Living Legacies Counselling Service

If you are going through hell – keep going!

Lynda Hannah is a member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors, as well as being the director of Living Legacies:

One of the routes to Living Legacies was through listening to people struggle with grief and blocks in their emotional healing. I heard so many stories about loss, including the deaths and funerals of their family members, and how they could have been much better, and healthier, that I started to realise there was a great need which was rarely being met, and in some people it became a huge, gaping hole.
It was for a family-focused, personal and holistic approach to the subject of death, dying and funerals. For some people it was simply permission to grieve. For others it was a sense of participation and belonging, of contributing something worthwhile to a generally unpleasant process. For some it was a need to leave this planet in a slightly better state than they found it. For others it was about simplicity, and reclaiming the act of letting go of the body, and the life, without too much pomp and ceremony.

Everyone has their own personal beliefs, values and needs when it comes to dying and grieving, and it’s these unique aspects of each individual that are often ignored or repressed. I believe that we have a right and a responsibility to express ourselves through the way we live our lives, and this includes how we let go of our lives – and each other – and move on.

My training is in humanistic existential counselling, which is a rather silly way of saying that my particular interest is in the big questions of human existence: Why am I here? What is life? What is death? Is there anything more? What is the meaning of it all? What is my purpose? And, as a counsellor, I don’t offer answers but I can help you to explore your own thoughts, beliefs, feelings and values to discover a way through.

For some people being confronted by a major loss may be the first time they’ve felt the need to evaluate their own answers to these sorts of questions. Most people have concerns of some sort about death or, more commonly, about dying. It’s important to have someone to talk to about them. I believe that the more prepared we humans are the better we cope with the inevitable. We can’t change the fact that it’s going to happen, we can only change how we choose to deal with it.

Visit Ecounselling.co.nz for more.