Nadya Godukhina

My style as a psychologist is honest, flexible and goal-oriented. Our basic agreement as we start treatment is that the client and therapist are allies during the healing process, joining forces in working with the client's symptom (collaboration, not confrontation). I'm a follower and practitioner of E. Fromm's “being vs having” concept and apply an active being stance in our sessions, while keeping curiosity and openness to everything my client shares within the session, striving actively to grasp his or her unique life experience and perspective.

I consider it necessary to see the mature personality part my clients have and i believe that everyone already has all the resources for well-being and personal development, which I can help to realize and discover. Therefore, as a psychologist, I'm not giving advice, definetly not trying to solve the problem for the client or telling what client should think about him or herself and his or her environment. I also believe that it's no one else but the clients' privilege to make decisions and evaluate choices.

The psychotherapeutic approach is based on F. Perls’ concept of contact and methods of focusing attention in everyday life. We get to use techniques of contact with the traumatic material, and it matters as our unconscious recreates recurring situations based on early learned patterns of relationships with significant others ("primary caregivers" in the Attachment theory). Early experiences shape the basic beliefs /the shoulds that we hold about ourselves and others, which must be confirmed and reinforced by the actual events later in life.

The "tyranny of the shoulds", as psychoanalyst K. Horney called it, can be the cause of internal conflicts, low motivation, dysfunctional perfectionism, low self-esteem and even depression. In this way, we work with the parts that deprive us of the ability to be ourselfs, accept the past and make deep-rooted secure relationships.