I am an Angolan psychotherapist and writer based in Copenhagen. I work therapeutically with black women around mental health and personal growth with a focus on identity. I am an avid reader and love being in nature. I am passionate about healing, personal growth and helping women reach their full potential, be their full selves.

I moved to Denmark in 2007, left in 2013 and came back in 2018. So, all in all I have lived here 9 and a half years. I moved here for family. My first year in Denmark was focused on motherhood and it was very pleasant, everything seemed great since Danish society is so strongly geared to family life. But once I turned my focus to myself, to my own needs and building a career here, I found that there were many closed doors. I met an inflexibility that was hard to fathom and challenges in finding satisfactory employment or education.

I eventually found a psychotherapy training programme that I liked and enrolled in, but there were some important elements missing in it for me. It is not possible to study psychotherapy at university in Denmark and I missed the academic approach to learning. It was also important for me to have access to a population of specific ethnic and social backgrounds for my trainee practice experience, as I knew that once I qualified this target group was going to be an important part of my practice. That was not available to me in Denmark. For these two reasons I made the choice of moving to the UK to pursue a masters in psychotherapy in an environment where my requirements were available. That felt like an important choice for me as it equipped me with the skills and experience to later create the private practice that I wanted, rather than just a generic one.

My greatest achievement or career highlight is starting my own business, my own private practice serving black women globally delivering a service that was much needed but that often missed the mark when it came to this neglected population is what I am professionally proudest of. I am proud of it because it was not an obvious one, I had to go deeply into myself to pull it out. I am proud that I created something that is perfectly aligned with what I feel is my mission in life and I am grateful that there are women for whom it resonates.

My journey has not been plain sailing and I encountered the external challenges that I described above, but also some internal challenges to do with limitations I sometimes put on myself about what I could and could not say out loud. How I could and could not present myself. A big challenge was also facing the realities of studying while raising small children.