Thiago Pires de Azevedo
Counselling Psychologist & Psychological Counsellor
Your life may work on paper and still not feel like yours. I'm a clinical psychologist working phenomenologically: listening before labelling. Sessions in English, Portuguese, French or Spanish.
I specialise in:
About me
There is a moment almost everyone who wears glasses remembers: the first time they put them on and realized that trees have individual leaves. The world didn't change that day. The way of seeing did.
Psychology, for me, is about that kind of transformation. Each of us looks at life through a lens we never chose: built by our history, our family, our culture, our wounds. Through it, some things look impossible, some feelings look forbidden, some ways of living look like "just how life is." The lens is invisible precisely because we see everything through it, and so we mistake it for the world itself.
Therapy is the place where the lens itself becomes visible. And something profound happens there: what you can see, you can finally take responsibility for. Not guilt, responsibility, in its literal sense: the ability to respond. You stop being someone that life simply happens to, and become someone who answers for how they live. In my experience, no change is deeper than that one.
I know this transformation from the inside. My own lens first cracked at eighteen, when I left Brazil for an exchange year in Hungary, alone, without the language. Everything I had assumed was "normal" turned out to be local. I have been traveling ever since, mostly with a backpack, and I speak four languages, each one a slightly different way of seeing. Living between cultures keeps me permanently humble about how many valid ways there are to be a person.
Professionally, I hold degrees in both Psychology and Pedagogy. I have taught children, worked with families in social vulnerability, and researched how schools treat those who don't fit. My intellectual home is phenomenology, the philosophy of lived experience; my thesis was on Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher of perception, of how we see. I don't treat philosophy as decoration: it is a discipline of attention, a training in taking your experience seriously before explaining it away.
Outside the consulting room, I train calisthenics, play volleyball and football, and host travelers from around the world in my home in Rio de Janeiro.
If there is one conviction underneath all of it, it is this: transformation is not becoming someone else. It is finally seeing the lens, choosing what to do with it, and beginning to inhabit a life that is genuinely yours.
I speak:
Location:
Media Gallery
Approach
A session with me is slower than you might expect. I will not open by asking what your goal is, and I will not have you figured out by the third meeting. What I want first is a description. Not what you think about what happened, but what it was like. Where you felt it. What you were about to say and did not. This is phenomenological work, and it rests on a fairly simple wager: that most of us have already explained ourselves half to death, and that the explanations are part of what holds the thing in place. So we go the other way. We slow down, we stay with the experience longer than is comfortable, and we let the meaning arrive instead of assigning it in advance. I work primarily from the phenomenological-existential and Gestalt traditions, and I draw on Non-Violent Communication and acceptance-based approaches where they genuinely help. What I do not do is hand you a technique for a feeling you have not yet been allowed to have. The relationship matters here, and not as rapport or as a means to an end. Much of what goes wrong between people will eventually happen between us too, in miniature. That is not a problem to be managed around. It is usually the most useful thing in the room.
Experience
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.
Education
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.
Services
Individual Session
Individual Session
Insurances
