My Professional Journey

There are many stories of people who come to psychology in their thirties, forties, or even fifties. And that is completely fine. My own story began much earlier, when I was around 13 or 14.

At school, we had a wonderful psychologist. For about half a year, she taught us psychology classes, and she somehow knew how to talk about it in a way that made me genuinely interested.

Later, I turned to her for help myself.

Like many teenagers, I had a difficult relationship with my parents. And it was probably the first time in my life that I received something very important from an adult: a sense of support and validation. That I was okay, that my feelings were valid, and that I was not necessarily wrong simply because I was a child and the person in front of me was an adult.

Without any theory behind it, that experience gave me my first real confirmation that psychological support can work and that there is real value in it.

I remained interested in psychology, but after school I still tried to choose a profession that seemed more understandable and, at the time, more secure. At first I considered marketing, and later I enrolled in journalism. I wrote a lot, both prose and poetry, and writing was an important part of my life, so journalism seemed relatively close to what interested me.

But quite quickly, I realised it was not for me.

So I returned to psychology. I enrolled in a psychology degree and, since then, I have never regretted that decision.

I think it was a very conscious choice. Even while I was at university, I already understood why I was there and that I wanted to work in this profession. The university programme alone was not enough for me. I read extensively outside the curriculum, became interested in Freud, Jung and psychodrama, and began training in person-centred psychotherapy.

Even then, I was drawn to the idea that a person does not constantly need to be corrected or told who they should become. When there is enough safety, acceptance, respect, and space to understand oneself better, a person has more room to grow in their own direction.

I think this was already the beginning of something that is still central to my work today: I am more interested in understanding a person than in fixing them.

I started working as a psychologist while I was still in my final year at university.

My first client came to me through a recommendation from someone connected to one of my classmates. I still remember how much anxiety, uncertainty, and inexperience there was in those early sessions, and how many things I would approach very differently today.

At that point, I did not yet have much practical experience, I was still learning about professional boundaries, and sometimes I became too emotionally involved in a client’s story. But those early sessions quickly showed me the difference between knowing psychological theory and actually being present with a real person in a difficult moment of their life.

At the same time, I could see that I was able to be helpful. Clients came back, shared that something in their lives was beginning to change, and that gradually gave me more confidence.

I am glad I started practising while I was still studying. Psychotherapy cannot be learned from books alone. There are many things you only begin to truly understand when a real person is sitting in front of you with their own story, feelings, and life.

After university, I found my way into addiction work almost by accident. At a summer forum, I met people who worked at a private rehabilitation centre. We started talking, and I was invited to work with their clients.

I was about 21 or 22 at the time. I still remember my first groups very clearly: around twenty people in front of me, mostly men, ranging from very young adults to people considerably older than I was. Unsurprisingly, a young woman who had just graduated from university and had come to tell them something about psychology was not always taken particularly seriously.

There was a lot of challenging, disagreement, humour used to derail the conversation, and attempts to test whether I really knew what I was doing. Looking back now, I can see how many mistakes I made in those first groups.

But I am very grateful to my younger self for having the courage to walk into that room.

About a year later, I already felt that I could hold a group like that. I knew much more about group dynamics, understood what might be behind constant disagreement, devaluation, or the need to turn everything into a joke, and felt much more confident in my role as a psychologist.

Most importantly, I began to see the results of my work. There were people who genuinely found our work helpful and told me about changes taking place in their lives. For a young professional, that was an important confirmation: I had not simply imagined that I could be useful. I actually could.

About six months after starting in rehabilitation centres, I also began working for a charitable foundation. In this way, addiction and social work gradually became a major part of my professional life for almost six years.

I worked with people experiencing addiction, adolescents, and other socially vulnerable groups. There was a great deal of additional training, workshops, and travel to different cities in Ukraine and abroad. But ultimately, I learned more from the people themselves than from any training programme.

This experience changed the way I understood psychological and social difficulties. I learned that addiction does not have one “typical face”. A person can be struggling with very serious problems while appearing completely successful from the outside. Background, income, education, and appearance tell us very little about what is actually happening in someone’s life.

Another important lesson was just how powerful the system around a person can be. Family, partners, friends, and the wider social environment can support change, but they can also make change incredibly difficult.

And this was also where I learned very clearly to distinguish between helping and rescuing.

Sometimes, out of love and a desire to protect someone, we try to remove every consequence of their decisions, solve problems for them, or pull them out of every difficult situation. But this kind of help can end up supporting the very problem we are trying to change.

That experience still influences the way I work today. I can support a client, stay with them, help them understand what is happening, and tolerate difficult feelings with them. But I do not try to live their life for them or rescue them from every difficult consequence.

I think this work became one of the toughest, and at the same time one of the most valuable, schools of my professional life.

At first, I started Gestalt training simply as one more course.

By that point, I already had a university degree in psychology, practical experience, additional training, experience with the person-centred approach, and an interest in psychodrama. So I did not expect Gestalt to become something so important to me.

But even during the first level of training, I was very drawn to the format itself. There was a lot of emotional support, a lot of genuine contact, and a lot of attention not only to what a person thinks, but also to what they feel and to what is happening between people in the moment.

At first, I still saw Gestalt as an additional set of tools. Something I could add to what I already knew and used.

Then, somewhere around the beginning of the second level, I realised that it was no longer just another method in my professional toolbox.

Gestalt began to answer many of the questions I had about therapy. I saw that it could be used with a very wide range of concerns without trying to fit every person into one correct protocol.

That flexibility was very important to me. The absence of a rigid idea that there is only one right way. The attention to feelings, to contact, and to the individual person rather than to an abstract model.

I think that is why Gestalt became my main approach. It fits very closely with the way I see people and life in general.

Over the years of training and practice, I became more confident professionally, developed a deeper understanding of psychological processes, and became much more aware of what happens in the contact between client and therapist.

There was one more important change. At the beginning of my professional life, I had a strong desire to help, and sometimes to rescue. My work with addiction had already taught me a great deal about why this does not help, and Gestalt helped me understand the difference even more clearly between supporting a person and trying to live their life for them.

Today, this is one of the foundations of my work. I can stay with a person, support them, and help them see more clearly, but I do not decide for them how they should live.

Another important part of my professional work, and one that I genuinely enjoy, is teaching and facilitating trainings.

It actually started back in the rehabilitation centres. I worked with many groups there and created my own training sessions on a wide range of topics. Not only addiction, but also family relationships, personal boundaries, authority, social roles, communication, the ability to say yes or no, and other areas that today are often described as soft skills.

I really enjoy the process itself. I like sharing information and, I think, one of my strengths is being able to explain complicated things in simple language.

Later, I taught adolescents at a college, worked as a psychologist and trainer at a private acting school for adults, and developed educational programmes, lectures, practical sessions and intensive workshops.

I especially like formats that combine learning with practical psychological work. In a training, a person can not only hear or understand an idea, but also immediately notice how it appears in their own life, in communication with other people, and in the group itself.

I also genuinely enjoy group work. In a group, participants can become a source of support for one another, a mirror, and sometimes a useful form of frustration. There are moments when it is not the therapist who helps someone notice something important, but another group member whose reaction shows that there may be another way to live, think or respond.

Groups have a lot of energy and movement, and for me they have always been a very alive format.

This is still part of my work today. In Cyprus, I run small in-person workshops and events on topics such as relationships, identity, migration and other issues that are relevant to people’s real lives.

I do not see this as a separate profession alongside psychotherapy. It is simply another way for me to work with people, share what I know, and create a space where someone may understand something about themselves more clearly.

Emigration was not something I had planned, and it became a major crisis for me both personally and professionally.

Before moving, I already had an established private practice, in-person work, teaching, trainings and groups. I was part of a professional community. People knew me, saw my work, and often came through recommendations, educational programmes or events.

After the move, almost all of that disappeared at once.

Some clients did not want to move online, while others naturally came to the end of their therapy. Fewer new clients appeared because I was no longer teaching, running trainings or taking part in the professional events where potential clients could get to know me.

At some point, I had to rebuild a large part of my practice from the beginning.

Online therapy initially became a necessity rather than a deliberate choice. Over time, however, I saw that it genuinely works and offers many possibilities. Today, I work online with adults living in different countries, and this has become the main format of my practice.

At the same time, I am gradually bringing some in-person work back into my professional life. In Cyprus, I run small workshops and events where people can meet in person, explore topics that are relevant to many of us, and where I can once again experience the energy of group work that I enjoy so much.

Today, the centre of my work is long-term individual therapy with adults.

What interests me most is the depth of this work. The opportunity to gradually get to know one particular person, to understand how they live, how they build relationships, what matters to them, what they want, and what may be getting in the way of living the life they would like to have.

Over the years, I have gained much more professional experience and simply more life experience. I am much more able to stay present with difficult feelings, crises, anger, shame, despair, and situations where there is no quick or correct answer.

But there is one thing that, I think, has hardly changed since the very beginning.

I am genuinely interested in people.

It matters a great deal to me when someone trusts me with something deeply personal, painful, or important. And I genuinely see it as a privilege to be there during moments when something in their life begins to change.