Counselling in Loss

This unit offers students the knowledge and skills to counsel those experiencing loss. It provides an understanding of the grief process, and considers the impact culture and your personal history have on your interaction with clients seeking counselling due to loss.
The emphasis is to build your existing counselling strategies and skills so you can counsel and help people to deal with loss and grief.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand and apply the terminology and concepts for counselling in loss
• Discuss the different ways that grief is experienced and expressed
• Identify key issues in bereavement counselling
• Explain the role of the counsellor in dealing with loss
• Discuss different models of grief and approaches to bereavement counselling
• Identify appropriate strategies for bereavement counselling
• Demonstrate the key skills of counselling in loss
• Apply these counselling skills in a wide range of loss situations

Content Areas

• An Introduction to Counselling in Loss
• Counselling Approaches and Models of Grief
• Cultural and Religious Perspectives of Others
• Bereavement Counselling
• Complicated Grief and Prolonged Grief
• Other Losses and Gender and Bereavement
• Bereaved Children and Adolescents
• Bereaved Parents
• Family and Loss
• Disenfranchised Grief and Complex Loss Situations
• Supporting Caregivers, the Dying and the Bereaved Elderly
• Developing Self-Awareness and Maximising Counselling Effectiveness

Unit Duration and Workload

This unit involves a total of 36 hours of face to face delivery of self directed study including educator contact in flexible delivery modes, generating a further 54 hours of self-study per unit including research and related study activities, including assessment. This translates to 7.5 hours per week for the unit.