A sense of safety and trust in the relationship with your therapist is essential to allow you to explore the aspects of your life that are not working and find the best way forward.
Our sessions provide you with a safe place to talk openly about how you feel and to understand what might be causing your difficulties. This could be by looking at a recurring theme in your life. Often it has become a refrain almost like the childhood stories we echo: “people will always let me down”; “I’ve always been shy” “I feel like everyone else got the rule book to life and I missed out.”
prolonged grief
“Bereavement is a universal human experience and our minds contain mechanisms for successful coping and finding a satisfactory “new normal”. Humans are naturally resilient. When grief complications are present, this natural resilience is thwarted.” – Dr M. Katherine Shear
Complicated Grief is a prolonged form of grief where the natural adaptive grieving process becomes stalled. The complex feelings experienced in the Acute Grief phase in the days and weeks after a death do not shift as time passes. Newly bereaved people typically feel intense yearning and longing for the deceased; cut off or distant from friends and family; unable to do the things they used to enjoy and feel that grief is the biggest problem in their life. If they continue to have a lot of these acute grief symptoms and it’s more than a year after the loss they could be experiencing Complicated Grief.
Prolonged Grief Disorder Therapy (PGDT) is a 16 session protocol devised by Dr Bonnie Gorscak and Dr M. Katherine Shear at Columbia University’s Centre for Complicated Grief. As a treatment protocol it has been rigorously tested in 3 large studies funded by the American National Institute for Mental Health.
I am one of a few therapists in Australia trained in CGT at the Centre for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, New York , who is supervised by their trained therapists. I have been working with clients using CGT and continue to be mentored by Dr M. Katherine Shear and Dr Gorscak in this work.
Feedback informed treatment
I value collaboration and believe best outcomes with clients are achieved when we work together to form a trusting and safe relationship. I use Feedback Informed Treatment to improve therapeutic effectiveness and engagement. In general, counselling helps individuals better cope with the stresses involved in dealing with challenging and difficult situations. I have found that in general after three to six sessions most clients feel more empowered and confident that they have resources and an improved ability to engage with life effectively in line with their values.
Anita Hoare 