Session name | Session activities |
1: Emotions of grief | Each woman tells her perinatal loss story and: expresses her feelings at the time of her loss, feels and expresses her current feelings about her loss, elicits support from and supports the other group members. Each woman is guided to: identify current supportive people, select one person to ask for grief support, role-play how to ask for support. |
2: Understanding what happened | Each woman: explores her understanding of what happened to her pregnancy/baby, explores her thoughts/feelings about fault or blame, explores what the loss means to her, begins to explore who she has talked to about the loss and how she talks to them about her needs, identifies who she will invite to session 3, role-plays how to communicate this invitation. The therapist: helps each woman unpack and examine whether there was anything she could have done to change the outcome, with support from the group, guides the women to seek information from their obstetric providers about what does and does not contribute to perinatal loss, guides women to identify additional questions for their providers, helps each woman explore how she makes sense of her loss. |
3: Grieving with others | Each woman is encouraged to invite a support person to the group. The therapist provides psychoeducation about: depression, grieving styles, ways to manage grieving differences, how IPT helps women recover and how partner/family/friend support can help women recover. Next the therapist guides each woman and her support person to: complete a written communication exercise about both partners’ loss-related emotional needs, discuss their written answers privately for 20 min, discuss as a group what they learnt from each other about support, discuss how each pair will manage communication with others in their social network, develop communication homework to improve each pair’s support of each other regarding the loss. |
4: Holding the memory and moving forward | Each woman discusses how she: holds the memory/meaning of her loss experience, can re-engage in life roles, seeks support and communication with key people, reflects on her grief process and her recovery from depression. The therapist guides the group by: reminding them that new members are added next week and discussing ways to welcome them, eliciting and role-modelling how to offer well-wishes to and from women completing their group treatment in this session. |
IPT, interpersonal psychotherapy.