I view helping practices in general—and psychotherapy, coaching, and mediation in particular—as relationships of collaboration and co-creation, focused on the authentic experience of specific individuals, their goals and hopes, while also considering various methods and tools that I offer as a kind of samples, building blocks, which we customize together to construct a path toward fulfilling people’s aspirations. In this process, we find ways to navigate “diagnoses,” “disorders,” “crises,” “conflicts,” and other challenges, selecting appropriate solutions for them.

In my work, I use different forms of feedback and accountability, and I am interested in creating unique and authentic “programs” of change in co-authorship with clients, so we can track progress together while maintaining the ability to address important contexts, combining creative and investigative “lenses” with a solution-oriented collaborative structure.

I will certainly not be the right fit for everyone, but this usually becomes clear after an introduction, establishing contact, and beginning to build an alliance. It depends less on the topic of the problems or requests I encounter and the people I collaborate with.

I am politically correct but not neutral, intelligent but not harsh, valuable in communication but not a nuisance, broad-minded—through life I both tremble and strive for the right to have. I consider the idea “respect must be earned” to be a national trait and painful because of that. I choose differently and don’t think it’s a special path. I find people interesting and likable as a whole, individually, and in connection—with each other and with the things that matter to them. And everyone has those.

I have been engaged in helping practices for over 15 years—since studying at the Psychology Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Besides private practice, over this time, naively, I danced with windmills—in “elite” schools and special boarding schools, worked on projects with business contexts. For several years, I supervised volunteers supporting children and adolescents in “difficult life situations,” conducted training in mediation and nonviolent communication. For two years, I was co-lead of the international Embodied Facilitator Course Russia program, which changed me roughly as much as my encounter with narrative practice and depression. I have always wanted, “want and will,” to facilitate changes in the lives of people for whom it is important to defend their right to dignity and quality of life and to embody it despite social circumstances. And thankfully.

The position of a helping practitioner like me, from which the use of any method flows, is based on the idea of the client’s expertise regarding their experience, the specialist’s expertise in assisting them in embodying their preferences, and the ethics of collaboration between them. The client’s ethics are mainly described in terms of organizational matters, while the specialist’s ethics, in addition to organizational aspects, include things like “trauma-informed care” (i.e., creating ecologically safe conditions for work considering the client’s current context), as well as “strengths-based approach,” “zone of proximal development,” and “transparency.”

Due to the principle of transparency for the client and my interest in the profession, I describe in detail the methods of modern psychotherapy and helping practices that I use in my work. In the professional community, these methods are broadly called collaborative.

Among them, I use