How I Work

Psychotherapy, as I practise it, is a disciplined way of paying attention to a life while it is being lived.

When people arrive in my online practice, they rarely present themselves as a “case.” They arrive as someone in the middle of a life that has grown unfamiliar: a move to another country, a promotion that quietly erodes sleep, a relationship that no longer orients as it once did, a sense that the person they have become does not quite match the story they have been telling themselves.

The work begins there, in this in-between place. Not with a list of goals or a promise of solutions, but with the effort to think carefully about what is happening, with the person who is living it. The session becomes a space where experience is examined from different angles, without rushing to reduce it to a label or a single explanation.

My task as a clinical psychologist is to sustain this kind of attention. I listen to what is said and also to what becomes visible only gradually: patterns in relationships, forms of silence, traces of other cultures and other lives that continue to act in the present. Together we look at how these different threads come together in the specific situation that has brought someone to therapy.

Over time, this shared work of looking and thinking makes certain movements possible: decisions that once felt blocked, words for experiences that seemed incommunicable, a more stable sense of having an internal position from which to respond to change.

We work by thinking while acting, and acting while thinking, so that life does not have to pause in order for it to become thinkable.

A shared space of thought

I do not understand psychotherapy as a place where a specialist delivers ready-made answers to a passive listener. Nor as a space where everything that happens is immediately translated into a fixed interpretation. What interests me is the creation of a shared space of thought, where it becomes possible to make sense of what is happening while it is happening.

This means that the session is not organized around “solving a problem” as quickly as possible. It is organized around understanding how a person has been living, what has become unbearable or confusing, and how their history, relationships, work, body and cultural background participate in what is now at stake. Symptoms matter, but they never stand alone. They are always located within a wider fabric of life.

In practice, this shared thinking involves following small details. A word that is repeated without noticing. A gesture when a certain topic appears. The way a story is told differently from one week to the next. Rather than forcing these elements into a pre-existing theory, we stay with them long enough to see what they might be saying about the person’s way of inhabiting their world.

Because I work primarily online and with adults whose lives move across borders, languages and social positions, this space of thought also needs to be attentive to context. The same experience can have very different meanings depending on the country one is living in, the documents in one’s pocket, the economic pressures that structure everyday decisions.

Paying attention to these conditions is not an “extra” to clinical work; it is part of understanding how suffering takes shape.

A clinical toolbox

My training is rooted in clinical psychology, with a PhD in Mental Health and Development from the University of São Paulo (USP). Over the years, my work has been shaped by different fields: psychoanalytic thinking, social psychology, cognitive-behavioural approaches, health psychology and intercultural psychology. I do not treat these as separate camps to be defended, but as a toolbox that can be used with care.

In the consulting room, this means that there is no single script that every person must follow. With some patients, it is important to slow down and listen closely to dreams, early memories and the ways desire and conflict appear in their narratives. With others, it becomes crucial to examine very concrete patterns: how a thought leads to a particular reaction in the body, how certain situations reliably end in withdrawal or exhaustion.

Sometimes the work calls for detailed attention to beliefs, expectations and habits of interpretation, in line with cognitive-behavioural traditions. At other times, the focus shifts to how social structures, gendered expectations, migration policies or workplace hierarchies are shaping a person’s emotional life.

Intercultural psychology is especially present when we are looking at how more than one culture lives inside the same person.

The point is not to apply a technique to someone, but to find, together, the forms of thinking that are most helpful for that particular life at that particular moment. This requires clinical rigour, theoretical grounding and also a certain humility: the willingness to let the person’s experience guide which parts of the toolbox are needed.

The kaleidoscope

In my doctoral research, I worked with the image of a kaleidoscope to think about psychological suffering. The pieces inside a kaleidoscope do not change much; what changes is the way they are arranged in relation to one another, depending on how the object is turned and from where it is viewed. Suffering, in this sense, is not a fixed object that can be removed once and for all. It is something that reorganises itself as a person’s context, relationships and narratives shift.

In clinical practice, this means that I am less interested in eliminating discomfort than in understanding how it is organised, what holds it in place, and how it might be possible to live differently alongside it. Diagnosis, when it is used, can be a useful language for describing certain configurations of experience. But it is never taken as an identity. The person always exceeds the name that has been given to their suffering.

Working with the kaleidoscope in mind allows us to notice shifts that might otherwise go unregistered. A feeling that once filled an entire week appears only at the edges of certain days. A relationship that seemed entirely closed begins to admit small acts of negotiation. An inner narrative that once said “there is no alternative” makes room, very gradually, for other sentences.

The aim of therapy, as I see it, is not to promise a life without suffering.

It is to support the rebuilding of autonomy alongside it: the capacity to think and choose, even when conditions are not ideal; to recognise where one has room to move and where one does not; to inhabit one’s own life with more authorship, even when certain pieces of the kaleidoscope cannot be changed.

Who I work with

I work with adults who are, in different ways, living through complex forms of change. Some are Brazilians living abroad who find that migration has quietly unsettled their sense of continuity: a different language in the mouth, another country’s bureaucracy shaping daily life, distance from familiar forms of support. Others are expats who have moved several times and notice that their life appears coherent on paper, yet feels strangely fragmented from the inside.

There are also those who have not crossed borders geographically, but who recognise that something has shifted around them: a new role at work that demands a version of themselves they do not fully recognise; a separation or new partnership; a period of caring for others that has gradually pushed their own needs to the background.

Sometimes the change is more diffuse: a sense of having lost orientation, of living a life that no longer quite fits.

What these people share is not a specific diagnosis, but the experience of trying to think and act in situations where previous references are no longer reliable. Some seek a brief period of psychological support to navigate a defined moment of transition. Others enter into longer-term psychotherapy, where it becomes possible to look more carefully at how certain patterns have been built over time.

In all these modalities, the orientation remains the same: we work in the movement between living and thinking, so that decisions are not made blindly, nor postponed indefinitely in the hope that clarity will appear on its own. The work does not ask you to suspend your life in order to understand it. It invites you to bring your life, as it is being lived, into a space where it can be seen with greater precision and honesty.