About me
I’m Marianna Khanivetskaya.
My route into this work began with a question that has stayed with me in different forms for years: what actually makes a person act the way they do?
I first approached that question through science. I studied Natural Sciences at UCL, specialising in Biomedical Sciences and Synthetic Organic Chemistry, with a particular focus on physiology, neurobiology, immunology, the nervous system, pharmacology, and cellular and molecular processes.
The more I understood about how the body works, the less convincing it became to look at a person through separate systems and mechanisms alone.
I became increasingly interested in how physiology is intertwined with everything that makes up human experience: how we perceive what happens to us, what we feel, how we react and make decisions, and how we relate to other people and the world around us. Why the same event can barely touch one person and remain deeply significant to another years later. Why a bodily response, a thought, a feeling and an action can all be expressions of the same process. And why looking at only one level of what is happening can leave something essential unexplained.
That interest gradually led me further into the psyche and the inner life of a person: how our ways of perceiving and responding take shape, what influences our choices, how we come into contact with ourselves and others, and what can continue to shape us without being immediately visible to us.
My scientific training also shaped how I approach questions I do not yet have an answer to. It taught me to be careful with conclusions, to test whether apparent connections actually hold, and not to accept an explanation simply because it sounds persuasive.
That matters to me in this work. A theory can be useful, but it should help us see a person more clearly, not make the person disappear behind the theory.
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?
Why I work the way I do
What has interested me for years is not simply why people do what they do, but what lies underneath.
You can know where a fear came from, understand the dynamics in your family, recognise your familiar patterns, and still find yourself making the same choices, reacting in ways you do not fully understand, or holding back from something you genuinely want.
Those are the moments I tend to want to look at more closely.
So I do not begin a session with an answer already in mind.
I would rather stay with the particular person and the particular situation long enough (or short enough!) for us to understand what is actually happening here, what is actually happening with you.
And that, perhaps, is the very heart of my work.