On this page
My approach
I offer individual online consultations for adults in Russian and English.
I work within the existential-humanistic approach. We usually begin with what has brought you to therapy now: a difficulty, a question, an inner conflict, or a feeling that something in life is going wrong.
However, it soon becomes apparent that an individual problem exists within an entire life. Behind it may be relationships with other people, decisions made and left unmade, ways of coping with fear and uncertainty, losses, your own desires, and ideas about the person you want to be.
In our sessions, we explore this experience carefully. I ask questions, share what I notice, and sometimes pause over words or feelings that could easily have been overlooked. I am interested in what happened to you and in how you live with it now.
Therapy can gradually make visible things that are difficult to see from within your own life: recurring choices, contradictions, ways of moving towards and away from others, what you protect yourself from, and what you are really striving for.
Our relationship also becomes part of this work. What happens between us in conversation can sometimes reveal directly how you experience closeness, trust, disagreement, vulnerability, and the possibility of being understood by another person.
For me, therapy is ultimately connected with the possibility of seeing your own life more clearly and taking a more conscious position within it: understanding better what you want, what you are willing to live with, what you want to change, and how you want to spend the time you have.
Starting our work
What brings people to me
- Anxiety, shame, and self-criticism, when thoughts and feelings about yourself and your actions take up too much space in life.
- Losses and changes that require rebuilding everyday life and your sense of the future.
- Moving to another country, losing familiar surroundings, loneliness, and finding your place in a new culture.
- Searching for meaning, difficult choices, and responsibility for decisions whose consequences cannot be fully anticipated.
- Questions about yourself: what I want, who I am becoming, and how my desires relate to other people's roles and expectations.
- Difficulties in relationships: trust and closeness, expressing feelings and needs, personal boundaries, disagreements, and conflicts.
You can also come with something that is difficult to place within these themes or that you cannot yet put into words.
Write to me
Contact me on Telegram or WhatsApp. I will reply within a day, and we will arrange a time for our first meeting.
The first meeting
€30
Online · 50 minutes
We get to know each other and discuss what has brought you. You can ask questions about my work and decide whether you want to continue. If I think you need help from another professional, I will suggest where to turn. The meeting lasts 50 minutes and costs €30 or the equivalent in roubles. Booking the first meeting requires advance payment at least 24 hours before the session.
Continuing our work
€40
Online · 50 minutes
If we agree to continue, we usually meet once a week at a regular time. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs €40 or the equivalent in roubles. Further details about payment, rescheduling, and cancellation are in the working terms.
How we work
A favourite thought of mine about therapy comes from Gregory Bateson:
It takes two to know one.
I see therapy as a particular kind of relationship in which a person can look more closely at how they live. I do not assume that I can understand you once and for all, arrive at the right explanation of what is happening, and work from that point onwards. A person changes, their life continues, and our understanding can change along with it. I try to remain attentive to your experience and open enough to keep getting to know you, rather than fitting what happens into an established picture or a particular theory.
My therapeutic reference points:
- Respect for your freedom, values, and right to decide what kind of life you want to live.
- Willingness to explore what happens together with you and reconsider my own understanding.
- Attention to how you relate to yourself, your body, other people, and the world around you.
- Sensitivity to the language, images, metaphors, and stories through which your understanding of yourself and your life takes shape.
- Caution about typologies and ready-made explanations that can obscure a particular person's individuality.
I value sustained, in-depth exploration. It can gradually reveal familiar ways of living, choosing, entering relationships, limiting yourself, or dealing with what cannot be changed. At the same time, I keep in mind that therapy is part of your real life, which you are already living here and now.
Working with leaders
I work with a range of clients, and one particular area of my practice is leaders, entrepreneurs, and startup founders.
I have worked in technology entrepreneurship for more than ten years and know this environment from the inside. It involves making consequential decisions without guarantees, taking responsibility for people and results, and enduring periods when familiar reference points stop working and the cost of error seems particularly high. Growing responsibility often brings loneliness, while achieving a goal can unexpectedly leave you asking: ‘What now?’
I am also familiar with the everyday context of this life: product, team, investment, deadlines, uncertainty, changes of strategy, closing projects, and attempts to start again. Therefore, if you are building a business or working in technology, much of that context will already be familiar to me.
In therapy, I am interested in the person beyond their professional role. An entrepreneur, leader, or specialist remains a person who builds relationships, fears, chooses, loses, doubts, grows older, wants things from their own life, and tries to understand what they are spending their time for.
Qualifications and education
How I came to this profession
I came to psychology from technology entrepreneurship.
My first university programme at Saint Petersburg State University focused on complex systems in nature and society. I then completed a master's degree in Innovation Studies at ITMO University. After university, I spent most of my professional life in startups: creating products, leading development and teams, and taking part in launching and closing companies.
Gradually, I became increasingly interested in questions that did not fit comfortably into the language of business. Why does work that once mattered enormously suddenly feel empty? Why do people burn out even in work they chose for themselves? How do we make decisions when no amount of information can provide certainty? What happens to a person when a project around which much of their life was organised falls apart? And what makes work and life meaningful at all?
Later, migration, losses, my own crises, and personal therapy made these questions much less theoretical. Psychology gradually developed from an interest into a second profession.
Existential therapy has particularly influenced how I see people. I have become more cautious about the desire to explain, classify, and fix everything. I am more drawn to exploring how a particular person came to be living this particular life, how they experience it, what they choose within it, what they avoid, and what possibilities remain open to them.
My education in psychology:
- 2024 — Practical Psychology and Contemporary Methods of Psychotherapy, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
- 2025 — Three stages of training in narrative practice, Narrative Workshop.
- 2026 — Basic programme in existential therapy at the Institute of Humanistic and Existential Psychotherapy (HEPI), Lithuania.
Further details are in Qualifications.
Education
- 2024 — Practical Psychology and Contemporary Methods of Psychotherapy, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
- 2025 — Narrative practice course (three stages), Narrative Workshop.
- 2026 — Completed the basic Existential Therapy programme at the Institute of Humanistic and Existential Psychotherapy (HEPI, Lithuania), led by Rimantas Kočiūnas. Training ran from March 2024 to September 2026. The certificate was issued on 7 September 2026.
Membership
- East European Association for Existential Therapy (EEAET).
- Alliance for Existential Counselling and Care (ECCA).
More about my approach and experience appears above.
Technology and the human encounter
Psychotherapy is one part of my professional life. I continue to work in technology and entrepreneurship and am a co-founder of Purpose Labs, where we create digital products for helping professionals. One of our projects, Limino, enables therapists to turn their own working methods into supported digital programmes.
Working in both areas repeatedly brings me back to the boundary between what can be entrusted to technology and what arises only in relationships between people. This question becomes particularly apparent as artificial intelligence develops: machines are becoming better at explaining, helping us reflect, structuring experience, and sustaining conversation.
Against this background, the particular nature of psychotherapy becomes clearer to me. It takes place between two people, each present in the relationship with their own history, vulnerability, and way of being in the world. The therapist can be affected by what happens between them, and the encounter itself becomes part of the work.
Therefore, what particularly interests me about technology is its place alongside human relationships: what it can make easier, extend, or make more accessible, and what makes sense to leave within the space of a living encounter. This question also guides my involvement in creating products for psychotherapy and other helping practices.
Associations and ethics
I am a member of the Alliance for Existential Counselling and Care (ECCA) and the East European Association for Existential Therapy (EEAET), whose code of ethics I follow. My entire practice is conducted under supervision.
Working terms
Professional scope and limitations
I work individually with adults. I do not work with couples, families, or minors. I do not work with:
- Acute psychotic states.
- Active substance addictions.
- Eating disorders.
- High suicide risk or risk of violence.
My practice is non-medical and does not replace psychiatric care.
Ethics
I follow the EEAET code of ethics.
My work is grounded in respect for your dignity, autonomy, and right to self-determination, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or social and economic position.
Session format
Meetings take place by video call in Zoom and last 50 minutes. They end at the scheduled time. We usually begin with weekly meetings, at the same day and time where possible. From time to time, we discuss how the work is going and what it is giving you. Please connect on time: arriving more than 20 minutes late without notice counts as a cancellation.
The length of our work depends on what brings you: work on a particular difficulty may take 10–15 meetings, while deeper work may take 30–50 or more.
Alongside Russian, I speak English fluently and offer consultations in English (C2).
Payment
One session costs €40.
Payment can be made in euros or the equivalent at the exchange rate on the payment date (for example, in roubles or cryptocurrency); transfers to foreign and Russian banks are possible. I ask for ordinary sessions to be paid within 24 hours after the meeting. Advance payment applies to the first meeting, as described below. I sometimes have reduced-fee places: if this matters to you, please ask about availability before we begin. I may change the fee no more than once a year and give at least one month's notice. If payment for the previous session has not arrived, I reserve the right not to hold the next one.
The first session
Our work begins with a first meeting in which we get to know each other, clarify what brings you, and decide together whether we are a good fit. If another kind of help is needed, I will help you find your bearings and recommend colleagues.
The first meeting costs €30 (or the equivalent in roubles or another currency). Booking requires advance payment at least 24 hours before the session. If you cancel more than a day in advance, I will refund the payment. For later cancellation or a missed meeting, the payment is not refunded.
Boundaries of our relationship
During our work and for at least two years after it ends, I do not enter into other relationships with you, including business, friendship, or romantic relationships. I also cannot be your close relatives' or loved ones' therapist. These boundaries help protect our work.
Confidentiality
Everything you share stays between us. There are two exceptions:
- A direct threat to life, yours or someone else's.
- An official request from law-enforcement authorities under the law of the country where I practise.
Even in these cases, I disclose only what is necessary and, where possible, inform you in advance. I sometimes discuss our work with my supervisor anonymously, without names or identifiable details.
If we happen to meet outside a session, I will not indicate that we know each other. The decision to greet me or introduce me to people accompanying you remains yours.
Cancellation and ending
Cancellation more than 24 hours before a session is free; later cancellation requires full payment. If I cancel less than 24 hours in advance, your next session is free. In unforeseen circumstances or force majeure, where advance notice was impossible, this rule may not apply; we discuss such cases individually. If cancellations happen frequently, I suggest discussing what makes meeting difficult and whether the current format suits you.
Ending our work
You can end our work at any time. However, I recommend allowing at least two meetings for this, so we can take stock, discuss feelings about the ending, and consider next steps.
If you decide to finish, we can discuss your reasons and how you assess our experience. The decision to continue or end remains yours. After ending, maintenance sessions (monthly or quarterly) or a return to regular meetings are possible.
Additional sessions
If you need an additional session between meetings, write to me. I will reply within 24 hours, and we will find the earliest available time.
This possibility does not replace emergency medical care. If your condition threatens life or health, please contact emergency services or the nearest medical facility.
Terminology
On this page, ‘therapy’ and ‘psychotherapy’ refer to my work within the existential-humanistic approach. I use ‘therapist’ to mean a professional participating in that work. My practice belongs to psychological counselling; details of my education appear under Qualifications.
Short answers to common questions, from booking to session format, are collected on the Questions and answers page.
Source updated: сентябрь 2026
Why this works
Research helps us understand which forms of therapy are useful, for whom, and under what conditions. When reading it, we need to consider which approach was studied, what difficulties participants brought, and which changes were used to evaluate outcomes.
The sources below cover existential therapies and the broader humanistic tradition, alongside a book on the foundations of existential-humanistic practice. Each has its own subject and limits to its conclusions. All sources are in English.
You can read about how I work above.
Research
Existential therapies: a meta-analysis (2015)
Joël Vos, Meghan Craig, and Mick Cooper identified 21 eligible randomised controlled trials. The meta-analysis included 15 studies with unique data, involving 1,792 participants.
The strongest results came from therapies working directly with meaning: participants reported a greater sense of meaning in life, lower anxiety and depression, and greater confidence in their ability to cope with difficulties. Other forms of therapy produced more modest or statistically non-significant results.
The authors note the small number of studies and limitations in their quality. The most convincing evidence in this review concerns structured work with meaning among people with physical illnesses. Conclusions require further clarification for other presenting difficulties and therapy formats.
Evidence-Based Foundations of Existential-Humanistic Therapy (2025)
A book edited by Louis Hoffman and Veronica Luck, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The authors examine the research foundations of therapeutic presence, empathy, work with emotions, authenticity, and attention to what happens between client and therapist.
The volume connects these principles with evidence-based practice that considers research findings, clinical experience, and the characteristics of the individual client. It is a collection of work on the approach's foundations and application.
Research on humanistic-experiential psychotherapies: an updated review (2021)
Robert Elliott and colleagues reviewed research on person-centred, emotion-focused, and Gestalt therapies, psychodrama, and supportive approaches. A meta-analysis of 91 studies published between 2009 and 2018 found improvements among clients; comparative studies found overall outcomes comparable to other therapies.
Results varied between approaches. The strongest evidence concerned emotion-focused therapy, while findings for anxiety and depression were heterogeneous. The review helps us understand the broader humanistic tradition; applying its findings to a particular existential practice requires separate consideration.
Figures in the humanistic and existential tradition
- Carl Rogers (1902–1987), founder of person-centred therapy, emphasised the central role of unconditional acceptance, empathy, and authenticity in the therapeutic relationship. His work is foundational to humanistic psychology.
- Rollo May (1909–1994), one of the founders of existential therapy, explored anxiety, freedom, responsibility, and the human striving for self-realisation.
- Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), Austrian psychiatrist, former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp, and founder of logotherapy. Author of Man's Search for Meaning.
- James Bugental (1915–2008) developed the existential-humanistic approach, paying particular attention to awareness, deep self-exploration, and the therapist's participation in exploring the client's experience.
- Irvin Yalom (born 1931), existential psychotherapist and author of books on fear of death, the search for meaning, and the significance of relationships in therapy.
- Other significant figures include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Emmy van Deurzen, Ernesto Spinelli, Alfried Längle, and Kirk Schneider.
Strasbourg Declaration
The Strasbourg Declaration of 21 October 1990 sets out an understanding of psychotherapy as an independent scientific discipline and profession. It provided the basis for the establishment of the European Association for Psychotherapy in 1991. The declaration concerns professional principles and the training of psychotherapists.
I value its requirements concerning training, personal experience of therapy, and supervised practice, which is why I reproduce its text here.
Full text
In accordance with the aims of the World Health Organization (WHO), the non-discrimination agreement operating within the European Union (EU) and intended for the European Economic Area (EEA), and the principle of free movement of persons and services, the undersigned agree on the following points:
- Psychotherapy is an independent scientific discipline, the practice of which represents an independent and free profession.
- Training in psychotherapy takes place at an advanced, qualified, and scientific level.
- The diversity of psychotherapeutic methods is ensured and guaranteed.
- Complete psychotherapeutic training encompasses theory, personal experience, and supervised practice. Adequate knowledge of different psychotherapeutic processes is acquired.
- Access to training takes place through various prior qualifications, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
Contacts
I. Sapranidi
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