About me
My name is Marianna.
You can understand a great deal about yourself and still keep ending up in the same places.
Knowing where the fear came from. Understanding your relationship with your parents. Seeing the familiar scenarios. And still choosing similar people again, reacting painfully to the same things, putting off what you actually want, or not daring to take the step you have long wanted to take.
These are exactly the stories I find most interesting to untangle.
Not stopping at the first explanation, but looking further:
- 01
Why do I want one thing and do another?
- 02
Why does this, of all things, touch me so deeply?
- 03
What am I protecting myself from?
- 04
What am I trying to get?
- 05
What keeps repeating here?
- 06
And how much of what I am used to calling myself was once simply a way to cope?
I am good at assembling scattered pieces of a story and noticing connections between things that at first seem unrelated. I hear the contradictions between what a person says, feels, wants and does. And I do not settle for the first elegant explanation if it does not explain what is happening all the way through.
Sometimes several entirely different difficulties turn out to be connected, sometimes not, and that matters to see too.
What matters to me is not just understanding why something happens, but finding the point where a person gains more freedom to act differently.
Why I work the way I do
By training I am a scientist. I read Natural Sciences at UCL, specialising in biomedical sciences and synthetic organic chemistry.
My interest in people began with the body: physiology, biochemistry, symptoms and the mechanisms that keep an organism running. Gradually it became impossible not to see how closely the body is tied to what a person lives through.
That is how I came to psychology, trauma, relationships, family history, unconscious processes, and the way an experience lived through once keeps taking part in our life years later.
A scientific education left me one important habit: not to fall in love with the first explanation just because it sounds beautiful.
I want to look at the actual person in front of me, not fit their story into a theory chosen in advance.
So in a session I do not want to decide beforehand what we are supposed to find.
I am far more interested in understanding what is actually happening with you.
And that, perhaps, is the very heart of my work.