Thiago Pires de Azevedo
Beratungspsychologe & Psychologischer Berater
Tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Days that pass without you quite in them. Goals reached, nothing felt. Your life isn't asking for more discipline. It's asking to be examined. Existential therapy for adults.
Ich spezialisiere mich auf:
Über mich
A profile can list degrees. It cannot tell you who will be sitting across from you. Let me try to do that here.
I am a psychologist and educator from Rio de Janeiro. Before private practice, my path went from academic research in phenomenology and emotional flexibility to classrooms in some of the city's most vulnerable areas. Those years left me with a conviction that shapes everything I do: people do not break randomly. Suffering has a logic. When you understand the life around a symptom, the symptom starts to make sense, and what makes sense can begin to change.
My two backgrounds still work together every day. Pedagogy taught me how people learn. Psychology taught me how people unlearn: how a way of surviving that was once intelligent becomes, years later, a cage that looks like a personality.
Today I work mostly with adults whose suffering does not show. People who are doing everything right and feel almost nothing. Who finally reach the goal and stand there thinking, is this it. Whose anxiety is the body objecting to a life the mind has already approved. Whose burnout is not too much work but effort that has lost its connection to meaning. Who are present in every meeting and absent from their own days. If you recognize yourself in any of this, you are exactly who I had in mind when I wrote this page.
I do not experience this work as fixing people, because I have never met a broken person. I have met people who stopped being asked real questions, sometimes decades ago, and who slowly stopped asking them of themselves. Therapy, as I practice it, is the place where those questions come back.
How I work session by session is in "My approach". This section exists to say something simpler: if something here resonated, that resonance is worth taking seriously. It is usually how the work begins.
Ich spreche:
Standort:
Mediengalerie
Ansatz
Maybe your life works. Job, routines, responsibilities, people who care about you. And still something is off in a way that is hard to name: a background anxiety, a tiredness that rest does not fix, an inner voice that speaks to you more harshly than you would ever allow anyone else to. When you try to talk about this, you get labels and quick advice. Anxiety, burnout, you should exercise more. None of it is exactly wrong. It just does not touch what you actually feel. Being explained is not the same as being understood.
My work begins at that difference.
I am an international clinical psychologist, and my approach is phenomenological and existential. In practice this means one thing above all: I do not start from theories about you, I start from you. Before any diagnosis or technique there is your experience. How anxiety actually feels in your body on a Tuesday morning. What "I'm just tired" is really carrying. What happens in the silence you avoid. My job is not to fit your life into a framework. It is to open a space where your experience can finally appear, be heard with precision, and begin to move.
Although I have two high-valued degrees, I did not learn this only from books. I have lived between languages and cultures since I was a teenager: an exchange year in Hungary at eighteen, years of backpacking, a life that taught me that what we call "normal" is always local. There are many ways of being a person, and the one you learned is not a verdict. I work in English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, and many of my clients live far from where they started. If that is you, you know that some things can only be felt in your mother tongue while your daily life happens in another one, and that a specific kind of loneliness grows in exactly that gap. It has a place in our work. You will not need to translate yourself for me.
Existential, in my practice, means we take the questions underneath the symptoms seriously. Not only "how do I stop feeling anxious" but "what is this anxiety telling me about how I am living". The decision you have been postponing for years. The life you built because it was expected, and the one you quietly suspect you wanted. The freedom that frightens you more than the routine that numbs you. Much of what gets called burnout is a life asking to be examined, and it does not stop asking because you optimize it, medicate it or push through it.
What sessions usually look like: we meet weekly, online. I am present, I ask real questions, and I will sometimes challenge you, always with care and always on your side. I will not hand you ready-made answers, not out of principle but because you are not struggling for lack of information. You already know what you "should" do, and something in you does not follow. That something deserves to be listened to, not overridden. In my experience, change does not come from forcing new habits on top of an unexamined life. It comes from contact: when you finally experience what you have been running from, it stops running you.
I work mostly with adults dealing with anxiety, exhaustion and burnout, harsh self-criticism, and that peculiar feeling of living on autopilot, of watching your own days as a spectator. Many of my clients are competent, high-functioning people whose suffering is invisible from the outside, which often makes it lonelier.
If you want to be listened to with depth and seriousness, to understand your life from the inside instead of managing it from the outside, and to build a different relationship with it, you are welcome here.
Psychology, without psychologizing.
Erfahrung
Independent online practice | 2025 to present
Individual psychotherapy with adolescents and adults. Common focuses: anxiety, burnout, low self-worth, difficulty being assertive, hypersensitivity to judgement, and the sense of living on autopilot.
Clinical internship, ONG Uirá | June 2024 to May 2025
Psychotherapy with children, adolescents and families in contexts of social vulnerability. Family intake interviews, clinical documentation, and coordination with schools, health services and social support networks.
Pre-surgical psychological assessment | by referral
Assessment for patients considering aesthetic procedures, following CFP guidance.
Bilingual teacher, Escola Serendipity | 2026 to present
Daily work with children in a Reggio Emilia setting, including neurodivergent learners and individualised learning plans.
Research
Stigma in school trajectories (Goffman framework), UFRJ, 18 months.
Languages
Portuguese (native), English, French, Spanish.
Ausbildung
Psychology, BSc | Centro Universitário IBMR, Rio de Janeiro, 2020 to 2025
Licensed psychologist, CRP 05/83313.
Pedagogy, BA | Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), 2020 to 2025
First Class Honours. Thesis on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and education, graded 10/10 with distinction.
Further training
QUATI psychological assessment certification (Casa das Estrelas).
ECOAR research group, mental health in schools (UFRJ), ongoing.
Stigma research group
Leistungen
Einzelsitzung
Einzelsitzung
Versicherungen
