Therapy and Coaching

My current areas of specialization include experience of emigration, anxiety, depression, and navigating life crises. People sometimes come to me to improve their connection with their own bodies, bring more vitality into their lives, and work through significant issues—ones that cannot be resolved through talk therapy alone—through bodily experience. I also support clients with professional challenges through coaching.

I work with a relational Gestalt and movement-oriented approach.

Key Aspects

Sessions take place online or in my office in Lisbon, in Russian or English. Deciding to iniciate therapy isn’t always easy, so during our first introductory call, we can get to know each other, clarify your goals for therapy or coaching, and agree on the frequency and duration of our work.

What kinds of issues can you bring to therapy?

There’s no such thing as the "right" reason to seek therapy. Sometimes people come to cope with moving abroad and find themselves, to sleep better, to stop being afraid to speak another language, to wake up in the morning with a desire to live, to not snap at their children, to set boundaries at work, when nothing brings joy or moves them, when they can’t silence their inner critic, when they feel like everything is falling apart and life will never get better. Sometimes requests aren’t articulated at all, but there is a discomfort, or simply a desire to make your life better.
The absence of a clear request is normal. In general, we are very vulnerable in therapy: coming to a stranger and sharing your hidden, complex, and no easy feelings is an act of trust. Sometimes it’s very difficult to take that step and articulate the problem. But if the desire for support is there, even if the request isn’t articulated, it takes shape dynamically during the sessions.

Finding the approach in therapy: what really matters?

It turns out that you shouldn’t be looking for a method, but for a person with whom you can openly talk about what matters, with whom you feel heard. At the same time, the therapeutic alliance is not a constant but a relationship: it can involve adjustment, enchantment and disappointment, frustration and irritation, and a decline in trust. Navigating such crises often facilitates a shift in therapy to a different level of trust. In fact, in Gestalt therapy, the very contact between client and therapist becomes a space for experiments, where one can learn to build relationships.

What are the relational Gestalt and somatic approaches?

If we’re talking about the approach itself: the Gestalt approach was shaped by phenomenology—a philosophical movement that emerged in the 19th century, which emphasized a return to the essence of things and to direct human experience. In therapy, this is probably the first thing that distinguishes Gestalt—an attempt not to diagnose or form judgments, but first to understand how a person’s experience of this problem is structured. And the relational aspect means that a situation tells us something not only about the person, but also about how their contact with others or interaction with the world is structured.

I also work with movement and the body—and this is about paying attention to bodily experience. Any movement, including breathing, gait, posture, and body language, as well as the micro-movements of the hands and eyes during a session, is part of our experience that carries knowledge about ourselves and the context. In sessions, we learn to pay attention to this knowledge and try to find a verbal form for it. In other words, a somatic session does not mean that the therapist asks the client to dance—rather, it means paying attention to client’s bodily knowledge. Sometimes, if the client is interested, small experiments related to body awareness or movement are possible.

People (psychotherapists and philosophers) who have inspired me: Gordon Wheeler, Ruella Frank, Helena Kallner, Jean-Marie Robin, and the philosophers Merleau-Ponty and Maxine Sheets-Johnston.

Is therapy always insightful and joyful?

Yet therapy is more often experienced as a relief, and even confronting an unflattering reality or a crisis becomes something that can be managed. Changes in therapy rarely happen overnight or because of some dramatic event; instead, they occur imperceptibly and gradually—sometimes as a couple of steps forward and one step back.

So what we actually can expect from therapy?

Formats

Duration

Duration and frequency depend on the client’s needs and the quality of the therapeutic alliance. There’s nothing wrong with short-term therapy, or, conversely, long-term and open-ended therapy. Different issues require different durations, and often they change over the course of the process.

Cost

If you’re interested, we can set up a 15-minute online call to get to know each other and discuss the format of our work (coaching or therapy, online or in-person, frequency, and so on). You can ask any questions you have during the call or via the form.

There’s also no significant difference between online and in-person therapy. It’s a different environment, but both conversational and movement-based therapy are available in both settings. Currently, some of my clients work in a hybrid format: we meet in person when possible, and the rest of the time we work online.

Resources