Kiira Gavralas

My therapeutic style is genuine, compassionate, and non-judgemental, but also challenging enough to foster growth and change. I focus on building a therapeutic relationship where clients feel safe to share, reflect and process emotional experiences in session, while navigating life’s difficult events. I feel privileged to be invited into people’s emotional worlds and sit alongside them throughout their journey of understanding themselves better, so that they can move toward a life filled with more satisfaction and ease.

I believe that our relationships with ourselves and others are at the heart of our wellbeing, and my work is predominantly informed by psychodynamic, relational, and emotion-focused frameworks, mostly drawing from Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy and models grounded in attachment theory. This means that therapy involves working collaboratively to understand emotional patterns that shape how we think, behave, and relate to others. Together, we bring curiosity and compassion to how these (often unconscious) patterns may have developed. By bringing awareness to this, clients are empowered to shift automatic responses that may be contributing to current difficulties, and to foster more adaptive and lasting ways of managing emotional distress. This way of working can be helpful for emotional difficulties including depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, trauma symptoms, grief and loss, emotion regulation difficulties, relationship difficulties and physical/somatic complaints.

I have worked consistently across both public and private settings in my career, working with infants, children, adolescents, adults, and families. I have a particular interest in supporting both women and men through the transition to parenthood. This transition is often a time where we think about how we were parented, and how we may like to parent similarly, or differently. Often, it becomes a meaningful opportunity for parents to courageously break intergenerational cycles, for the purpose of building a secure infant-parent attachment – a relationship that in turn, protects the child’s mental health into the future.