Loss & Grief

Theories of Grief and the Grieving Process

Grief theories provide a conceptual base for understanding grief and loss as a process involving many common characteristics and phases. A general understanding of these will help you understand and anticipate the process that people may go through. This will help you to identify and normalise reactions to loss, and to identify where further help may be needed. »

Theories of Grief and the Grieving Process

Grief theories provide a conceptual base for understanding grief and loss as a process involving many common characteristics and phases. A general understanding of these will help you understand and anticipate the process that people may go through. This will help you to identify and normalise reactions to loss, and to identify where further help may be needed.    »

COVID-19, Fear and What Counsellors Can Do to Help

A member of our writing team related the following experience during these times of near-lockdown. She had gone out to do some essentials such as grocery shopping and getting prescriptions filled for her healthy but self-isolating husband. Returning home, she threw down her things, wailed, “It’s just awful”, and burst into tears. Her astonished husband enquired, “What happe... »

Infidelity: Rebuilding After a Betrayal

She makes an appointment to talk about the “what next” since the affair. You assume that her spouse has been unfaithful, but when she turns up to session, she tells you that she was the one who strayed. “It felt so good at the time,” she says. “I felt more alive and sexy than I have at any other time in the last decade. But it all happened so fast.” Is there any... »

Infidelity: Helping the Betrayed Partner

He sits down and looks at you dolefully, his big eyes full of hurt and desperation. “I don’t know why she cheated on me,” he whispers hoarsely, “but this is the worst hurt I have ever felt. I don’t know how I will cope, or what it means for our kids. I guess my marriage is over?” »

Counselling: From Resistance to Acceptance

Your 39-year-old female client seats herself and looks at you with frustration. It’s been many months now since she was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative condition, but she just can’t accept it; life is becoming impossible. »

Dealing with the Stigma of Hearing Impairment

One in six Australians has hearing loss, and the projection is that one in four will have it by 2050, as our population ages (Australian Network on Disability, n.d.). Thus, even if you never have a profoundly deaf client come to your rooms, you are likely to see someone at some stage who is hearing-impaired. If not the client, it may be that the person coming is frustrated because of having to dea... »

Helping Clients Handle Rejection

There are no two ways about it: rejection is a universal experience and we will all face it multiple times over the course of our lives. But it still hurts! So what might it be helpful to keep in mind when you face that poor client that has been rejected (perhaps again)? This article offers some points to understand the experience and organises options for how to help your client with it according... »

Post-disaster Resilience: Who Survives Better?

In recent years, many disaster response experts and mental health researchers have switched their focus from looking exclusively at at-risk populations in the aftermath of an emergency to asking, “What are the protective factors?” “What situations, experiences, or personal traits help people to come through a traumatic incident with greater resilience?” First, let’s c... »

Counselling Dilemma: A Terminally-ill Client

You are working with a 65-year-old female client, Mary, who has been coming to see you for six months as she had grief and loss issues around having lost her only sibling, her brother and her husband in a space of a month apart (a year ago). She has a daughter and son who are both married and have two children each. They live in Sydney whilst she is in Brisbane. She has three close girlfriends who... »

The Ten Commandments of Grief Counselling

Suicide is a significant public health problem, and properly supporting those left behind — the survivors — is a challenging but significant contribution to the wellbeing of the whole community. If a suicide-bereaved person wound up in your therapy room, what counselling tasks would need to be worked through with them? In this post we look at Worden’s general guidelines, which co... »

The Reactions of Grief and Mourning for the Suicide-bereaved

There are perhaps few human events which generate as many emotions and as intense a set of reactions as someone ending their own life. We can divide the reactions into two categories: those which tend to occur early in the grieving, and those which are ongoing. In this post we explore the early reactions of grief and mourning for the suicide-bereaved. »

Tips to Support the Suicide-bereaved

If you have a friend, family member, or other acquaintance struggling with bereavement of suicide, how can you best offer support? What attitudes, translated into caring actions, can best facilitate the bereaved person’s coping in the immediate and short term, and their healing in the longer term? Because of the remaining societal stigma and also the lack of knowledge about how to be with th... »

Common Stages of Disaster Recovery

Disasters and mass disruptive events can be extremely unpredictable and chaotic. Even though that is a valid characterisation of catastrophe, disaster experts have discerned a general pattern or cycle of phases that a community and the individuals in it go through from the time of impact of a disaster to establishing a newly reconstructed life. »

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