About Me
I am Eleni Drakaki, a licensed psychologist and family psychotherapist in training.
I approach every person I meet in my work with the desire to recognize and appreciate their uniqueness, activate unexplored resources, and facilitate the best expression of themselves.
My passion for relationships has led me to work today as a couples therapist through Emotionally Focused Therapy: the approach that has changed my life and the way I practice my profession.[
Theoretical Frameworks
Attachment Theory
Attachment theory represents the most significant conceptual framework, and offers us answers to the most crucial questions about human relationships. How do we become trapped in futile strategies that deprive us of the love we desire from our partners and family members? And, more importantly: how can we better focus our efforts to heal and nurture the precious bond with those we love?
The attachment lens offers us a clear, de-pathologising perspective from which to read the deeper nature of human suffering, and provides the therapist with a language for people’s wounds and dilemmas. As a theory of trauma, attachment theory helps us above all to understand the gravity behind emotional wounds — such as rejection or perceived abandonment by a loved one. Once we are able to make sense of the drama of a difficult relationship, we need an intervention-oriented approach, such as EFT. New reparative experiences can destabilise old fears and predispositions, allowing internal working models to be completed and expanded, and enabling new behaviours to be built and integrated.
John Bowlby always believed that attachment was a matter of a lifetime. From the cradle to the grave, people want someone who cares for them, who gives them attention and value, who soothes their wounds, who reassures them in the difficult moments of life, and who holds their hand to walk through the darkness.
The Systemic Relational Approach
The systemic relational approach recognises the power of context and relationship and uses them to facilitate personal change. By focusing on “here and now” interactions and their power to direct and constrain individual behaviour, the systemic therapist attempts to break inflexible, repetitive cycles that include symptomatic or dysfunctional behaviour.
Causality is circular — therefore no single behaviour simply causes another; rather, each is connected in a chain, in a cycle, to other behaviours. This perspective encourages the therapist to discover how each member of the family or couple unknowingly contributes to creating the other’s negative responses.
The way in which people define themselves through communication with significant others also affects the way they see themselves and structure their intrapsychic responses — that is, what they think and feel toward themselves. The systemic relational therapist can therefore work on an individual’s relationships even without physically meeting the significant people in the therapy room, since the patient carries them in their mind.
My Journey as a Therapist
From the very first years of university, my interest was primarily focused on developing a deep understanding of myself and my emotional experiences. It was immediately clear to me that in order to look at others with attentive and caring eyes, I would first need to learn to look at who I was — and at my own baggage of experiences — with compassion. Through personal therapy, coming into contact with my fragile and needy side, alongside that part of perseverance, determination, and courage, gave me the opportunity to experience the healing process that I so deeply desired to promote in others.
Then my life was marked by the “before and after” of motherhood. That divide which separates who you were from who you are now — after a child (after two daughters, to be precise). A profoundly transformative experience on multiple levels, which gave me a broader perspective connected to the role of both daughter and mother. In parallel with this personal change, my professional outlook was also shifting. As can be seen from my CV, I became passionate about everything related to the maternal experience, the physical and psychological birth of the child, their caregiving, and the power it exerts on their parents. If I can encapsulate the meaning of this “pull” toward the perinatal period — and the difficulties and gifts it brings into the lives of women and men — it is perhaps the need to look at where existence originates, and to try to protect this deeply intimate process, starting with the adults themselves, with their need to become a secure base from which to explore their relationships with their children.
Particularly significant has been my attentiveness to seeing the person as part of a bond — of many relationships that influence them and upon which they in turn exert an influence. This helped me avoid oversimplifying problems by proposing “ideal” solutions, and guided me instead toward understanding what the relational web could offer, so that the person could rediscover their own well-being. In this way, I “fell in love” with the systemic approach — or perhaps more precisely with the systemic gaze, its complexity and depth — and eight years ago I decided to deepen my training by studying couples therapy in Emotionally Focused Therapy with my mentor, Kyriaky Polychroni.
Subsequently, the opportunity to cultivate the therapist’s self as a primary instrument — and to deepen my knowledge of the family — was offered to me by the Mara Selvini Palazzoli School of Psychotherapy. With highly qualified teachers and supervisors, and the accompaniment of my genogram specialists Roberto Mazza and Gianni Gambiaso, acquiring a sense of mastery in the therapeutic process — and the capacity to be, for my clients, a figure who facilitates them in expressing the potential of their bonds — has been one of the most significant journeys of my professional formation.
What to Expect from Me
• Committing until the very last session to building and maintaining a strong alliance, a climate of trust and mutual respect — giving absolute priority to repairing the alliance when ruptures occur
• Reassuring you that your experience makes sense on a human level — the more open one is to their own experience, the more it can be revisited and transformed
• Encouraging you to listen to yourself and your loved ones in a more attuned way
• Focusing my attention on deepening and expanding significant experiences, slowing down emotionally so that you are better able to process them
• Organising and bringing order when emotions become chaotic, including elements that help us make sense of what is happening to you
• Participating in your emotions by reflecting them back to you, to support and contain you when emotions become overwhelming — “What we can share, we can also bear!”
• Offering my empathy and validation to the other member of your couple or family without invalidating you
• Dedicating my efforts to understanding the emotional reality that drives some of your dysfunctional behaviours, attributing to them a relational meaning
Certifications
