Grief and Loss Counselling in Port Perry, ON.

When life falls apart, the pillars you hold onto are no longer there. There is a groundlessness to it. Therapy can help you move through the depth of feelings and thoughts that may feel too uncomfortable to share with friends. Acknowledging the pain and loss and finding ways to rebuild slowly and gently are the ways therapy can help in these painful and human life experiences. Therapy helps you move through the almost surreal pain of loss and grief. Together, you work on grieving the loss, learning how to find pleasure in life again without guilt and moving through the experience without suppressing how you feel and move forward in supported and healthy ways.

Grief and loss are parts of our human experience. When you experience grief and loss, I want to encourage you that you are not alone in this journey. I collaborate with clients to help in normalizing grief, encouraging healthy coping strategies, facilitating healing, and persistence to knock down the pain of loss. I use CBT and EMDR together with active listening, empathy, and culture-sensitive infusion treatment. Please, do not suffer alone. I am here to help.

Drawing upon the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross ("On Death & Dying" and "On Grief and Grieving"), I support people in their grieving journey, assessing the challenges and also the strengths each person has to most effectively adjust to loss and develop effective coping strategies. Ultimately, finding ways to carry this loss and grief in the most graceful way possible is the goal to be attained. Courage and faith along with a growing spiritual understanding and openness contribute greatly to the success of this work.

Many people have ideas about how grief should look or feel based on expectations from family, society, or the media. There are so many experiences and events that deserve be mourned, whether society recognizes them or not, and your feelings about the loss are valid. Your experience of grief is unique to you and there is no correct way to process your loss, which is why I work collaboratively with clients to explore meaning in the thoughts and feelings that emerge as you begin your healing journey. Book a free consultation to learn more about my approach and explore if we are a good fit.

I define grieving as: "Your body is healing an emotional break and/or bruise". A loss of any type will create emotional bruising or an emotional break - such as the loss of a loved one. Grieving is a normal emotional healing process. Our emotions will heal, just as a broken leg will heal. However, we are to nurse the bruise/break properly, otherwise the emotional body can not heal itself. I will help you develop a healthy emotional wound care system. I provide a safe place for you to vent your feelings. Venting feelings or I like to call it "washing your emotional wound" is the first step. Then I teach the emotional nursing steps which will guide and support the healing process.

Grief and loss can feel overwhelming, isolating, and unpredictable. At Willow Tree Wellness, I offer a compassionate and grounded space where clients can explore their emotions at their own pace. Through a personalized, trauma-informed approach, I help individuals process their loss, find meaning, and reconnect with hope. Together, we’ll work to honour your experience, reduce emotional distress, and build coping strategies that support healing and resilience in everyday life.

Feeling grief and loss is unique to each person, but it is felt more or less as a form of depression. Grief and loss is felt not just from the death of a loved one, but also from divorce and relationship losses. I find that clients often begin to feel isolated in their grief, relationships become affected, and moving through daily activities can feel overwhelming. As a Specialist in Depression, I help my clients move through the stages of loss, and I help them to feel pleasure and hope in their daily lives, rebuilding self-esteem and self-worth. I offer kindness and support, and my clients often comment that they "feel lighter" and "hopeful" after each session.

After a loss, it is not uncommon to feel helpless, sad, anxious, fearful, or depressed. We understand that the emotional pain you may be feeling makes it hard to live life as it was before the loss. We are here to help you to navigate through the pain, we are here to help you to understand the loss and its impact on you, and we are here to ultimately help you to develop better strategies to cope with the loss and adjust to this new reality. Our approach to therapy means that we are committed to collaborating with you throughout this process in a compassionate and accepting atmosphere.

Have you found yourself in deep sadness from a recent loss or that may be many years old and perhaps you are only recently recognizing? People were designed to reach out to someone when they are grieving and have had a loss. Unfortunately in our modern world, we are expected to be brief about our losses, to shrug them off and move on. You don't have to suffer alone. I will support you to more fully allow yourself to experience this loss and sadness in safety so that you can truly process the pain. Please contact me for help.

Grief looks different for everyone, and there's no timeline for healing after a significant loss. I provide a compassionate, non-judgmental space where you can process your grief—whether from the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or another major life change—without feeling rushed or told how you should feel. Using trauma-informed and somatic approaches alongside traditional talk therapy, I help clients honour their loss while gently finding ways to carry it forward. My goal is to support you in navigating grief in a way that feels authentic to you.

Being alive means experiencing inevitable loss, which is normally followed by grief and recovery. The loss can be the loss of a person, image, ideal, or even a hope. However, the grief and recovery can sometimes be complicated. Every person follows a unique pattern of grief processing. The key for a healthy recovery lies in understanding this pattern in a supported environment. The therapy is about helping the client to get to this insight. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to see if we are a good fit.

In my practice you will find a safe place to talk about and work through pain, and the feelings of sadness, confusion, guilt, shame and anger that often accompany the experience of grief and loss. Moving through grief and loss is your personal journey that takes time and is experienced uniquely from your own perspective. I provide therapy, counselling and and support for people who have lost a loved one such as a family member, friend or colleague whether through death or the ending of a relationship, those who have lost an important pet or animal companion or people who have experienced a loss that includes a loss of a job or personal identity.

I have personally suffered a great loss in my life, as a result, I feel that I am uniquely qualified to work with clients who have also suffered similar tragedies. Textbook grief therapy is not enough. My experience has helped me formulate a deep understanding of the particular fears, sadness, and problems one faces while dealing with a profound loss.