The Center for Grief Training & Education provides grief-literate, trauma-informed professional education for understanding how loss affects a person, how grief becomes reactivated, how integration may be supported, and how losses are carried across the lifespan.
GEM™ — Grief Events Mapping Framework brings four connected models into collaborative mapping that is descriptive, revisable, and attentive to the person living the loss as the authority on its meaning and context.
Explore how loss may affect identity, safety, roles, and relationships—and how changes across these areas may influence quality of life, connection, functioning, and felt capacity.
Understand how memories, reminders, milestones, bodily experiences, and changing circumstances can bring grief newly into the present.
Explore the relational processes of awareness, relational acknowledgement, compassion-based processing, and realization of an integrated self within a circular, revisiting model of integration.
Consider how death, non-death, chronic, cumulative, traumatic, and stigmatized losses may interact across a person's life.
A one-day professional training that establishes the foundational GEM™ relational stance and conceptual language through Four-Quadrant Grief Events Mapping and the Grief Activations Model.
Join the Part I Interest ListA two-day professional training that includes a brief review of Part I and introduces Circular Motion of Grief Integration and Lifespan Activation and Integration Mapping. Completion of Part I is required.
Receive Training UpdatesContinuing education approval is pending. Credit information will be shared once approval has been formally confirmed.
Grief competency is not a specialty. It is an essential part of informed, compassionate practice.
Founded in 2026 by Andrea O'Reilly and Irish Dhindsa, The Center for Grief Training & Education grew from their shared work in grief services, clinical practice, supervision, community outreach, and professional development.
The Center provides education for professionals seeking more relational, context-sensitive ways of understanding grief beyond stages, timelines, and prescriptive models.
GRIEF-LITERATE
Approaches grief beyond universal stages, timelines, and assumptions about how loss should unfold.
TRAUMA-INFORMED
Attends to safety, context, relational experience, and the ways grief and trauma may intersect.
RESEARCH-INFORMED
Engages contemporary grief and trauma literature while clearly distinguishing established knowledge from the Center's developing framework.
PRACTICE-READY
Designed to support thoughtful reflection and meaningful application across professional settings.
Andrea and Irish bring complementary experience in grief-service leadership, clinical practice, supervision, community support, therapeutic arts, professional education, and lived experience.
Founder and Executive Director
Grief-service leadership, clinical practice, supervision, and professional education.
Creator and Lead Author, GEM Framework; Director of Professional Development
Community grief support, therapeutic arts, and professional development.
Explore why grief does not follow a fixed sequence—and how attending to identity, safety, relationships, roles, quality of life, and context can help professionals understand the unique impact of a loss.
Understand how memories, reminders, milestones, and changing circumstances can bring grief vividly into the present—and why renewed intensity does not automatically mean regression.
Explore how death, non-death, chronic, cumulative, and traumatic losses can interact across a person's life—and why the current loss may be only one part of what they are carrying.
GEM™ Foundations is intended for professionals and graduate-level trainees, where appropriate, whose roles include grief support and who bring foundational helping skills, professional ethics, trauma-informed practice, and scope-of-practice awareness.
GEM™ Foundations — Part I is launching soon. Join the inaugural Part I interest list to receive finalized program details.
