Hello! My name is Valeria. I am a psychiatrist and I am also studying to be a Gestalt therapist. As a child, my dream was to become a veterinarian, because it combined my love for animals and my desire to help those in need. If I managed to realize the first by taking care of my pets, then the second was modified into a specific goal - to become a doctor. If I, a freshman, had been told that I would be a psychiatrist, I probably wouldn't have believed it, but now I feel that there could be no other better path for my professional development. Despite frequent misconceptions, psychiatry combines physical and mental experiences into one whole, and this is what most impresses my vision of human functioning. Working as a psychiatrist, I learned to look at symptoms not in isolation, but in the context of a person's life: their personal history, relationships, the way they experience difficulties, and the resources they have. It is important for me not only to establish a diagnosis and choose a treatment, but also to understand what experience has shaped a person. That is why the next step in my professional development was psychotherapy. I came to it with the desire to work more deeply not only with symptoms, but also with the causes and mechanisms of their occurrence, to help a person better understand themselves, their emotions, needs and behavioral patterns.