Welcome to my online practice! (▰˘◡˘▰) My name is Dany. I'm a psychologist, licensed psychotherapist and the creative engine behind the mental health & wellness platform Help Cafe ☕
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Born in Kyiv, I grew up frequently traveling between Ukraine and Germany. Every other year I would be the new kid at school. And every time I had to find new ways to connect with peers, and accommodate to new teachers. It was stressful but also exciting and luckily aligned with my character. It allowed me to experience a unique multicultural upbringing and amplified my natural interest in people.

Eventually, I decided to take my passion to a professional level and pursued a degree in Psychology at the Kyiv National Linguistic University. The program's emphasis was on cognitive psychology, counseling, and specialized psycholinguistic branches like psychosomatics, semiotics, heuristics and a more in-depth methodology of content analysis. After graduating and getting a license in psychotherapy for children and adolescents, I moved back to Germany and worked for half a decade in the trade. Since my Diploma did not cover enough clinical hours I had to go through a reaccreditation. In 2020 I graduated with my second MSc in Psychology from Jacobs University Bremen, which allowed me to reset my path toward practical psychology.
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After 10 years of working in mental healthcare and following its development, I became aware that the classical codex of psychological work had become less and less relatable to younger generations. Anecdotal exchanges consequently presented different variants of the same impression: psychologists are a bit distant and arrogant, mercantile, and would validate toxic people without any moral concern as long as they get paid for it. Not flattering feedback.

And this is hardly surprising. For over a decade people had been exposed to each other's inner worlds through social media. For some of them, it became difficult to build a rapport with a counselor, who has a professional imperative to remain impartial.

Couch Insight is an attempt to bridge the gap between these people and psychology. It's familiarity-based counseling to create a more holistic image of a counselor. It's an attempt to redefine the psychologist's persona role in solving the client's problem. It's wondrous and a lot more effective, because you build a sense of familiarity with the professional before you even reach out to them. Money, in this case, becomes a barter system of mutual support: you boost the counselor financially so that they can boost you cognitively and emotionally.

For every responsible specialist, it is of utmost importance to recognize, that some requests can't be solved with consultations or coaching, and require therapeutic intervention. For such situations, I keep a reference list of reliable colleagues with appropriate qualifications.