There's a particular bind in this work: when your client's grief mirrors your own, the usual clinical moves stop working. Reframing doesn't land, holding space tips into shared helplessness, and your nervous system is responding to the same world they are — often before you've named it.
This workshop is designed to work on both levels at once: what happens somatically when we're saturated with collective grief, and how we help clients move that energy rather than simply bear it together.
Through collage as a psychoanalytic and ritualistic vehicle, you'll cut, arrange, and assemble your own images — fragments of life, loss, and world — transforming raw grief into something new. The finished piece becomes a ritual object you take home. Sharing it with the group before you leave is part of the ritual: private grief made collectively held.
And because you'll have moved through the process yourself, you'll leave with an experiential understanding of collage as a clinical tool — one you can adapt and introduce directly into your work with clients.
What makes this workshop distinct is the particular intersection of expertise its facilitators bring. Asilia Franklin-Phipps, PhD brings what most grief frameworks leave out: a rigorous, lived, and scholarly lens on collective and diasporic loss — grief shaped by race, colonialism, displacement, and the specific weight of what it means to mourn as a Black woman in this cultural and political moment. Jennifer Byxbee grounds the work clinically — in somatic awareness, Gestalt existential principles, and attachment theory — with 20+ years of experience helping clients navigate complex trauma and grief in NYC. As a queer practitioner, she brings a lived understanding of grief that exists outside dominant frameworks: the losses that don't get named, the mourning that happens without ritual, the identities and relationships that have had to be fought for or grieved in isolation.
You'll leave with:
A framework for how collective grief registers in the nervous system — and why ritual works where reframing doesn't
Tools for helping clients move grief energy rather than simply bear it
A way to work with countertransference when your client's grief and your own are resonating at the same frequency
A ritual object you made yourself — and a felt sense of how to adapt the process with clients
3 CE credits (NY-licensed mental health clinicians)
This is for you if:
You're holding clients whose grief is about the state of the world — and you feel it too
You've been reaching for hope that doesn't feel honest, or absorbing hopelessness that lingers after session
You want to help clients do something with grief, not just process it
You're ready to do some of this work yourself first
Space is limited to 18 participants. Register below.
Asilia Franklin-Phipps, PhD is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and Associate Professor at SUNY New Paltz whose work spans race, gender, affect, visual culture, and pedagogy. Drawing on years of research into race, white supremacy, and the use of art as a vehicle for processing racialized trauma, she brings a sociopolitical lens to collective and diasporic grief that is both theoretically rigorous and deeply embodied.
Jennifer Byxbee, ATR-BC, LCAT, CGT is a psychotherapist and Founder of Creative Arts Psychotherapy in NYC. With over 20 years of clinical experience, she integrates Gestalt, Somatic Therapy, Creative Arts Therapy, and Dreamwork in her work with trauma, CPTSD, anxiety, and identity.