The Final Chapter: End-of-Life Counseling, Death Anxiety, and Meaning-Making
Every good story has a final chapter where meaning coheres and themes reveal themselves. End-of-life work with older adults is this final chapter work: accompanying people through the most fundamental human passage, helping them write an ending that reflects their deepest values, and supporting the family systems that will carry the story forward. This 3-CE course provides clinicians with evidence-based competency in death anxiety assessment, meaning-centered approaches, dignity-based interventions, grief facilitation with dying clients, and ethical navigation of advance care planning and hospice referral. Participants will also develop sustainability practices for the clinician engaged in sustained end-of-life work.
3
CE Hours
7
Modules
15
Quiz Questions
2
Est. Minutes
What you'll learn
- Assess and distinguish clinically significant death anxiety from normative existential mortality awareness in older adult clients using validated instruments and theoretically grounded frameworks including Terror Management Theory and Yalom's existential model.
- Implement meaning-centered and dignity-based therapeutic approaches including Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy, Dignity Therapy, and Life Review with older adults approaching end of life.
- Facilitate advance care planning conversations with older adults and families including goals-of-care discussions, hospice referral, and navigation of end-of-life decision-making within the mental health scope of practice.
- Support bereaved family members through anticipatory grief, the death vigil, and post-death mourning using evidence-based grief facilitation informed by the continuing bonds framework.
- Identify and manage clinician countertransference, mortality awareness, and professional sustainability in sustained end-of-life clinical work.
Who it's for
Licensed Professional Counselors (LPC/LPCC), Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW), Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT), Licensed Mental Health Counselors (LMHC), Psychologists, Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners, Hospice and palliative care clinicians, Counselors working in geriatric or medical mental health settings
Approval & credit
CounselorReady is an NBCC-Approved Continuing Education Provider (ACEP #7760). This course awards 3 NBCC-approved CE hours; a certificate is issued on completion. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. CounselorReady is solely responsible for all aspects of the program.