Elissa Bishop-Becker M.Ed., LPC, NCC, DCC

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Grief and Bereavement Expert

Elissa Bishop-Becker Quick Facts

My own grief journey began in 1992 with a 3-year period of multiple transitions which included job loss, relocation, and the deaths of my daughter, Ericka, my father, and my grandfather. Three years after that, I enrolled in the Community Counseling program at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, and received my M.Ed. (Master of Education) in 2000.

I am now a National Certified Counselor (NCC), a Distance Credentialed Counselor (DCC), and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the state of Illinois. I am the co-founder of the Center for Transformative Counseling, Inc., a nonprofit corporation whose mission is “to expand personal and community awareness of grief and loss as opportunities for transformation.” I have given numerous talks, staff trainings, and presentations, on various aspects of bereavement and was chosen as the Sophia Fahs Lecturer of 2005 by the Liberal Religious Educators Association. I volunteered with the Red Cross in September, 2005 and counseled survivors of Hurricane Katrina. I am the author of a book manuscript on the theory of Transformative Bereavement, and recently became an Adjunct Instructor at Florida Keys Community College, where I teach a course on the grief process.

Transformative Bereavement

As I studied and practiced, I began to see the pattern in the way I learned to recover from my losses. I evolved and formulated my theory of Transformative Bereavement, my clients responded and found new meaning and direction for their own lives, and colleagues observed and encouraged my work.

Transformative Bereavement is an expanded theory of grief and loss that has grown in my practice, my personal experience with traumatic loss, and my research from the foundations in the ground-breaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Most current approaches to the grief process are based on her work, and most grievers identify with and accept the validity of her 5 stages. I discovered that grievers who reach her final stage of Acceptance are still in pain and asking, "Now what?" My theory is the "now what," and Kübler-Ross's theory is the first stage of mine (Loss).

Other Programs & Highlights

My online course Surviving Death: Dealing with Grief, being offered through Florida Keys Community College (but available on your home computer or laptop in the comfort of whatever place you choose!) will begin on October 1, 2009!! For more information about the course, go here: http://www.fkcc.edu/future-students/rec-and-leisure.da#Dealing_with_Grief. For more information about me, here:http://www.griefcounselors.org.

This is an opportunity you won't want to miss if you are grieving a loss. One student wrote, "You changed my life."

Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Elissa Bishop-Becker

"Although loss and grief are experienced by 100% of the world's population, many people do not understand how a profound loss can lead to enhancement and transformation. They acknowledge that a griever's world is forever changed, but aim toward acceptance of the loss, and do not have the tools to facilitate moving forward from there. The purpose of my approach is to provide you with those tools."