The Spirit Vessel Professionals Perspectives in Deathcare series aims to help bring awareness, acceptance, and normalization to death and the grieving process. Throughout this series, we interview professionals of all types in the deathcare and emotional wellness space including hospice nurses, grief counselors and coaches, death doulas, funeral directors, life insurance agents, celebrants, alternative disposition advocates, and social workers just to name a few.
In this interview we speak with Litsa Williams, licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of What’s Your Grief one of the country’s largest online grief and bereavement support communities, accessed by nearly 8 million grieving individuals and professionals each year.
What’s Your Grief offers hundreds of free grief articles, creative expression initiatives, online courses and workshops for grievers, all created by mental health professionals who have experienced personal loss. They offer a robust online professionals’ community for clinicians from around the world who specialize in grief or are looking to expand their grief practice competence, as well as an online community for grievers looking for creative approaches to grief coping.
In addition to her MSW, Litsa also holds a master’s degree in philosophy with a special interest in applied mental health ethics. She has worked in the field of unexpected and traumatic grief in Baltimore, MD for thirteen years and has been interviewed as a grief expert for The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR.
In this conversation we discuss:
- How Litsa and Eleanor met through an organization that supported people through traumatic and unexpected losses in Baltimore.
- How they saw an opportunity to serve people in their grief process with different tools for coping with grief, and in a way that helped overcome the barriers to access.
- The three types of grievers that their resources are created for.
- Our society’s perspective on what grieving “should” look like
- The role of individual and private ritual vs. traditional memorial and collective rituals.
- The Baltimore-based project that has Lisa inspired!
- The launch of their new book, Lists to Help You Through Any Loss, available now for preorder and set for release September 27, 2022.
LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION HERE
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