Integrative Concepts, LLC

11/04/2025

For far too long, grief has been treated as abnormal, especially under traumatic circumstances. Today, normal reactions to extraordinary tragedy are being diagnosed, contained, or corrected by systems of supposed-care.

But, as I have said for more than three decades, grief is not a disorder that needs to be fixed or abbreviated or rushed. This type of coercion is imperialist coercion, and it adds to the extreme loneliness and despair that many grievers report.

When clinicians view those who are bereaved as problems they need to fix, they fail to see the sacredness of deep emotional experiences. Right after my own child died, I wrote, "Our love is worth every tear I shed." That remains true today; for me, and for anyone who has lost someone so beloved that our 'house' has become a 'house' of sorrow.

True caring of the bereaved begins with reverence and compassion, not with symptom management and "treatment". Most bereaved need others to willingly sit beside them as they bear the unbearable.

We must change the pedagogical models and cultural responses to those who are bereaved. We have to change the lexicon. Bereaved parents, for example, don't usually appreciate the words “dysfunctional” or "disordered“ or "excessive" as it relates to their grief. And, importantly, every word either opens or closes the heart.

In one of my study's findings, the least helpful 'strategy' of therapists, amongst four other points, was the therapists' attempt to 'find meaning' for the client. This is bad therapy, and I encourage clients to find another therapist if they are being pushed toward meaning-making.

In the Compassionate Bereavement Care (tm) provider training (30 CEUs available), we teach clinicians how to let meaning emerge. How to invite stories that help clients process deep, traumatic grief, instead of imposing their own interpretations of the loss. We teach them when and how to ask about the love, the regrets, the fragments of beauty that still flicker - and the moments of terror that still rage - in the context of a resonantly safe relationship. We teach them how to listen for the mourner’s language and culture and context, not using the clinician’s standards or understandings or diagnostic systems of harm. We teach clinicians to practice sacred silence and sacred presence. We teach how to release the urge to direct or fix: silence will do her quiet work. We teach clinicians to bear witness to sorrow as an act of love, not pathology.

Caring for others in a professional or para-professional role is not a "treatment" for bereavement. Caring for others is an ethic, a way of seeing, bearing witness to tragedies that elude the conception of most.

For clinicians to honor grief is to remember that the one who mourns is not broken, but faithfully still loving, even when who they so deeply love is gone. The question is not how to make grief smaller but how to make our presence worthy of its immensity.

With compassion for all,
Dr. Jo

** Next training is April of 2026. More information can be found here: https://www.missfoundation.org/compassionate-bereavement-care-certification/ **

Please share if you know a clinician or peer counselor who may benefit from this training (online and in person, though I LOVE the in-person option because its held Selah Carefarm )

10/17/2025

Grief is a secret, ancient language that cannot be learned from books or in laboratories. It can only be learned from the empty chair, from the dog’s slow sigh at your feet, from the threshold of a door that remembers feet that never return. So few are willing to see or hear it. The world’s language is speed and solutions. But grief is a language that is etched into bone, spoken in small brave acts like a trip to the grocery store.

It has only a few true words, repeated like prayer: the name, the love, the ache.

Grief is not a diagnosis. It is devotion, an ancient vow the body keeps.

For the world to hear, and see, it must unclench its jaw. Put its ear to the earth, bend a knee to the brokenhearted’s low drum, to the tears that proclaim: We must remember. We stand, we sit, we carry water, we say their names again.

And again.

For all our beloveds,
Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

10/12/2025

"There are losses that unmake our words. We learn this, not from a book but, from the empty chair, the quiet where a voice once lived.

The world says be efficient, be productive, as if a wound could be taught manners.

But the first lesson of grieving is older than speech, the dark soil under every feeling. It is the real work of the living, not the thin busyness we call a life. It is the heavy, night work that redraws each morning.

Go outside. Stand by the field where the grasses lean. Watch the hawk take the long circle. Let your own heart slow to the pace of shade and sun.

We have been trained to run from the heart—speed where stillness is needed, spectacle and judgment where witness is required—and the cost is clear: Countries that refuse grief are bereft of mercy and tenderness. When we cannot grieve, we cannot love without fear.

Integration comes when we sit among ashes without pretending, when we keep company through the long weather of absence, when we allow the broken truth of grieving to do its patient work.

Whatever is sold to us, remember: what saves us does not come in a bottle. It comes as a small bird on a fence line, a hand taken without hurry, the faithful return of lightness, the compassion in another’s eyes." (2009, journal entry)

~~~~

This is a throwback to a journal entry from 2009.

I was reading it this morning as I came across my 'retired' ones. I was writing from my more wise self to my own heart at the time as a reminder of why I was committed to the heavy, and worthy, work of fully inhabited grief.

09/30/2025

On Thursday, the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Lauren Richwine and her business “Death Done Differently.”

09/06/2025

Trauma Trails

by Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson AM

The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia Book by Judy Atkinson

Providing a startling answer to the questions of how to solve the problems of generational trauma, Trauma Trails moves beyond the rhetoric of victimhood, and provides inspiration for anyone concerned about Indigenous and Non-Indigenous communities today.

Beginning with issues of colonial dispossession, Judy Atkinson also sensitively deals with trauma caused by abuse, alcoholism, and drug dependency. Sharing their stories, contributors also demonstrate the Aboriginal gift to the nation – Dadirri: listening to one another, and the way in which it provides a way forward.

By inviting Non-Indigenous people to sit with them in the circle, sharing stories, listening to and learning from each other, song lines emerge of a courageous journey, pointing us in the direction of change and healing.

Judy Atkinson is of Jiman and Bundjalung descent as well as having Celtic-German heritage, and is an Emeritus Professor at Southern Cross University, where she was Head of Gnibi College. She has worked within areas of Aboriginal community health and welfare for many years.

You can purchase Judy’s book trauma trials via the link in our bio.

09/06/2025

When we sit in circle, sing together, weave fibre into baskets, or carve a tool by hand, something shifts.
Our breath steadies. Our muscles soften. Our hearts remember safety.
In Western science, they call this somatic processing or Polyvagal regulation.
In our culture, we simply call it coming back to ourselves.

Healing People – Sharing Culture – Regenerating Communities

09/06/2025

Send a message to learn more

08/01/2025

08/01/2025

Pathologizing distress benefits psychiatry, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, but dampens responses that could dismantle oppression.

07/27/2025

Suppose you’re reflecting on your life with a friend and you can’t think of anything bad that happened to you, and so your friend asks you, “Tell me about a time when you felt emotionally comforted by your Mom after a hard day.” Or “Tell me about a time when you felt really celebrated by your Dad.” And you can’t think of anything... that’s a big deal. Some of you had growing up experiences that were devoid of goodness. For more, check out podcast episode 71.