Psychotherapy

Coming to counselling and therapy shows that you have the courage to look at the things that are challenging you and to take steps to change.

My therapeutic support may include grief education, practical suggestions, creative activities and spiritual support as well as emotional support.

Using my ‘Growing Through Grief’ approach, I provide consistent weekly or fortnightly protected time, space and support for individuals or families experiencing living losses and death losses to:

• make sense of what’s going on with your feelings or circumstances
• discuss difficult feelings and have them validated, including after-death communications and visitations
• discuss the  impact your loss / grief is having on you  
• increase self-awareness and regain lost confidence

Traumatic, Untimely Death Losses

Traumatic grief is when you are stuck in the intensity of your emotional pain and it feels just as intense as the first day of the death and the grief isn’t naturally subsiding over time.  It is so debilitating that you are not functioning at full capacity at home, work, place of study or elsewhere.

This type of trauma-informed therapeutic approach is for:                                                              

• terminal illnesses, such as cancer
• suicide
• murder
• multiple deaths within a year (or in close succession of each other within a short period of time)
• ambiguous loss (such as when a person has disappeared, pregnancy loss, or sudden Covid deaths)
• work-related traumatic deaths (aka vicarious / secondary trauma) due to constant exposure to trauma, such as nurses coping with Covid deaths

Counselling for Natural Death Losses

Support in your grieving process of natural deaths following a full-lived life.

Counselling for Living Losses

• for diagnosis of cancer and other life-limiting illnesses
• anxiety/depression from endings of significant relationships (family / friendship fall out or estrangement)
• loss that society doesn’t recognise as valid grief (ended romantic affairs, empty nest syndrome, socio-political)
• medical – chronic pain, life-changing illness (dementia, Parkinson’s disease, MS, cancer etc.)
• forced migration and dislocation  / voluntarily moving house or country 
• abuse / family rupture 

Together we will work on your current emotional states that may be creating unhelpful thought patterns and behaviour, or unusual physical symptoms that may be manifesting from unprocessed loss and grief.