At Stoney Creek Counselling, our Social Worker Vicki Peirce offers a holistic approach to grief support. Grief comes from all forms of loss. The most widely known cause is the death of someone close to us. However, grief is also experienced at times of loss of relationship not linked to death, life transition as in loss of career by choice or through retirement, and larger societal events such as the COVID-19 pandemic that we all just lived through.

There is a notion that grief also happens in very linear, predictable stages that a person is meant to live through, move through, and come out the other side to “move on” with life. This is not the lived experience or the approach to grief support you will find here. Grief and loss is experienced very differently for everyone. Your own experience is yours alone, however, some concepts are more universal that you can work through here at Stoney Creek Counselling.

Often we are at a loss of how to support those who are grieving or even to know what we need ourselves. The support you will receive here draws upon various treatment modalities and models of grief support including the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement, the Developmental Model of Grieving, and the Attachment perspective in Grief support.

There can be a link between the experience of grief and trauma, in particular in the face of sudden, unexpected death and/or death of an important person through suicide, motor vehicle accident, or violence. The support you will receive will come from a trauma-informed lens. If further assessment or treatment of trauma symptoms is required, we will support you in the referral process needed.