Frequently Asked Questions
60 Euro per call.
As I make the call to you, there are no additional costs for the call itself. This is covered by the service.
Each call is treated as a counselling session and lasts for 50 minutes, unless you decide to end the call earlier.
My service is currently available to residents of Ireland.
I generally work with clients who are 18 years old and over. I would consider working with a younger person but I would need the consent of a parent or guardian before doing so.
Other services that can help and support families and children who are bereaved are The Irish Childhood Network (www.childhoodbereavement.ie) and Child Bereavement UK (www.childbereavementuk.org).
I provide support for any death of a loved one. This covers the loss of a partner, parent, grandparent, sibling, or any other family relative, child (including miscarriage, stillbirth and neo-natal death), friend and pet. This is not an exhaustive list. Any death that impacts upon you and leaves you feeling you need support is appropriate for my service.
I also provide support for any type of death, whether it is due to natural or unnatural causes, such as, accidental death, suicide, murder, or death by medical negligence.
Bereavement, however, is not confined to death alone. Loss can take many forms and I provide support for any life event or development that results in you experiencing this. The end of a relationship, estrangement from family, infertility, redundancy and retirement from long-term employment, are but a few examples. There is what is known as “living losses”, wherein a loved one deteriorates and loses mental and / or physical capacity. This can also happen to oneself and result in having to face the greatest of personal losses in one’s own death.
Yes you can, whether this is to help you support somebody who is bereaved, or whether it is to help you cope with the bereaved person and your relationship with him or her. Many relationships feel the strain of bereavement when one person is going through a grief reaction. Bereavement can have a profound effect upon somebody’s personality and how they relate and feel towards others, which, in turn, can become stressful for those who experience these changes.
Deciding to access counselling is a personal choice. You may decide to get support based on how difficult you are finding your grief and the impact it is having upon you and your life. Grief is a natural process and, in most instances, it will resolve itself over time. However, it is still a painful and confusing process to go through, and counselling can help you cope with it until it does get easier. More complicated and prolonged forms of grief, in which a person may become stuck in their process, may require a therapeutic intervention in order for recovery to take place.
There is no right or wrong time to have counselling for bereavement, as such. Sometimes it can be a while after experiencing a loss before a bereaved person feels ready to access counselling and to start talking about the loss in depth and the feelings that accompany it. It can be helpful to have some distance from the event of a loss for it to be processed and worked through in counselling.
This is not, however, set in stone, and counselling can still support a client in the early stages of grief, in beginning to find a way to cope with and to begin to adjust to the loss. In particular, this can be the case where a death or loss has been traumatic, and some research suggests early therapeutic intervention can help to reduce the impact of trauma in grief.
On the other hand, counselling can also help with bereavement that has occurred many years ago. There is no time limit on an unresolved grief that has not been processed and worked through. This is particularly true of many losses that occur in childhood, and were not permitted or given support to at the time.
Definitely not. If anything, you are showing strength of character by accessing counselling. You are committing yourself to facing your grief and how you feel about it. There are benefits to doing this, absolutely, but it can also be painful and tough going in doing so. The consequences of not working through your grief, however, can be detrimental, not only to your own wellbeing, but to that of others as well. If you don’t face up to your own suffering then the likelihood is that you are going to make other people suffer, including loved ones.
From my perspective, the first call is one in which I carry out an assessment of your grief, its impact upon you, and your support needs moving forward. In order to do this, I need to hear your story, what you have gone through, and the extent to which you are coping with your experience. For you, the client, this is an opportunity to talk about your loss and the impact it is having upon you. This may very well be the first time you have spoken about it at length and in depth with another person, so you may become emotional in doing so, but that is absolutely fine and appropriate. Nothing else causes such powerful feelings as grief does and there is a cathartic effect in being able to experience and express them.
This really depends on the outcome of the first call and what your needs are in moving forward. Sometimes a client feels one call is enough. Just to have had that one experience of being able to talk through your grief and its impact can be enough in itself. Sometimes it is useful to have a follow-up call to review how you have been since having your first call, and this may turn out to be sufficient. Other times, it can be useful to have ongoing sessions for a period of time, in order to work through an aspect of your grief that you are finding difficult.
Being an online counselling service I aim to be flexible in how I am accessed by clients. Unlike other issues that are brought to counselling, bereavement is something that very much fluctuates through a person’s life. There can be times when it eases but other times when it surfaces very strongly, such as, at anniversaries, significant dates, and other times of the year. Subsequently, I am comfortable with my service being accessed on an ad hoc basis, as and when the need for support arises.
It really is a case of individual preference and what you are most comfortable with. Clients who want a visual image to interact with often prefer video counselling. Sometimes, however, this can be distracting and inhibiting, which is not the case in telephone counselling. But it all depends upon which medium you feel will work best for you, and you are welcome to change from one to another at any time during your counselling.
Counselling is available, in a limited form, for certain indivduals via the Health Board, employee-assistance programmes, health insurance policies and charitable organisations. All of these services are run as businesses, which often means that a counsellor has to sacrifice a certain level of ethical principle, in order to work and adapt to the required business practises. This is often not in the interests of the counsellor or of the client.
By paying to speak to a counsellor in private practise you are more likely to be having your therapy with a counsellor who is free from organisational demands to practise more ethically and safely. When you pay for an appointment with me you will also be receiving the time before the appointment in which I am preparing for our meeting, as well as the time after the appointment, in which I write up casenotes and reflect upon our meeting and what we have discussed.
Although I work from home I still have overheads, such as, the running and maintenance of a website and booking system, as well as professional costs, such as, professional membership and accreditation, professional indemnity insurance, and regular clinical supervision. To maintain my professional membership I am also required to attend regular training events for continuing professional development, which incurs further costs.
I would also like to think that I bring a certain level of training, experience and personality that equips me to specifically work with bereavement, and the challenges this involves, which is not always a given for clients when accessing other services. I no longer see counselling for bereavement as just a job, but more of a calling, that I am responding to. In order to support and work with clients at depth, I also need to be able to take care of and to sustain myself, which includes setting a reasonable price for what I am able to offer.