Counselling in Italian, across the UK

Sessions in Italian are available online, anywhere in the UK. If it feels easier to read this in Italian, there's an Italian version below.

Why the language you think in matters

People who live between languages often notice something odd in therapy: the feeling arrives in one language and has to be delivered in another. Something is lost on the way across. You find the technically correct English word and it sits at a slight distance from what you actually meant — accurate, but not quite true.

That gap is tiring. It also quietly shapes what gets said. It's easy to skip the thought that would take too long to translate, or to reach for the version of a feeling that has an easy English equivalent rather than the one you actually have. Over months, a lot can go unsaid simply because saying it was too much work.

Working in Italian removes that step. Feelings that formed in Italian can stay in Italian — including the ones that don't have a clean English counterpart, and the ones that come attached to a particular family, a particular place, a particular way of speaking.

Moving between both

In practice, sessions rarely stay neatly in one language. People switch mid-sentence, or find a word in one language that says what the other can't. That's welcome here. If your English is fluent and you'd rather work mostly in it, that's fine too — the point isn't to insist on Italian, it's that the option is there when you want it.

Sometimes the switching itself becomes interesting. Which language a memory lives in, which one an argument happens in, which one you'd use to say something difficult to a parent — these are worth noticing rather than smoothing over.

Migration, distance and belonging

Many of the people I work with in Italian are navigating something to do with having moved: the ordinary strain of building a life somewhere new, the particular guilt of being far from ageing parents, or the disorientation of returning home to find you no longer fit the way you used to.

There's also the quieter, harder-to-name experience of belonging incompletely in two places — being read as foreign in one and as changed in the other. That's rarely a problem to be solved, but it is something that gets easier to carry once it's been described accurately and taken seriously.

My background is in anthropology as well as counselling, and much of my academic work concerned exactly this: how culture, migration and social context shape a person's sense of self. It means I'm unlikely to treat your cultural situation as background detail to the "real" psychological material. Often it is the material.

What we might work on

• Migration, displacement and the experience of living between cultures
• Family relationships stretched across distance, including obligation and guilt
• Identity and belonging when neither place feels entirely like home
• Anxiety, low mood, stress and life transitions
• Bereavement and grief, including grieving at a distance
• Relationships and intimacy, in all their forms

Practical details

Sessions are 50 minutes, held online via Zoom, and available anywhere in the UK. Individual sessions are £80; relationship counselling is £160; a limited number of concession places are available at £65. Walk-and-talk sessions in Edinburgh can also be held in Italian — more on how those work.

A note on what I can and can't offer: I work with adults experiencing mild to moderate difficulties. As a counsellor I don't provide diagnoses or prescribe medication, and some situations need specialist or multidisciplinary care instead. If you're not sure where you fit, please just ask — we can think it through together. More detail in the questions on the main page.

In italiano

Sono la Dr.ssa Irene M C Soldavini, counsellor registrata BACP con sede a Edimburgo. Offro sedute online in italiano in tutto il Regno Unito, e sedute walk and talk a Edimburgo.

Chi vive tra due lingue conosce bene quella piccola distanza: l'emozione nasce in una lingua e deve essere raccontata in un'altra. La parola inglese è corretta, ma non dice esattamente quello che sentivi. Con il tempo, molte cose restano non dette semplicemente perché dirle costava troppa fatica.

Lavorare in italiano toglie quel passaggio. Le cose possono essere dette come le pensi, comprese quelle che in inglese non hanno un equivalente preciso. Si può anche passare da una lingua all'altra liberamente, se è così che funziona per lei.

Mi occupo spesso di temi legati alla migrazione e all'appartenenza: la distanza dalla famiglia, il senso di colpa verso i genitori che invecchiano lontano, la sensazione di non essere più del tutto a casa in nessuno dei due posti. Insieme a questo, lavoro con ansia, umore basso, lutto, transizioni di vita e difficoltà relazionali.

Le sedute durano 50 minuti e si svolgono su Zoom. Il primo colloquio di dieci minuti è gratuito e senza impegno: serve solo a farsi un'idea e a fare domande. Se preferisce, può scrivermi in italiano a drimcsoldavini@proton.me — bastano due righe.

Come counsellor non fornisco diagnosi né prescrizioni. Lavoro con adulti con difficoltà di grado lieve o moderato; alcune situazioni richiedono un supporto specialistico. Se non è sicura, me lo chieda pure: possiamo pensarci insieme.

Related: walk & talk therapy in Edinburgh · polyamory & non-monogamy counselling.