She knows what it costs to rebuild yourself in a place that doesn’t yet know who you are beneath the surface

Patricia’s approach is grounded in psychoanalysis – a tradition that takes seriously the depth of the inner world, the unconscious patterns that shape how we relate and feel, and the transformative potential of the therapeutic relationship itself. She draws on the work of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, and integrates ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy). This rigorous, evidence-based approach that works directly with the emotional and defensive patterns that keep people stuck.

Patricia also draws on Schema Therapy, a structured, evidence-based approach that identifies deep-rooted patterns formed in childhood, known as early maladaptive schemas, and works to understand and change them. Schema 

These approaches are not used in isolation; Patricia integrates them fluidly according to what each client needs and what the clinical work calls for.

Patricia works through an explicitly feminist and intersectional lens. That means the clinical work does not look at the inner world in isolation from the world a person lives in. Gender, migration, race, culture, class, and the physical body.  These are not background to the work, they are part of the work itself.

For immigrant women in particular, this is clinically essential. The systems that shaped a client’s psychology – in her country of origin, in the family she grew up in, in the gendered expectations she was handed – don’t disappear when she crosses an ocean. They come with her. Understanding them is part of what therapy at Talking Works does.

Patricia offers sessions in Portuguese, Spanish, and English — because the language a client thinks in is the language in which depth work should happen. For many clients, working in Portuguese is the first time they have been able to say certain things out loud. That matters clinically and it changes what is possible in the room.

Patricia was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. She trained as a psychologist there, and came to Melbourne in 2012, initially for a year, as these things often go, and then for longer.

The decision to stay was not simple. It involved the kind of grief and renewal that she now sits with in the consulting room. Moving countries, rebuilding a professional identity in a second language, learning where she belonged and what she needed to let go of… these are not abstract experiences for Patricia. They are the foundation of the work she does.

Patricia is a feminist — not in the diluted, brand-friendly sense of the word, but in the sense that she takes seriously the structural conditions that shape women’s inner lives, and believes that clinical work that ignores those conditions is incomplete. Her feminism shapes how she listens, what she asks, and what she notices.

Patricia also works with a holistic understanding of wellbeing, one that takes the connection between body, psyche, and the broader rhythms of a person’s life. She holds this alongside her clinical training not as a contradiction, but as a commitment to taking seriously the full complexity of who a person is.

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