Dr. Adriane Barroso

Therapy, as I practice it, is not a set of techniques applied to a list of problems. It is a sustained, serious engagement with another person's inner life, one that requires time, genuine curiosity, and a willingness to sit with what is uncertain rather than move too quickly toward resolution. My approach is psychoanalytic, grounded in the Lacanian tradition. What that means in practice is that I pay close attention to what repeats in a person's life, what gets avoided, what shows up in unexpected places, and what the person themselves does not yet fully understand about their own experience. I take seriously the idea that much of what drives us lies outside conscious awareness, and that understanding it, rather than simply managing it, is what produces lasting change. This is not a short process, and I do not present it as one. Psychoanalytic work unfolds over time. It requires patience from both sides of the room. What it offers in return is something different from symptom relief or behavioral adjustment: a genuine shift in the way a person relates to their own history, their desires, and the patterns that have kept them stuck. The patients I work with often describe a sense, after some time in treatment, of finally understanding something about themselves that had always been present but never quite visible. The first sessions are not administrative. I am not running through a checklist or collecting information to file into a formulation. I am listening for what the person brings, how they bring it, what they emphasize, what they pass over quickly, and what returns when they think they have moved on. I am also attentive to what happens between us in the room, because the therapeutic relationship is not a neutral container for the work. It is part of the work. I work with grief, trauma, depression, and psychological crisis. These categories are useful as orientations, but they are not destinations. A person does not come to therapy simply because they are grieving or depressed. They come because something in their life has stopped working, because they are repeating something they cannot stop, because they have lost something they cannot name, or because the way they have always managed is no longer sufficient. I try to follow what each person actually brings rather than fitting them into a predetermined framework. I also work with people who have been in therapy before without finding what they were looking for. That is a particular kind of patient: someone who already knows something about what therapy is supposed to be, and who arrives with a combination of hope and skepticism. I find that work meaningful. It asks me to be clear about what I offer and honest about what therapy can and cannot do. Culture, language, and migration are present in much of the clinical work I do, whether explicitly or not. I was born in Brazil and have lived and practiced across multiple countries. I understand from the inside what it means to carry more than one cultural context, to negotiate belonging in a new place, and to think and feel in more than one language. These dimensions are clinically significant. The language a person learned to describe their inner life in, the cultural frameworks they absorbed for what counts as suffering and what counts as strength, the history they carry from their families and their countries of origin: all of it matters and all of it is welcome in the room. I provide therapy via telehealth in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I am PsyPact authorized, which means I can see patients across multiple states in addition to Texas. I work with adults and young adults. I do not offer structured, time-limited treatment. The work I do is open-ended, meaning it continues for as long as it is useful and as long as both patient and clinician agree it should. Some people work with me for a year. Others work with me for many years. The length is determined by the work, not by a predetermined protocol.