Grief Counselling

Grief has many faces: the death of someone beloved, the loss of an identity or dream, the unravelling of illness, or an ache of uncertainty and confusion when closure never comes. However your grief shows up, it deserves to be witnessed with gentleness and warmth.

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.

— David Whyte, Anglo-Irish Poet

My Approach

The Hakomi Method

The Hakomi Method approaches grief as an experience that is emotional and embodied. When we lose someone or something deeply meaningful, our nervous systems, beliefs, and sense of self are all affected. Often, parts of us tighten or shut down to protect us from pain, yet those same protective patterns can keep us feeling disconnected or “stuck.”

Hakomi creates a mindful, compassionate space where those implicit patterns can be observed with gentleness, not judgment. By noticing subtle sensations, movements, or impulses in the body, we gain access to the unconscious “organizing principles” that shape our experience of grief, such as beliefs like “I have to be strong,” or “It’s not safe to feel this.”

In therapy, we don’t try to push grief away. Instead, Hakomi invites the body’s natural intelligence to guide the process. As awareness deepens, new experiences of safety, love, or release can emerge. which allows for integration rather than suppression. Clients often describe a sense of relief, spaciousness, or reconnection after this kind of work.

Hakomi helps grief move, not by hurrying it, but by creating the conditions for healing to unfold organically, from the inside out.

Meaning Reconstruction, as espoused by researcher and clinician Dr. Robert Neimeyer, views grief not as something to “get over,” but as a profound disruption to the story a person has been living. Neimeyer’s research highlights how loss can shake the foundations of meaning, such as identity, purpose, relationships, and the assumptions that once made the world feel familiar. Meaning reconstruction therapy offer a compassionate way to gather these broken pieces and weave them together into something integrated and authentic.

Clients are invited to explore their grief story with care and curiosity, uncovering how the loss has changed their inner world. Through gentle conversation, reflective writing, imagery, and metaphor, this process supports the creation and re-creation of meaning. It helps people make sense of their experience, acknowledge what has been altered, and begin to shape a story that honours both what was lost and what remains.

Work within this model often includes:

  • Sense-making: exploring the questions and uncertainties that naturally arise after loss.

  • Meaning making: discovering what still matters, and what new possibilities or perspectives are emerging.

  • Identity reconstruction: recognizing how the loss has reshaped roles, values, or the felt sense of self.

  • Continuing bonds: cultivating healthy, enduring connections to the person, relationship, or part of life that has been lost.

  • Narrative re-authoring: integrating grief into a coherent life story that allows movement forward without erasing love.

Meaning Reconstruction

Sand Tray

Sometimes words aren’t enough, or they’re hard to speak. That’s because grief can live beneath language, in images, sensations, and symbols that can’t yet be spoken. Sand Tray Therapy offers a way to process and release what feels unspeakable.

Using miniature figures, you can create a world in the sand tray that mirrors your inner experience. The tray becomes a safe, contained space where emotions, memories, and parts of your story can emerge naturally.

In grief work, the sand tray can hold what feels too big or too fragile to hold alone. It allows you to see your experience from a new perspective, to honour relationships, to externalize pain, and to explore moments of meaning or transformation. Often, the symbols that appear carry deep personal wisdom, helping you connect with what still lives within and find gentle ways to move forward.

Emotion-Focused Therapy

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) views emotion as central to healing. In grief, emotions often arrive in waves (sometimes overwhelming, sometimes muted) each carrying important information about what we’ve lost and what we still value.

Rather than analyzing grief from a distance, EFT invites us to feel it as it arises within us. By attuning to the body’s signals and the emotion underneath them, clients begin to access deeper layers of experience: sadness, longing, guilt, anger.

As these feelings are safely expressed and understood, they begin to transform. Pain can soften into self-compassion, despair into a sense of continuing bond or meaning. EFT provides both structure and emotional safety, helping clients move from being overwhelmed by grief to being in relationship with it, which allows for growth, reconnection, and emotional integration.

Moreover, grief often holds many voices inside us. Chairwork gives each of these inner voices a place to speak and be heard.

In this experiential process, we use chairs to represent parts of your experience or relationships that need tending. You might speak to a part of yourself, or to a person who has died. These conversations can bring clarity, release, and relief. You may discover new compassion for yourself, greater understanding of your loss, and a felt sense of integration.

FAQs

  • Therapy can be helpful if you’re struggling to navigate grief, whether after a death, a major life transition, or another type of loss. Sometimes the closest people to us don’t know how to react, and can end up saying things that invalidate our experience and ultimately make us feel worse. Because grief can affect us emotionally, physically, and spiritually, it’s natural to need support as you adjust.

    In therapy, we work together to make sense of your experience, honour your connection to what’s been lost, and find ways to carry your grief with greater compassion and strength.

  • No! Although my specialty is grief and loss, I also work with people experiencing other concerns such as anxiety, depression, life transitions, stress, and relationship challenges. Grief often overlaps with these experiences, and therapy can support you in understanding and tending to the full range of what you’re feeling.

  • I work with people ages 4 and up. With adults, I use relational, experiential, and body-based therapies, whereas with children I use Child-Centered Play Therapy.

  • $160 per 50 minutes

  • Navigate over to my contact page and submit a form, send me an email, or give me a call! I typically respond within 24 hours.

  • I work out of Allius Services Ltd. We have locations in Nanaimo and Duncan. I work in Duncan Monday to Wednesday and Nanaimo Thursday and Friday. I also work 5 days a week online, so you can reach me from the comfort of your own home.

  • Yes! If you have coverage for a Registered Social Worker, you can submit for insurance reimbursement. I will provide a receipt to you after our session.

Contact Me

Interested in working together? Fill out this form, send me an email, or give me a call! I’d be so happy to hear from you.

julia@allius.ca

250 753 0363 x 7