Bereavement
Working with people affected by loss, death & suicide
In 2014 I started working at the Harbour in Bristol, UK. The Harbour is a charity providing psychotherapy and counselling for people facing death and dying. I worked initially as a psychotherapist in training before gaining employment with them as a psychotherapist, and then as the Clinical Lead and a Senior Psychotherapist. In this role I lead a team of 11 clinicians, provided clinical supervision and line management.
Through this time at The Harbour I have gained a deep experience of working with people affected by loss and death. Whether this is the anticipation of the death of a loved one, the bereavement following a death or facing your own death. I believe that by carefully listening to the person, the unique shape of their grief can be traced and from this, we can work together in finding out, not just who has been lost, but what they have lost. With this comes the path of facing the hole that is now in their life.
Outside of the work that took place inside of the charity, I have also supported businesses who have faced the death of an employee and worked for a partnership between Bristol University and charity providing short term therapy for students. This work was brought about as a response to a suicide at the university.
“Let me be clear at the offset that what I write takes as its starting point the skill, professionalism and humanity of Matthew. He behaved humanely and impeccably throughout my process with the therapy. I was very frightened, disturbed if you like, following my wife’s death and the medicalisation of the last part of our lives together. I needed help to both experience what had happened, strange but, despite at one level its obviousness, true; and I needed help to find out I could survive the experience.
What I got was all of this and something unexpected, something more. My therapist had a delicate mixture of firm down-to-earthness and a rich poetic imagination. I felt a great freedom to explore the territory of my grief in my own way, and even more importantly, at my own pace. What took me by surprise was a gift, an opening up of my personality into something more warm, more loving and more generous and paradoxically more able to look after itself too, once the shocks had subsided.”– Client