Maura Brivio, Therapy & Coaching

I am Maura Brivio, a psychotherapeutic counsellor and coach. I work online, in English and Italian, with adults.

Most of my work is relational: couples, mothers and daughters, parents, together or separated, and people on their own.
They may want to explore a relationship, grief, or serious illness in the family, including cancer. They may have been adopted as a child, live between countries and languages.
And sometimes the relationship they want to explore is the one with themselves, the one they cannot leave, and which is often the harshest of all.

How I work

I am qualified as both a counsellor and a coach, and that shapes everything about how we’d work together. Counselling looks at what happened and how it still shows up now. Coaching looks at where you want to get to and what is in the way. Trained in both, we do not have to pick one. We go deep where that’s needed and stay practical where it isn’t, sometimes in the same session.

We start by understanding what is going on, not by managing its latest expression. Where this began. What it is protecting. What it once did for you, even if it costs you now.
Once that is clearer, the question changes: from why does this keep happening? to what do you want instead? You try something different, in how you think, what you say, or what you decide, and we look at how it went.

What people usually bring

·      You and your partner have stopped really talking. You are polite. You run the house, the children, the diary. You don’t feel close, and neither of you says so.
·      You and your mum, or you and your daughter. You love each other. You still come away from most visits hurt.
·      You already know the pattern. You can describe it clearly. Knowing has not stopped it happening again. And often, the same pattern shows up elsewhere.
·      Grief that arrives late, or years on, or all at once when you thought you’d dealt with it.
·      Serious illness quietly reorganising a family: who holds what, what gets said at the table, and what’s carefully not.
·      Or the harsh voice in your own head, which probably started as protection and has long outstayed its welcome.

Most people I see are thoughtful and highly sensitive. They have read, thought hard, and often had counselling before. The pattern is still there anyway. That is not a failure. It started before you had any say in it.

Before we begin

This work takes time, and it matters that you feel comfortable with the person doing it with you.
The first conversation is free, about 30 minutes, with no pressure to book anything afterwards. You tell me what is going on. I ask a few questions and mostly listen. By the end, we will both have a sense of whether this feels right.