What to Expect · Moksha Relational Therapy · Canberra
A clear sense of what happens — from making contact to beginning the work.
Starting counselling can feel uncertain, particularly if you have never done it before, are coming with someone else, or are not yet sure what kind of support you need.
You do not need to have everything worked out before you contact me.
Nothing is assumed. No commitment is required beyond the first session.
Before the first session
You don't need to prepare a perfect explanation.
When you make contact, I will ask for enough information to understand what kind of support you are seeking and whether Moksha Relational Therapy is likely to be an appropriate starting point. Before your first appointment, you will receive the relevant consent and intake information for the service you are attending.
The intake is not intended to tell the whole story before we meet. Brief answers are enough. Anything you would rather discuss than put in writing can be brought to the session. For couples and some other forms of relational work, each person may be asked to provide information separately.
You do not need a referral. You do not need to know exactly what to say.
Before the first session
Understanding what brings you — and whether this is the right fit.
The first session is not a commitment to ongoing counselling.
It is a structured conversation that allows me to begin understanding what has brought you, what is happening now, and what you would like to be different.
01
Understanding what brings you.
We begin with your experience of the difficulty: what has been happening, what feels most important now, and what you hope counselling might help with. There is no expectation that you tell your entire history in the first appointment.
02
Mapping the pattern.
Often, the immediate problem sits within a pattern that has become difficult to shift.
- For an individual, that pattern may appear across relationships, emotions or ways of responding under pressure.
- For a couple or family, it may be a recurring sequence between people—one that everyone can become caught in despite good intentions. We begin making sense of that pattern rather than simply deciding who is right or wrong.
03
Deciding where to begin
As the picture becomes clearer, we consider what the work might need to focus on. Sometimes that direction is clear after one session. Sometimes further assessment is needed.
04
Checking the fit
I will also consider whether the service I provide is appropriate for what you have brought. If another kind of support would be more suitable, I will discuss that with you rather than continuing counselling simply because you have already started.
How the work proceeds
Structured and directed — not open-ended.
Sessions are not simply a place to review what happened during the week. Current events matter, but our attention also stays on the patterns beneath them—what tends to happen, what activates the pattern, what each response may be trying to manage or protect, and what makes the pattern difficult to change.
Understanding
Making sense of the pattern — without reducing someone to the problem.
Many ways of responding make more sense when understood in the context of relationships, experiences and circumstances in which they developed.
Understanding a pattern does not mean excusing everything that happens within it. It means becoming clearer about what is happening and why, so that different responses become possible.
In the room
Paying attention to what happens — not only what is described.
I am not only listening to what you are saying. I am also paying attention to what happens while it is being said—where someone withdraws, becomes defensive, reaches for connection, becomes overwhelmed, or struggles to express what matters underneath the immediate reaction.
When an important pattern begins to appear in the session itself, I may slow the conversation down and help us look at what is happening before the familiar sequence takes over.
New experience
Something different happening — not just being understood differently.
Insight matters, but deeply established relational patterns do not always change through understanding alone.
At times, the work involves creating an opportunity for something different to happen in the room—to stay with an emotion that is usually avoided, express something more directly, hear something differently, or experience a response that was not expected.
Lasting change often requires more than understanding or instruction. It also requires the experience of something different.
Safety
Safety comes before conjoint work.
For counselling involving couples or families to be useful, people need sufficient freedom and safety to participate meaningfully.
Where there are concerns involving violence, coercive control, threats, intimidation, fear, stalking, monitoring, sexual coercion or pressure to participate, I may need to speak with participants separately or reconsider whether joint counselling is appropriate.
Moksha Relational Therapy is not a crisis or emergency service.
If your situation requires immediate or specialist support, counselling here may not be the appropriate first step.
Practical details
The information you need before booking.
Sessions
Sessions are available in person in Belconnen, Canberra, and online across Australia.
Counselling is available in English, Nepali and Hindi.
Fees
No referral required.
Individual: $150 · Couples: $180 · Family: $200 · Premarital: $180 · Discernment: $180 · Initial consultation: No charge (15 minutes). Medicare rebates are not available. Some private health insurers provide rebates — confirm your policy before your first session.
Session length
Varies by service.
Individual and premarital sessions: 50 minutes. Couples, family, and discernment sessions: 60–90 minutes. Extended sessions are available where clinically appropriate and are charged pro-rata. Session lengths are confirmed at booking.
Frequency
Weekly or fortnightly.
Most people begin weekly and move to fortnightly as the work progresses. The frequency is discussed in the first session and reviewed as the engagement develops. There is no prescribed number of sessions — the duration depends on what is being worked on and what pace suits.
Cancellation
24 hours notice required.
Cancellations or missed appointments with less than 24 hours notice may incur a fee of 50% of the session rate. Contact by phone or email as soon as you know. The policy is applied with common sense — genuine emergencies are handled accordingly.
Location
Belconnen · Online across Australia.
In-person sessions are held in Belconnen, ACT — 5/55 Lathlain Street. Parking is available on site. Online sessions are available via secure encrypted video to clients anywhere in Australia. Setup details are provided at confirmation.
Availability
Including evenings and weekends.
Sessions are available on selected mornings, evenings, and weekends — times that in-person sessions at a fixed daytime location rarely accommodate. Current availability is shown in the booking system. If the wait is longer than two weeks, that will be named directly so you can decide whether to wait or look elsewhere.
Confidentiality & neutrality
Two questions almost everyone has before the first session.
Is everything I share confidential?
Yes. Everything shared in sessions is held in strict confidence and governed by the PACFA Code of Ethics, the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), and the Australian Privacy Principles.
The only exceptions are the legally defined circumstances that apply to all registered practitioners in Australia: serious risk of harm to yourself or another person, a concern regarding the safety of a child or vulnerable person, or where records are subpoenaed by a court. Outside these circumstances, nothing is disclosed without your written consent.
Clinical notes are maintained to support the continuity of the work. They are stored securely and accessed only by the practitioner. No information is shared with your GP, employer, or any other party without your explicit written consent.
Does the therapist take sides?
No sides are taken. No blame is assigned.
In couples and family work, the focus of the clinical attention is the cycle between people — not any individual within it. Every position in the cycle is held with equal clinical interest. The withdrawal is not indifference. The pursuit is not aggression. Both make sense from the inside. The work holds that.
Individual sessions within couples or family work are available where clinically indicated. Information shared in those sessions is not treated as a secret held from the other participant. It is used therapeutically to inform the work — not disclosed directly, but not kept separate from the clinical picture either. The exception is where safety concerns require mandatory reporting, which applies regardless.
How relationship change happens
What people notice as the work develops.
Change in this kind of work is not primarily cognitive. It is experiential. The shift that holds is not the result of better understanding alone — it is the result of the sequence itself being restructured, of new responses occurring inside the cycle often enough that the nervous system updates its predictions about what relational encounters produce.
For individuals
The relational move that always fired before reflection begins to arrive later.
Sometimes it does not arrive at all. The protection that once operated automatically becomes something that can be noticed, held, and in time, chosen rather than executed. The pattern does not disappear. It loses its automatic grip. That distinction is the whole difference.
For couples
The cycle no longer defaults to the same positions automatically.
The argument still starts. But the position each person ends up in becomes less fixed, less inevitable. The reach that used to be misread begins to land differently — not because both people memorised a different response, but because the sequence that produced the misread has been interrupted enough times that the nervous system no longer predicts it as the only possible outcome.
For families
The roles that organised the system begin to become flexible rather than fixed.
The person who carried the difficulty stops being the only one who changes. The adults in the system shift their positions — which changes what the system requires of everyone inside it. The identified problem often resolves not because it was targeted directly, but because the structure that kept it in place has been reorganised.
All services
Find your entry point.
The method above is the same across every service. What differs is the relational context — how many people are in the room, and what the cycle looks like there.
Individual
The same dynamic keeps recurring across different people and contexts.
→
Couples
The same argument keeps returning — regardless of what it is nominally about.
→
Family
Roles have hardened and the difficulty is larger than any one person.
→
Premarital
Understanding the patterns before significant pressure stress-tests them.
→
Discernment
Clarity about a relationship — from a grounded position, not the pattern’s distortion.
→
Before you reach out
What if I’m nervous about making contact?
Most people are.
You do not need to know what to say. You do not need to prepare. You do not need to convince anyone that your problem is serious enough.
We begin where you are.
Questions
The questions people bring before making contact.
No. You can contact or book directly without a GP referral or Mental Health Treatment Plan. Medicare rebates are not available for this practice — sessions are privately funded. Some private health insurers provide rebates; check your policy before your first session.
The first session is an assessment of fit as much as an introduction to the work. It typically involves understanding what brings you, what has already been tried, and what the relevant context is. At the end of the first session, there is a direct conversation about whether this is the right approach and what working together would involve.
Nothing is assumed. No commitment is required beyond the first session.
No sides are taken. In couples and family work, the focus is the cycle between people — not any individual within it. Every position in the cycle is held with equal clinical interest. The work does not assign blame or advocate for any particular outcome.
Yes. Everything shared in sessions is held in strict confidence. The only exceptions are the legally defined circumstances that apply to all registered practitioners in Australia: serious risk of harm to yourself or another person, a concern regarding the safety of a child or vulnerable person, or where records are subpoenaed by a court.
Outside these circumstances, nothing is disclosed without your written consent.
There is no fixed timeline. The duration depends on the complexity of the presenting difficulty, how embedded the pattern is, and what goals the work is organised around. An honest conversation about what to expect will happen early in the engagement — not after many sessions have passed.
Yes. Individual sessions within couples or family work are used where clinically appropriate — to support the shared work, not to replace it. I will discuss the rationale directly when individual sessions are proposed. Information shared in individual sessions is not disclosed to the other participant without explicit agreement.
24 hours notice is required to cancel or reschedule without a cancellation fee. Contact by phone or email as soon as you know. The policy is applied with common sense — genuine emergencies are handled accordingly.
Yes. All services are available online via secure video, across Australia. Online sessions follow the same clinical approach as in-person work — the delivery format changes; the depth of engagement does not. Sessions are available in English, Hindi, and Nepali.
Begin
When you are ready.
If, after reading this page, the process feels clearer than it did when you arrived — then it has already done what it was meant to do.