Grief and Loss Counselling, End of Life Doula and Dementia Doula Services
At Ground Zero Counselling and doula services our vision is to normalise informed, compassionate and holistic support for life's most challenging transitions - ensuring that no individual or family faces grief, loss, a life changing illness or end of life alone.
Ground Zero Counselling offers a unique service of grounded, person-centred, counselling expertise combined with specialist dementia and end-of-life care. We currently support individuals living with neurological disorders, disability, grief and loss, trauma and anxiety. Our services can be used at a particular point in a person's journey, or throughout the course of a person's journey, as needed. The choice is yours.
Ground Zero Counselling promotes advocacy, education and therapeutic support to individuals across the lifespan as they navigate the circumstances of loss and grief that have impacted their lives irrevocably. This support may be emotional, psychological, practical, relational or spiritual/existential.
We work collaboratively and respectfully, to help individuals and their family members consider their choices, develop greater awareness of the responses that may keep them ‘stuck’ in unhelpful patterns, explore new ways of coping to optimise personal wellbeing, strengthen the quality of their relationships with others, and enjoy more meaningful connections.
We are committed to:
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Creating safe, steady spaces for honest conversations
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Supporting informed and empowered decision making
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Honouring emotional, practical spiritual and relational needs
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Walking alongside people with clarity, compassion and dignity
At Ground Zero Counselling, we believe that even in life's most uncertain times, there is solid ground from which healing, meaning and connection can grow.
Ground Zero (noun) 1: the site of a nuclear explosion
2 : the centre of rapid, intense or violent change
3: back to the very beginning
About Kate Nankivell
Clinical Psychotherapist and Counsellor, End of Life Doula and Dementia Doula
Having been confronted with a few of her own ground zero events, Kate wanted the insights gained from her lived experience to not only enrich her practice as a therapist, but to be of value for others.
With an intimate understanding of what it is like to sit with profound and complicated grief, and as caregiver to a parent with dementia and key support person for a family member with a severe brain injury, Kate's lived experience may resonate with others who find themselves in the role of carer, having to make decisions and navigate the responsibilities brought on by significant change.
Kate's journey in this very specialised field began back in 2012 when she completed life transforming training with Karuna Hospice, followed by Deathwalker training with Zenith Virago. This then inspired her to volunteer her services at Hummingbird House in 2017. Her personal experiences, combined with over two decades supporting people therapeutically with various presentations of grief, distress and loss, allows her to provide authentic and holistic support to those facing fear and uncertainty wrought by a life changing diagnosis such as dementia, disability or any other distressing change event.
At Ground Zero Counselling, Kate sees the person beyond the diagnosis as no one deserves to be defined by a label. She works collaboratively with you to help improve your wellbeing and confidence, and improve your relationship with yourself and others. In short, supporting you to make what has been incredibly difficult and overwhelming, a little easier.
Kate provides a safe and supportive space for each person to identify their needs, express their concerns, and build stronger, more positive relationships through improved communication, understanding and effective coping strategies.
Kate has a Masters of Gestalt psychotherapy, with additional specialist training in Grief, Trauma, Interactive Drawing Therapy and Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples and family. She is a registered provider for QPS first responders (Self Refer program) and WorkCover Queensland, provides clinical counselling services to NDIS clients with self managed or plan managed funding, provides counselling and dementia support to Support at Home participants and sees clients privately. Kate undertook additional training more recently with Preparing the Way and Dementia Doulas International to become a certified End of Life Doula and Dementia Doula respectively.
She supports people online (Australia-wide), and face to face - either in her rooms at Spring Hill, Brisbane, or visits clients in their homes if mobility is an issue. Kate facilitates both individual therapy and group therapy, runs support groups with a dementia focus, facilitates CST groups for people living with mild to moderate dementia, and provides a range of dementia and end of life doula services. When counselling, she employs talk therapy or expressive art therapies depending on the clients’ needs, preferences and ability.
Kate’s unique, warm and creative approach helps individuals build their personal capacity by developing their self- awareness, explore where they get ‘stuck’, and inviting them to employ new skills and strategies to help them respond in healthier ways to their challenges.
