Grief Counselling Session

What Grief Counselling Helps With

Grief counselling for every kind of loss, not just the ones people recognise

Most people think of grief as what happens after a death. But grief follows any significant loss, a relationship, a career, your health, an identity, a future you’d planned for. Grief counselling helps you honour what you’ve lost, make sense of how it’s changed you, and find a way to carry it without being buried by it.

  • Death of a partner, parent, child, or loved one
  • Miscarriage, stillbirth, or pregnancy loss
  • Relationship breakdown and divorce
  • Loss of health, independence, or ability
  • Career loss, retirement, or loss of identity
  • Complicated or prolonged grief that won’t shift

How Grief Shows Up

Grief counselling for all the ways loss changes you

Grief doesn’t follow the neat stages you’ve read about. It comes in waves, it shows up when you least expect it, and it changes shape over time. Understanding how grief is affecting you right now is where the work begins.

Bereavement & Death

The loss of someone central to your life, a partner, parent, child, sibling, or friend. The world carries on while yours has stopped. Grief counselling gives you a space where the depth of your loss is taken seriously, without pressure to “move on” before you’re ready.

Complicated & Prolonged Grief

When grief doesn’t follow the expected trajectory, when it intensifies rather than easing, when you feel frozen in it months or years later, or when guilt, anger, or unfinished business keeps you stuck. Complicated grief often needs a different approach than standard bereavement support.

Disenfranchised Grief

The grief that others don’t recognise or validate, the loss of a pet, an ex-partner, an estranged family member, a miscarriage that “wasn’t that far along,” or a relationship that nobody knew about. When your grief isn’t acknowledged, it can feel impossible to process. Counselling gives it the space it deserves.

Anticipatory Grief

Grieving someone who is still alive, a terminal diagnosis, a parent’s cognitive decline, the slow loss of a relationship you know is ending. Anticipatory grief is isolating because you’re mourning a loss that hasn’t fully happened yet, and people don’t always understand why you’re struggling.

Non-Death Loss

Divorce, job loss, retirement, health decline, infertility, migration, losses that reshape your identity and your future without anyone sending flowers. These losses can be just as devastating as bereavement, but they often come without the same social support or permission to grieve.

Traumatic Loss

When loss arrives through violence, accident, suicide, or sudden unexpected death, grief becomes entangled with trauma. The shock, the images, the “what ifs” sit alongside the sadness. Stacey’s background in crisis support and trauma means she understands this particular intersection deeply.

Our Approach

Grief counselling that honours the relationship, not just the loss

Many grief counselling models focus on stages, timelines, or “moving through” grief toward acceptance. That can feel forced, like there’s a right way to grieve and you’re failing at it. At Liberty, we take a different approach.

Stacey works with grief as a relational experience, because grief is fundamentally about the relationship you had with what you’ve lost. Using psychodynamic and IFS approaches, she helps you explore that relationship: what it meant, what was left unsaid, what you’re carrying that belongs to the grief and what might belong to something older.

Her background in crisis support, military service, and paramedicine means she has sat with people in the immediate aftermath of loss, sudden death, line-of-duty incidents, and traumatic bereavement. She doesn’t shy away from the raw edges of grief. She meets you there.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Works with the parts of you that are holding grief, the part that stays strong for others, the part that feels guilty, the part that’s angry, and the part that’s afraid of fully feeling the loss. IFS gives each of these parts a voice.

Psychodynamic Grief Work

Explores the meaning of the loss at a deeper level, how it connects to your attachment history, your identity, and other losses you may not have fully processed. Grief often opens doors to emotions that pre-date the current loss.

Continuing Bonds Approach

Modern grief research shows that healthy grieving doesn’t require “letting go.” Instead, it involves finding new ways to maintain a connection with what you’ve lost while building a life that moves forward. This is the framework that guides our work.

Trauma-Informed Bereavement

When loss is sudden, violent, or traumatic, grief and trauma responses become intertwined. Stacey’s specialist trauma training means she can hold both, processing the trauma while honouring the grief, without one overriding the other.

How it Works

How Grief Counselling works at Liberty

There’s no right time to start grief counselling. Whether your loss was recent or years ago, if it’s still affecting you, that’s reason enough.

01

Free Discovery Call

15-minute phone call to talk about what you’re going through. You don’t need to hold it together for this call, Stacey understands that reaching out while you’re grieving takes courage. No obligation, no pressure.

02

Creating a Safe Space

The first sessions focus on understanding your loss, your relationship with the person or thing you’ve lost, and how grief is showing up in your life right now. There’s no agenda to follow, we move at the pace that feels right for you.

03

Working Through Grief

Ongoing sessions that give you space to feel, process, and gradually find a way to carry your grief without it consuming you. Some clients come for a defined period; others find value in longer-term support. Available in-person at our Buderim practice or via secure telehealth from anywhere in Australia.

Ready to start grief counselling with someone who won’t rush you through the process?

Book a free 15-minute discovery call. There’s no timeline for grief, and there’s no timeline for reaching out. Whenever you’re ready is the right time.

Common Questions

Questions about Grief Counselling

There’s no right time. Some people reach out within days of a loss; others come years later when they realise the grief is still affecting them. Both are valid. If your grief is interfering with your daily life, your relationships, or your ability to function — or if you simply feel like you need someone to talk to — that’s enough of a reason to start.

Grief counselling specifically focuses on the experience of loss and how it’s affecting you — your emotions, your identity, your relationships, and your daily life. It uses therapeutic approaches designed for grief work, including continuing bonds, meaning-making, and psychodynamic exploration of the relationship with the person or thing you’ve lost. Regular therapy may address grief as one of many topics, but grief counselling makes it the central focus.

If your loss matters to you, it’s enough. Grief counselling isn’t reserved for death — it’s for any loss that has changed how you feel, how you function, or how you see yourself. The losses that often go unacknowledged — a miscarriage, the end of a friendship, a career, a sense of who you were — can be just as painful as bereavement. You don’t need to justify your grief to access support.

No. Modern grief research has moved beyond the idea that healthy grieving means letting go. At Liberty, we work with a continuing bonds approach — which means finding new ways to maintain a meaningful connection with what you’ve lost while also building a life that moves forward. The goal isn’t to stop grieving; it’s to find a way to carry your grief that doesn’t prevent you from living.