Alina Omelchenko
Counsellor
I specialise in:
About me
I am a family psychologist and an accredited gestalt psychotherapist and gestalt supervisor (European Association for Gestalt Therapy, EAGT). I have been practising as a gestalt practitioner, organisational and family consultant since 2008.
My professional interests are: Individual therapy on anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Individual therapy on attachment and co-dependency issues. Couples therapy, family therapy.
I work a lot with people from business, science, arts and psychology. I work on the topics of personal crises and dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, burnout. I am interested in enquiries about self-actualisation, relationships with partners, siblings, relationships with unequal power, parents, supervisors. I have emigrated several times and have many clients, who are now in emigration. I know from my own experience the challenges of being in a new country and integrating in a different culture.
I learn a lot about depressive and anxiety experiences, panic attacks, narcissistic depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive experiences. My clients with these styles of functioning work with me in long-term and supportive therapy. I help clients to build stable routines, harmonise peaks and dips in their performance, reduce anxiety by turning it into a productive excitement and improve quality of life, in general. I love working with couples in a gestalt therapy approach and in a systemic family approach. I create an environment of focused attention for a couple in which we experience similarities and differences, competition, jealousy, envy, grief, infidelity, conflicts, separation and happy moments of understanding, intimacy and love.
I'm also trained and EAGT accredited supervisor. I provide supervisions in the gestalt therapy approach for therapists.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
I work in a systemic family approach and gestalt therapy approach, using a field perspective. For me it is important to see the person in the system of their relationships, in their interaction with others. I work on expanding the client's awareness, helping them to understand where certain feelings come from, what needs they signal, and how it happens that these needs remain frustrated. In therapy clients become more aware of how their fear of shame or being stuck on anxious thoughts prevent them from achieving goals that are important to them. I am interested in how the attachment style that formed with a primer caregiver determines our style of functioning (narcissistic, depressive, OCD, schizoid, etc.) and how in long-term therapy this style changes to a more secure style, how the client's self-esteem, calmness and confidence, and trust in the relationship grows. When working with couples I use all of the above lenses - the importance of the system, the primary attachment scheme, the style of functioning, the ability to recognise their needs and place them in the relationship. Unlike individual therapy, where it is important for me to create an alliance with the client and build an experience of a more nourishing relationship with them, in couples therapy I work to ensure that such an experience occurs between partners. I maintain safe boundaries, work on rebuilding trust between partners, on depth of contact. I am interested in working with bodily experience, imagery in psychotherapy, art and metaphors. I love experimentation and exploration. When a client and I seem to get a dead end a simple metaphor can help to move things through.
