Grief Training for Counsellors & Mental Health Professionals

Live workshops, webinars and self-paced courses for individuals, teams and organisations.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.
Empty space, drag to resize
Empty space, drag to resize
Empty space, drag to resize

Grief is already in the room. Even when nobody calls it grief.

Empty space, drag to resize
There’s a curious gap in counselling training that client work soon exposes.

Grief runs through almost every area of therapeutic work, yet most core training barely covers it. And when it does, grief is often treated as though it only begins when there's been a death.

But clients grieve relationships, health, identity, safety, fertility, careers, communities and futures that will no longer happen.

They may not call it grief. They may arrive talking about anxiety, anger, shame, numbness or feeling completely lost. The loss may only become visible as the work unfolds.

Our training helps counsellors and mental health professionals recognise grief in its many forms and feel more confident working with it - without forcing it into stages, limiting it to bereavement or treating it as something that needs to be resolved.
Write your awesome label here.

Supporting Grief Well: The Grief Map Approach

Go beyond grief theory and feel more confident in practice.
Grief can be one of the most significant parts of a client’s story and still be one of the areas counsellors feel least prepared to work with.

Supporting Grief Well: The Grief Map Approach helps bridge that gap. This CPD-accredited course will help you:

Recognise grief beyond bereavement, including losses connected to identity, relationships, health and the future

Understand why similar losses can affect people very differently

Explore grief without imposing stages, timelines or assumptions

Work more confidently with sudden, traumatic and suicide bereavement

Recognise when someone may need additional or specialist support

Use the Grief Map naturally within therapeutic conversations
Empty space, drag to resize
The Grief Map is a double-sided tool designed to be used, not filed away. One side orients you before a conversation. The other side can be shared directly with a client, selectively, in the moments where it helps. There's a section on the neuroscience of grief, for example, with a QR code linking to a short explanatory video. For some people, particularly those who find comfort in understanding things concretely, that kind of anchor is exactly what the conversation needs.

The course combines self-paced online learning with a live ninety-minute session that extends the training into some of the more complex areas of grief support, including sudden and traumatic bereavement.
Empty space, drag to resize
Empty space, drag to resize

One in five clients walking through your door are neurodivergent. 

Many familiar ideas about grief quietly assume a particular way of identifying emotions, communicating distress, accepting support and adapting to change. Those assumptions can make neurodivergent grief easy to misunderstand.

An autistic or ADHD client may experience shutdowns, meltdowns, sensory overwhelm, intense focus or delayed emotional processing. They may need to know precisely what happened, struggle to identify what they are feeling or appear composed while becoming increasingly overwhelmed.

A response that looks like avoidance, denial or resistance may mean something very different when neurodivergence is part of the picture.
Write your awesome label here.
The Neurodivergent Experience of Grief and Loss helps therapists understand how neurodivergence and grief can interact, without turning difference into pathology or encouraging them to diagnose the person in front of them.

The course explores:

How neurodivergence may affect emotional processing and expression

Alexithymia, interoception and recognising grief in the body

Executive functioning, memory and managing daily life after loss

Sensory needs, disrupted routines and the impact of sudden change

Rejection sensitivity and grief

Masking, delayed responses, shutdowns and meltdowns

Practical ways to adapt communication and therapeutic support
Write your awesome label here.
Empty space, drag to resize
The Neurodivergent Experience of Grief and Loss is entirely self-paced so it fits around your busy schedule, and it is CPD-accredited. It includes eleven role play videos, real-world scenarios, and downloadable tools designed to build confidence rather than just awareness. It covers how cognitive differences, sensory processing and communication styles shape the way grief is experienced and expressed by neurodivergent people. It gives you language to understand what you're observing, and communication frameworks that translate directly into your day-to-day client work.

Training built around the work you actually do

Grief will look different in a private counselling practice, a bereavement charity, a crisis service and a community mental health team.
So we don’t take generic grief training, change a few examples and put your logo on the front. We build training around the people you support, the work your practitioners do and the situations in which they feel least prepared.
Your team may need greater confidence supporting people after suicide, overdose or traumatic bereavement. You may want practitioners to recognise grief underneath other presenting issues, understand neurodivergent experiences of loss or respond more thoughtfully when a client appears stuck.
You may also need space to address what grief work asks of the practitioner. Repeatedly hearing distressing accounts, sitting with questions that have no answer and working close to death, trauma and despair can carry an emotional weight that core training does not always prepare people for.
We’ll work with you to understand what your team is encountering and what you want them to feel more confident doing afterwards.
Training can be developed around:
Recognising grief and loss in the therapy room
Working with non-bereavement losses
Sudden, traumatic and suicide bereavement
Supporting people bereaved by overdose
Neurodivergent experiences of grief
Grief presenting as anxiety, anger, guilt, shame or relationship difficulty
Working without imposing stages, timelines or assumptions
Disenfranchised and unrecognised grief
The emotional impact of grief work on staff and volunteers
Developing more grief-informed services
We’ve developed and delivered training for organisations including Sands, Doctors in Distress and Sheffield Hallam University, as well as professionals working across mental health, bereavement, policing and neurodivergence.
Your training might be delivered live in person or online, created as a self-paced course on our learning platform or developed into a wider programme for your service. It can be designed for one team, one professional group or your whole organisation.
You don’t need to arrive with a finished brief. Tell us who you support, what your practitioners are encountering and where they feel least prepared. We’ll help you work out what the training needs to do.

Talk to us about training for your organisation
Elephants In Rooms Ltd. Studio Suite L Market Hall, Market Place Chesterfield, S40 1AR.
Phone number: +44 7593 790399
Terms & Conditions   |   Privacy Policy   |   Cookie policy
Copyright © Elephants In Rooms Ltd.2026
Created with