Support after a death, and for the losses that do not involve one — anticipatory grief, pregnancy loss, and the grief that arrives years late. For adults, children and families.
Grief is not a disorder and most people do not need therapy for it. The support of people who knew the person, and time, carry the majority of grief without professional help — and saying so matters, because being told you need treatment for an ordinary human response is its own harm.
Counselling helps where grief has become stuck rather than simply painful: where it is not shifting at all after a long time, where it is tangled with trauma from how the death happened, where you cannot grieve openly because the loss is not recognised by others, or where you are carrying it alone. We also work with children, whose grief tends to come in bursts rather than steadily, which adults often misread as not caring.
Related approaches and areas: depression, trauma and PTSD, child psychology.
Medicare rebates available with a GP Mental Health Care Plan. In person in Bella Vista or by telehealth across NSW.
The five-stages model was never a prescription and the research does not support grief moving through fixed phases. What you are feeling is not out of order, and nobody will tell you where you ought to be by now.
They overlap and can coexist, but they are not the same and respond differently. Where depression has taken hold alongside grief, treating it is not a betrayal of the person you lost.
Where the memory of how someone died keeps intruding, trauma-focused work — including EMDR — may come before grief work, because intrusive images make mourning almost impossible.
Current approaches do not aim at letting go or achieving closure. The work is usually about finding a form the relationship can keep taking, which is closer to what bereaved people actually report wanting.
There is no correct duration, and the figures sometimes quoted are not clinical thresholds. What matters more is whether grief is gradually changing shape. Where it is completely unchanged after a year or more and still preventing daily function, that is worth assessing.
No, and most people do not. Grief is not a disorder. Counselling is for when it has become stuck, is tangled with trauma, or you are carrying it without support.
Yes, particularly after a long illness or a complicated relationship. Relief and love are not mutually exclusive, and the guilt that follows relief is one of the more common reasons people come.
Yes. Children grieve in bursts — distressed one hour and playing the next — which adults often misread. Play-based approaches suit younger children better than talking.
Grief can surface long afterwards, often triggered by an anniversary, another loss or a life change. Delayed does not mean invalid, and it is not too late to bring.
Medicare rebates available with a GP Mental Health Care Plan. In person in Bella Vista or by telehealth across NSW.