Biography

I work with states, processes and contexts that are uncertain, emergent and unknown.

My approach has been nurtured and developed in leading organisations in this country and the UK, including the legendary Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, where I worked for 5 years as a senior consultant, as well as for the United Nations and the Institute of Psychiatry in London. My services have been used in over 140 locations in Bulgaria, the UK and around the world.

Before I share below the story of one of the people I work with, I will tell you a little about my approach. I have been working for better mental health for nearly 25 years. From a psychotherapeutic one, my focus has gradually shifted to the personal, social and career development of the people I work with through their social and professional fulfilment. This makes my work suitable not only for 'ordinary' people, but also for people who are under professional stress - doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, police and fire officers, social workers and others. The approach is also useful for people in managerial positions who are responsible for teams, organisations, projects, finances.

I work both individually and with groups and organisations. At the end of the presentation I have included feedback from three years of consulting to a team working under high stress in the UK.

I work with the personality in its context

Unique to my services is that I combine my psychological training, which pays attention to the individual as a person, with my sociological training, which views that individual as an open system subject to the influences of society. This blend gives me an understanding of the mechanisms by which individuals can achieve a degree of functioning in which they themselves successfully influence their environment and resist the pressures of the contemporary accelerated social reality.

Health is not simply the absence of a disease but the presence of well-being

Most people are not perfect, and often our life experiences and childhood further build obstacles to our development. The modern world of exploitation, violence and impenetrable hierarchies is a key factor in the ways we feel, experience, sense, approach the world around us, think and relate to ourselves and others.

I believe that our specificities make us different and unique. My task is to reduce with you the suffering from aspects of personality, emotions, ways of knowing and behaviors that are more characteristic to you and prevent you from adjusting optimally to the current environment of competition, crisis and exploitation. My approach seeks to mobilise the specifics of your personality and character to achieve lifestyles and contributions to yourself and the world around you that bring you satisfaction and energise you. 

What do the people I work with say?

To give you more of a feel of what it is to work with me, here's the story of a young woman I'm currently working with who provided me with this text so that more people can reach out to me. R.N. is 23 years old and knew me from other professional situations. We have been working for less than a year in the mode of role analysis, a type of psychoanalysis that deals not so much with the individual as with our role in society. The sessions are 90 minutes each, with the frequency determined after the initial assessment I conduct.

Past the pandemic, the lockdown, the lack of good job prospects in my major, I felt desperate and tired. The first thing I thought of was to write to people I trusted. Accordingly, I wrote to Milena. I was at the gym and feeling really bad about everything and the potential opportunity to stop working a job I hated. A paradox, isn't it? She and I started seeing each other, online, every two weeks. 

We discuss what's been going on, what I'm not sure about. Slowly and gradually, I began to trust and present my emotion, in a more pure, unadulterated form. There are days I hate myself and feel like I'm not doing anything meaningful. Literally before we started with the sessions, I would wake up thinking I was doing nothing with my life. And that feeling, had an impact on my whole day. 

Now, I can't say that the feeling is completely gone, but I can say that it's easier for me to fight it and master it. On the other hand Milena lets me to share at my own pace, I don't feel judged, I don't feel guilty about things I generally feel guilty about. I feel free to share. When I saw that I felt a little better, I started convincing my girlfriends to go to a psychologist too. Because the fast-paced, competitive world we live in doesn't really give us the space and time we need to deal with the problems of being or the problems of the past. 

As I promised at the beginning, here is some feedback on my work with groups and teams after three years of consulting with a team in London that I had to "leave behind" when I returned to Bulgaria.

I have valued [your] approach, which invites the other to be playful and creative and pushes the group beyond the boundary of a reflective space. [Your] stance to consultancy attends to the mind as well as the heart to consider how emotions and experiences can be understood by a variety of approaches to enable unblocking of processes & consider ones’ relatedness to the task, role and responses to authority [...]I would really like to thank you for your input which would be greatly missed by us. Your support in holding the service at a very difficult time is much appreciated.---NHS Service Lead, UK

Respect, recognition and flexibility

My schedule is very flexible as I am aware of the constraints people put on themselves due to our intense work lives these days. As I work with people in different time zones I can offer hours at all non-traditional times of the day. I offer liberation in the spirit of the movements over the last 50 years that have fought for freedom at all levels, including freedom from anxiety. My work is tailored to your particular identity, age, profession, beliefs and convictions, and I am guided by the principle of respect for the individual and human rights, the right to choose and the principle of non-discrimination.