Linda Ruff

• Profile
• Book with Linda Ruff

- Counsellor & Death Doula -

Linda is an experienced counsellor who supports people to navigate complex and challenging life transitions. She works compassionately and collaboratively with her clients to establish a space of trust to explore emotional patterns and the stories we each craft about our place and belonging in the world. Linda sits with you in the space between chapters, in times of anxiety and uncertainty and helps you craft a way forward with more insight, clarity and hope.

As an integrative and holistic practitioner, Linda’s personalised approach draws from a variety of modalities including existential psychotherapy, attachment styles, family systems, somatic and eco therapy. She has a love of the mythopoetic and the archetypal stories that help us to find meaning and see our place in the universality of human experience.

Areas of Focus

Life Transitions
People come to therapy for all sorts of reasons, mostly because something in their lives is shifting. You’re in-between and you’re not sure how to move forward. You’re aware that there are patterns that keep you stuck, they have you feeling anxious and frustrated. It can help to tell your story to a compassionate witness, to hear a different perspective or try a new strategy.

Women’s Rites of Passage
Menstruation, Motherhood and Menopause are powerful phases of transition and change. For some they are times of powerful transformation but for others they are times of grief and anxiety. I work with women of all ages whose identities and relationships may be shifting, who are meeting their losses and regrets and revisiting their hopes.

Death and Mortality
Death is the final rite of passage and the one we are most afraid to talk about. I work with people who may be struggling with existential anxieties around their own death or the loss of loved ones through the exploration of personal and cultural stories around mortality. In my work as a death doula, I support individuals who have had a life-changing diagnosis or who are approaching the end of a long life to find peace with their mortality. I facilitate open conversations about death, build death literacy and the development of end of life plans, support family and community to care for their dying and their dead and assist with the crafting of personal ritual and ceremony.

Grief
I support the bereaved mourning the death of loved ones but I also acknowledge the many forms of grief. We grieve the ruptures in our relationships to others, to our relationship to our bodies in the face of illness and injury; we grieve the loss of identity with the loss of a job, of our role as partner or parent. We may grieve our wounds and the paths not taken. Our culture doesn’t tend to support us well in grief and we often need a safe place to express it.

Linda is a registered practitioner with the Australian Counselling Association (ACA). Her practice is inclusive and she provides diversity affirming support for cultural, neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ communities.

Appointments are available Monday - Friday.
$120 per 50 minute session.
(Medicare rebates are not available for this service)