Disabled Grief Portals:

Thursday September 3, 2026 • 6-8:30 pm EST

2.25 CE credits will be available for this class.

This 2½-hour training explores grief through a disability- and neurodivergence-centered lens, integrating lived experience with trauma-informed, embodied, and transformative approaches.

As sick and disabled people, we have the job of processing so much grief: 

• our lives, our worth, our contributions, our brilliant body-minds are unsupported, unprotected, and devalued by the systems of our overculture, 

• what happens as our bodies deal with increasing and different impairment and challenges at times can create more grief 

• there is so much direct and tangible impact on our lives and deaths.  We have lost so much and so many of our dear ones, and it’s all unnecessary.  

If we do not grieve, we will not survive, and so the task is ours.

 Participants will examine how grief can be shaped by medical trauma, loss of access and supports, loss of disabled kin, anticipatory grief, and the tangible impacts of impairment on relationships, identity, safety, and belonging. The workshop creates a structured space for participants to process grief while also learning practical clinical and facilitation perspectives for working with disabled and neurodivergent clients and communities.

Through storytelling, ritual, art, collective dreaming, and guided discussion, attendees will practice ways to help themselves and their clients name losses, reduce shame, honor the body’s responses to grief, and support the vision of a future we want to live into. We will pull from the inheritances of all we have been gifted by our sick and disabled ancestors, and also make space for the griefs and losses that will never be reconciled.

This training is designed for people with lived disability and/or mental health experience and for aligned practitioners (therapists, counselors, social workers, coaches, etc.) who want a deeper understanding of disability-related grief and how to integrate it into ethical, culturally responsive care.

By the end of the session, participants will leave with a clearer framework for recognizing grief presentations common in disability contexts and with concrete language and tools for supportive communication and trauma-informed care.

Learning objectives:

• Define disability- and neurodivergence-centered grief and explain how grief may emerge from stigma, unmet access needs, loss of supports, medical trauma, and anticipatory/ongoing losses.

• Identify grief presentations that may be shaped by disability (e.g., grief layered with chronic stress, embodiment shifts, complicated mourning, social isolation, and disenfranchised grief), and describe how these may differ from grief framed solely as event-based loss.

• Use at least two structured approaches for meaning-making and coping in disability-related grief (e.g., ritualized reflection, narrative reframing, or creative practice) that participants can adapt for clinical or peer-support settings.

• Communicate supportive, clinically attuned responses to grief.