Endings, Identity, and What Comes Next: Two Trainings on Retirement

Retirement rarely walks into the room and announces itself.

It arrives as a client in their late fifties who says they’re “just stressed about work.” As a couple whose arguments have quietly reorganized themselves around a date neither of them has said out loud. As a long-standing client whose therapy has run its course, where the question of how to end well has become as clinically significant as anything that came before.

This fall, Leading Edge Seminars is offering two trainings that approach that territory from opposite sides of the chair. One looks at retirement anxiety as clients experience it. The other looks at how we, as clinicians, bring our work with them to a close — ethically, compassionately, and without leaving loose threads.

They stand on their own. Taken together, they cover a transition most of us were never explicitly trained for.

Understanding Retirement Anxiety: Clinical Strategies for Identity, Purpose, and Life Transition

Live Webinar with Margaret Wehrenberg, PsyD
September 18, 2026 | 1:00 pm – 4:15 pm ET | 3 CE hours | Online

Retirement is not a single event. It’s a significant psychological transition that often begins years before a person leaves their professional role — and it rarely presents directly in therapy. Clients come in for stress, for relationship strain, for a vague uncertainty about the future, without recognizing that deeper fears about identity, purpose, and aging sit underneath.

Margaret Wehrenberg spent 50 years in the mental health field, with a private practice focused on anxiety and depression. She’s the author of eleven books, including the best-selling The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques, and co-author of Letting Go of the Work You Love: A Workbook for Therapists to Prepare for Retirement, Close a Practice, and End a Career with Integrity (PESI, 2025).

In this training you’ll learn to:

• Identify the key contributors to retirement anxiety — identity, meaning, aging, and uncertainty about the future
• Apply the 4-Stage Readiness for Retirement Model to assess client readiness and locate the real source of the anxiety
• Use practical tools including anticipatory coping, the Ripple Effect Worksheet, and the Reverse Bucket List to help clients clarify values and redefine purpose
• Reframe retirement as a developmental life stage built around meaning, contribution, and legacy — rather than loss or decline

There’s a second thread running through the day: therapists aren’t immune to any of this. The training invites reflection on your own relationship to retirement, aging, and professional identity — which tends to make the clinical work sharper, not softer.

→ Register for Understanding Retirement Anxiety (September 18)

The Art of Ending Well in Therapy: Ethical and Compassionate Case Closure

Live Webinar with Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, MCC
November 6, 2026 | 1:00 pm – 4:15 pm ET | 3 CE hours | Online

How therapy ends matters as much as how it begins. Yet clinicians receive extensive training in building rapport and guiding treatment, and comparatively little on one of the most clinically significant and ethically exposed phases of care: ending it.

Handled poorly, termination can undermine therapeutic gains, intensify distress, and create real ethical risk. Handled well, it consolidates progress, strengthens client autonomy, and becomes a meaningful part of the work itself.

In this training you’ll learn to:

• Differentiate premature termination from failure to terminate — and understand the risks specific to each
• Apply clinical strategies for both planned and unplanned endings, including in-session frameworks, outreach scripts, and readiness markers
• Evaluate how client and therapist attachment styles shape emotional responses to ending
• Manage complex terminations with dependent, high-risk, or trauma-affected clients while maintaining ethical integrity
• Set boundaries around last-minute disclosures without losing therapeutic focus
• Design closure interventions — therapeutic summaries, metaphors, integration strategies — that support long-term client outcomes

The training also covers the unglamorous but essential logistics: referrals, documentation, record retention, professional wills, and continuity of care planning. And it makes room for the countertransference that surfaces at endings — guilt, grief, avoidance, relief — and how those reactions quietly shape clinical decisions.

→ Register for The Art of Ending Well in Therapy (November 6)

Register for both and save 15%

Add both workshops to your cart and the 15% discount is applied automatically at checkout — no code required.

Both are live online webinars running 1:00–4:15 pm ET, each offering 3 hours of direct contact CE, and both include one full year of access to the recording. If you can’t make the live date, register anyway — the recording is released after the live broadcast ends, and on-demand participants receive their Certificate of Participation after passing a short post-webinar quiz.

Prices shown in CAD. You can select and pay in USD at checkout.

Register for September 18  |  Register for November 6

Who should attend

Psychotherapists, social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, counsellors, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists, pastoral counsellors, case managers, and graduate students in accredited programs in these fields.

Questions about CE credits? Canadian and international participants | US participants