Dr Loretta Verratti

Therapy is a place for you to be completely true to yourself, giving you time to talk, cry, shout as well as to think and reflect. And it’s my job to gain your trust and so allow all that to happen, accepting you totally as you are with no cloud of judgement. It’s definitely not about gazing back over your life and analysing every little thing that’s gone wrong for you in the past. Instead, our focus will be firmly on the future, on how you want to be, and how you want to feel, next week, next month, and next year. I work predominantly within a cognitive behavioural approach, or CBT. The C is about understanding any ‘thinking styles’ which may be keeping us stuck in life, while the B emphasises any positive behavioural changes we need to learn, at the same time un-learning unhelpful behaviours that keep holding us back. But making change implies taking action—actions you’ve been avoiding, or a novel approach we may formulate during therapy—and taking action inevitably entails anxiety. But it’s our relationship to that anxiety which matters, ‘observing’ and understanding it—as opposed to always being caught up in it—and seeing it as a transient emotion, knowing that what goes up always comes down.

I love my work as a therapist and I’m extremely passionate about what I do. The work is often challenging—for both therapist and client—but having experienced the process of therapy myself, I fully appreciate the extraordinary benefits it can have in our lives, present and future. No-one deserves to be unhappy or afraid, and for me it’s endlessly gratifying to see my clients making positive and lasting changes in their lives, knowing where they want to be, and now confidently on a path to getting there.

B.Psych (Hons), MSc Psych, DPsych

Italian National Council of Psychologists, Abruzzo Regional Council of Psychologists

• English
• Italian