Services · Moksha Relational Therapy · Canberra
Relationship counselling in Canberra — for individuals, couples, and families.
People come to counselling for different reasons. Sometimes the difficulty is clearly relational — conflict, distance, disconnection, or tension within a couple or family. At other times, what brings someone is experienced more individually: anxiety, depression, grief, stress, workplace difficulties, a life transition, or simply a sense that something is not right.
Moksha offers individual, couples, and family counselling within a relational and attachment-informed approach — beginning with what is happening, without assuming in advance where the difficulty comes from.
Not sure where to start?
Find your entry point.
You do not need to know whether what you are experiencing is “individual” or “relational” before reaching out. The most useful starting point depends on what is troubling you, who is affected, and what you hope will change.
Read the prompts below. The one that comes closest to what you are experiencing can help you choose where to begin.
Something between us keeps creating conflict, distance, or disconnection.
You may be having the same arguments, struggling to communicate or repair after conflict, feeling emotionally distant, or finding that genuine efforts to change the relationship have not shifted the underlying dynamic.
Something in my life, within me, or in my relationships has become difficult to carry or understand.
You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, grief, stress, workplace difficulties, a significant life transition, a relationship or family difficulty, or a recurring emotional or relational pattern.
The difficulty involves more than one person, and what is happening between us has become difficult to shift.
Tension, conflict, distance, changing roles, or concern about one family member may be affecting the family more broadly.
We want to understand and strengthen our relationship before marriage or long-term commitment.
Explore how you each approach closeness, conflict, family, expectations, values, and major life decisions before greater pressures arrive.
We are unsure whether to continue the relationship or separate.
When one or both partners are uncertain about the future of the relationship, discernment counselling provides a structured process for reaching greater clarity about what comes next.
Not sure which applies? A brief initial conversation can help clarify the most appropriate starting point.
The work attends to what is happening within people, between people, and around them.
One practice. One framework.
Why individuals, couples, and families — under one roof.
People do not exist in isolation. What happens within a person can affect their relationships, and what happens in relationships can affect emotional wellbeing. Families, communities, personal history, culture, work, and significant life experiences can also shape how difficulties are experienced and understood.
This does not mean every difficulty is caused by a relationship. It means individual and relational life are often connected, and counselling can pay attention to those connections when they are relevant.
Working with individuals, couples, and families within the same clinical framework allows the work to begin at different levels — with what is happening within a person, between partners, or across a family — while keeping sight of the wider context surrounding it.
All services
Relationship counselling in Canberra — across every relational context.
Each service works within the same relational and attachment-informed framework, while the focus changes depending on what brings you to counselling. The work may involve understanding an individual emotional experience, a recurring pattern, what is happening between two people, or the wider dynamics of a family.
Across each service, the aim is to understand the difficulty in context and create opportunities for new emotional and relational experiences — not only greater insight into what is happening.
I prefer this because the framework stays consistent without pretending the clinical task is identical across individual, couples and family work.
Individual
50-minute sessions
$150 per session
In-person · Canberra
Online · Australia
Understanding what you are experiencing without taking you out of the context of your life.
People seek individual counselling for many reasons. You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, grief, stress, workplace difficulties, a significant life transition, relationship or family difficulties, or emotional and relational patterns that keep returning.
Individual counselling begins with what is troubling you rather than assuming where it comes from. The work considers your inner experience alongside the relationships, personal history, significant experiences, culture, and wider circumstances that may be relevant to understanding it.
For some people, the work involves a recurring relational pattern — pursuing, withdrawing, over-adapting, protecting against closeness, or responding in ways that make sense but have become difficult to change. For others, the difficulty may be more immediate and may not require a relational explanation at all.
The work combines understanding with attention to emotional experience in the present. Where useful, the therapeutic relationship can also become a place to notice and experience something differently rather than only understand it retrospectively.
Individual counselling may be relevant when:
A relationship, family, or workplace difficulty is affecting how you feel
Anxiety, depression, grief, stress, or a life transition is becoming difficult to carry
An emotional or relational pattern keeps returning
You understand what is happening intellectually but still find it difficult to respond differently
Couples
50 minute sessions
$180 per session
In-person · Canberra
Online · Australia
The cycle between two people is the focus — not either person as the problem.
Couples counselling works with what happens between partners when connection becomes difficult. One person’s protective response can activate the other’s, whose response can then intensify the first. Over time, couples can find themselves caught in a familiar cycle where both people are trying to protect something important, yet both leave feeling less understood, less connected, or less secure.
The work pays attention to that cycle as it happens — what triggers it, how each person responds, what happens next, and what makes repair difficult. The aim is not simply to resolve individual arguments, but to help couples recognise and change the patterns through which conflict, distance, and disconnection develop.
The work also explores the emotions, attachment needs, fears, expectations, and personal histories that may shape each person’s position in the relationship. As these become easier to recognise and communicate, different ways of reaching for and responding to one another can become possible.
Couples counselling may be relevant when:
The same arguments keep returning, even when the topic changes
Emotional or physical distance has grown between you
Communication quickly becomes defensive, critical, withdrawn, or overwhelming
Trust or connection has been affected by hurt, betrayal, or significant change
You understand the pattern between you but still find yourselves caught inside it
Family
50 minute sessions
$210 per session
In-person · Canberra
Online · Australia
When a difficulty affects one person, it can affect the relationships around them — and what happens in the family can affect each person within it.
Families develop ways of responding to stress, change, conflict, and one another. Over time, roles can become fixed, communication can become difficult, alliances or distance can develop, and concern about one family member can begin to organise much of family life.
Family counselling looks at both the concerns bringing the family to counselling and what is happening between family members around them. The aim is not to assume that one person is the problem — or that an individual’s difficulty is simply caused by the family — but to understand how individual experiences and family relationships may be influencing one another.
The work may explore recurring interactions, roles, emotional responses, patterns of closeness and distance, and the ways family members respond when the system is under pressure. Where relevant, attention can also be given to intergenerational experiences, attachment, culture, migration, family expectations, and significant changes or losses.
Family counselling may be relevant when:
Conflict or tension keeps returning between family members
Communication has become difficult, defensive, distant, or emotionally charged
One family member is struggling and the impact is being felt across the family
Roles or patterns within the family have become difficult to shift
The family is navigating grief, separation, migration, transition, or another significant change
Family members want to understand one another better and develop different ways of responding together
Premarital
50 minute sessions
$180 per session
In-person · Canberra
Online · Australia
Understand the relationship you are building — before greater pressures arrive.
Premarital counselling creates space to understand your relationship more deeply before marriage or long-term commitment. Rather than waiting for difficulties to become entrenched, the work explores how you approach closeness, conflict, communication, expectations, family, intimacy, values, and important life decisions.
Every couple brings different experiences and expectations into a relationship. Some are explicit and easy to discuss; others become visible only when partners encounter disagreement, stress, competing needs, or different assumptions about how a relationship or family should work.
Where relevant, the work may explore family-of-origin experiences, attachment, culture, religion, expectations around marriage, finances, children, extended family, and the ways each person responds under emotional pressure. The aim is not to predict where the relationship will struggle, but to develop greater understanding of yourselves as a couple and more flexibility in how you navigate differences together.
Premarital counselling may be relevant when you:
Are preparing for marriage or long-term commitment and want to understand your relationship more deeply
Want to explore expectations around communication, intimacy, finances, children, family, culture, or shared values
Have noticed patterns or differences you would like to understand before they become more difficult
Come from different family, cultural, religious, or relational backgrounds
Want preparation that goes beyond communication tips or a compatibility checklist
Discernment
50 minute sessions
$180 per session
In-person · Canberra
Online · Australia
When the question is whether to stay, separate, or make a serious attempt at change.
Discernment counselling is for couples where one or both partners are uncertain about the future of the relationship. It is different from couples therapy: rather than beginning with the assumption that both people are ready to work on the relationship, it provides a structured, time-limited process for understanding what has brought the relationship to this point and considering what comes next.
The work holds both the possibility of separation and the possibility of making a serious attempt to change the relationship. Each person has space to understand their own position, the difficulties within the relationship, and what they would need to take responsibility for if they chose to work on it.
The aim is not to persuade either person to stay or leave. It is to support greater clarity about the available paths forward and help each person make a more considered decision about what comes next.
Discernment counselling may be relevant when:
One or both partners are uncertain whether to continue the relationship
One person is leaning toward leaving while the other wants to preserve the relationship
Repeated attempts to decide have left you feeling more confused or stuck
You are not ready to begin couples therapy but want a structured process for considering the relationship’s future
You want greater clarity before making a significant decision about staying or separating
This practice attends to what is happening within people and between people, the context surrounding it, and what it takes for something to genuinely change. The work is not analysis from a distance — it is relational encounter in which understanding and new experience work together.
“Medicare rebates are not available. Some private health insurers provide rebates — confirm directly with your insurer.”
The context changes. The relational lens remains.
Questions
The questions people bring before the first session.
The right service is determined by the relational context — how many people are involved and what the cycle looks like there. If the difficulty recurs across different relationships and different people, individual counselling is usually the entry point. If both people are caught in the same cycle together, couples counselling. If the difficulty is organised at the level of the family system rather than one or two individuals, family counselling.
If you are genuinely unsure, a free 15-minute consultation will clarify which context fits. Contact directly to arrange one.
This practice attends to why people behave as they do in relationships — the attachment history, family of origin, and early relational learning that shape how people respond under emotional pressure. That contextual understanding tends to reduce shame and self-blame. The work then combines that understanding with new emotional and relational experience in the session — because understanding alone rarely reorganises a deeply learned relational pattern. Standard counselling often addresses what is happening. This work attends to why, and to what it takes for something to genuinely shift.
Yes — with a clear understanding of what individual work can and cannot do. It cannot change the other person. It can work directly with your position in the cycle: the automatic moves you make, the emotional predictions you carry, how you respond when the pattern is activated. When one person’s position in a cycle shifts substantially, the cycle itself is often disrupted — because the other person’s expected counter-move no longer finds the same conditions.
Individual work is also valuable in its own right, regardless of what the relationship does or does not become.
No referral is needed. You can book directly. This practice operates as a private clinical counselling service. PACFA clinical counsellors are not currently Medicare-registered, which means sessions are not rebatable under a Mental Health Treatment Plan. Some private health insurers provide rebates — worth checking your specific policy before your first session.
Couples counselling assumes both people want to work on the relationship. Discernment counselling is for situations where that assumption no longer holds — where one or both people are uncertain whether the relationship has a future. The goal in discernment work is not to repair the relationship. It is to help each person arrive at a grounded decision about what to do next, free from the distortion the cycle itself creates.
Discernment counselling is time-limited and structured. Couples counselling is open to a longer process of pattern-level restructuring. The two are not interchangeable.
There is no fixed timeline. The work is structured and directed — not open-ended — but the duration depends on the complexity of the cycle, how embedded the pattern is, and the relational context. Individual work tends to be longer when the pattern is deeply embedded in attachment history. Couples work can move relatively quickly once the cycle is clearly identified. Family work depends on how many people are involved and how rigid the system has become.
An honest conversation about what to expect happens early in every engagement. There is no incentive here to extend the work beyond what it requires.
For referring professionals
GPs, psychologists, school counsellors, and other professionals are welcome to make contact directly.
A referral pack is available on request. It includes a practice overview, referral fit sheet, fees and booking information, and outreach templates.
Format
In-person and online. The approach does not change between them.
All services are available in both formats. Some people find in-person contact easier for emotionally intensive work. Others find the slight distance of a screen allows them to access material more readily. Both are clinically equivalent. The choice is yours.
In-person
Canberra, ACT
Face-to-face sessions at the Canberra practice. The physical presence of the room matters for certain kinds of relational encounters — particularly early in the work, or when the material is highly charged.
Individual: 50-minute sessions · Couples and family: 50-90 minute sessions
Online
Across Australia
Secure video sessions available to anyone in Australia. For couples and families, online sessions are conducted with all parties in the same location. Separate-location online sessions available in specific circumstances — contact to discuss.
Individual: 50-minute sessions · Couples and family: 50-90 minute sessions
Begin
Book a session.
In-person in Canberra. Online across Australia. If you are not yet sure which service applies, start with a conversation.