Therapy for Relationship Difficulties, Attachment & Grief
I work with adults experiencing relationship difficulties, attachment patterns, grief and loss, bereavement, relationship anxiety, relationship endings, and recurring patterns that feel difficult to understand or change.
This is individual therapy, rather than couples counselling. The focus is on making sense of your emotional world, relational patterns, choices, fears, longings, losses, and ways of navigating relationships.
Relationships are central to emotional wellbeing. Feeling understood, supported, and able to communicate can make a meaningful difference to how we feel and cope. When relationships feel strained, distant, or difficult to navigate, therapy can offer space to understand what is happening and what may need attention.
Relationship difficulties are not always about the current relationship alone. Sometimes the same painful emotional place is reached with different people. Therapy offers space to understand these patterns with curiosity.
On this page
Therapy may be helpful if you are experiencing
Relationship anxiety
Repeating relationship patterns
Anxious or avoidant attachment patterns
Difficulty with intimacy, closeness, or distance
Difficulty knowing or expressing what you want
Grief, bereavement, or relationship endings
Family estrangement
Loneliness, shame, resentment, or feeling stuck
Relationship patterns that keep repeating
You may come to therapy when you feel stuck in familiar relationship patterns, or notice yourself ending up in the same emotional place, even when the people or circumstances change.
This might involve saying yes when something does not feel right, becoming quiet to avoid conflict, feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, or struggling to know what you want until someone else has made their needs clear.
These ways of relating are not simply problems to get rid of. What is known can feel safer than what is new, even when it is painful or limiting. You may know how to survive distance, uncertainty, criticism, or emotional unavailability, while steadiness, openness, or being genuinely considered can feel unfamiliar or difficult to trust.
Over time, these ways of coping can become more automatic or rigid. You may remain protected, but less able to be known; avoid conflict, but feel resentful or unseen; hold tightly to independence, but feel lonely. Therapy can help explore what may be protected, where this may have come from, and whether it is still serving you now.
Anxiety, attachment, and intimacy
Relationship anxiety can take many forms. You may fear rejection, abandonment, dependence, or intrusion. There may be a strong need for reassurance, distress when someone does not respond, or difficulty feeling secure even when the relationship is going well.
At other times, anxiety is more connected to closeness itself. Emotional or physical intimacy may be longed for, but also feel uncomfortable, exposing, demanding, or unsafe. There may be a wish for connection alongside a strong pull towards distance, independence, or withdrawal.
Attachment patterns can affect autonomy and self-expression. You may find it difficult to know what you want, express needs or preferences, or hold onto your own perspective in the presence of someone else’s feelings. Silence or withdrawal may protect against rejection, conflict, or shame, while also making it harder to be known or understood.
Therapy can help make sense of how these relational patterns have been shaped by your unique history and context.
Grief, bereavement, and relationship endings
Grief can follow many kinds of loss. This may include the death of someone important, the end of a relationship, family estrangement, pregnancy loss, illness, identity change, or the loss of a hoped-for future.
Bereavement can bring sadness, anger, guilt, numbness, relief, longing, or a sense of unreality. Therapy can offer space for the pain of missing the person who has died, as well as the complexity of the relationship: what was loved, what was difficult, what was unresolved, what was never received, or what can no longer be said.
The end of a relationship can be deeply painful, even when the ending was necessary, long considered, or chosen with care. There may be grief not only for the person, but also for the future that had been imagined, the version of the relationship that was hoped for, or the parts of yourself that were organised around that bond.
Grief can also appear when a relationship continues, but something hoped for within it has not been possible. Therapy can offer a place to think about what has been lost, what remains unresolved, and how grief may connect with earlier experiences of separation, responsibility, rejection, love, or longing.
Individual Therapy and My Approach
My approach is relational psychodynamic and attachment-informed. This means therapy is interested not only in symptoms or current difficulties, but in the emotional and relational patterns that may sit beneath the surface.
A central part of the work is noticing patterns as they become clearer over time. This may include how you protect yourself from painful feelings, what you long for in relationships, what you fear or expect from others, and how you respond when you feel hurt, disappointed, rejected, unseen, or too needed.
The therapeutic relationship itself is also an important part of the work. Familiar patterns may begin to appear in therapy too. When this happens, therapy offers a space where these patterns can be noticed, thought about, and understood together, rather than repeated automatically or met with criticism.
The aim is not to tell you what decision to make or to offer advice. It is to understand what is happening internally and relationally, so that choices can become clearer and less driven by fear, guilt, avoidance, anger, or old patterns.
Relationship and grief therapy in East Melbourne and via telehealth
I offer individual therapy for relationship difficulties, relationship anxiety, attachment patterns, grief and loss, bereavement, relationship endings, and recurring relational patterns in East Melbourne and via telehealth across Australia.
If you are looking for therapy to understand relationship patterns, grief, bereavement, loss, or the ways relationships can feel difficult to navigate, you are welcome to get in touch to discuss whether therapy with me may be a good fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Relationship patterns are the familiar ways we come to manage relationships, including needs for closeness, intimacy, approval, autonomy, and the ways in which we protect ourselves or repeat old hopes and fears with new people. They are often not chosen consciously, but can shape relationships in powerful ways.
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This kind of insight alone is not always enough to create change. Therapy also involves emotional experience, reflection, and developing the capacity to recognise, tolerate, and respond differently to patterns as they emerge over time.
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Therapy is interested in both past and present. Current relationships often reveal emotional patterns that developed earlier and continue to shape how you respond now. Understanding these patterns can create more freedom and choice in the present.
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Therapy can provide space to process grief, confusion, emotional pain, uncertainty, or questions about yourself and your relationships following a breakup or significant relationship change.
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No. I provide individual therapy, though relationship experiences and relational patterns are often an important focus within individual work.
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Therapy is usually most helpful when sessions are regular. I generally recommend weekly sessions so there is enough continuity, containment, and momentum to build trust, understand patterns, and deepen the work over time.
We can discuss frequency in more depth during the assessment process.