Migrant Clinicians Network and the Witness to Witness Program are pleased to present Part 3 in this three-part online seminar series that addresses how to manage the multiple stressors impacting service providers and those they serve.  The series will present a model of the helper as witness that provides concrete suggestions as to how the provider can shift from feeling ineffective to feeling effective and competent.  Participants will learn ways of activating resilience, creating a self-care toolbox and managing grief and loss. 

As the losses mount with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, people are feeling a range of emotions. Confusion, fear, anger, and sadness are strong, as is grief. Grief usually takes shared public forms, but during the pandemic, there are constraints. In this online seminar, Kaethe Weingarten, PhD, presents materials about grief in general and grief in the circumstances of the pandemic. We discuss the particular challenges of grief following estrangement or ambiguous loss. We look at ways to support others – clients, friends, colleagues, family members – without becoming overburdened ourselves, so that we may avoid empathic pitfalls while offering support. Throughout the online seminar, we create ways for participants to share their experiences and form a felt sense of community. We need to balance despair with hope, and hope is something best done with others. For 90 minutes, we become your community.

Meet the Presenter

 Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., directs the Witness to Witness Program (W2W) whose goal is to help the helpers, primarily serving health care workers, attorneys, domestic violence advocates and journalists working with vulnerable populations.  She was an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry from 1981-2017 and a faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge where she founded and directed the Program in Families, Trauma and Resilience.  She has published six books and over 100 articles and essays.