Psychological Service

Head of Service: Patrizia Bressan

The Santa Croce Clinic provides a team of qualified psychologists and psychotherapists in order to guarantee the patient a psychological support or a real psychotherapy where indicated. The role of the psychotherapist is to accompany the person, with individual or group interviews, in a path of self-awareness and self-strengthening for the recovery of personal resources.

Individual interviews and psychotherapy

Psychotherapy intervention is an interpersonal process that involves the use of purely psychological tools (verbal and non-verbal) aimed at treating the patient’s situations of suffering related to his personal life history. The theoretical reference models are diversified and chosen according to the greater effectiveness demonstrated in specific disorders. In general terms, it is possible to intervene on behavioural and cognitive aspects of the symptoms (cognitive-behavioural therapy based on learning theories), or on dysfunctional structural aspects of the personality (psychodynamic psychotherapy based on psychoanalytic theories). The interviews are usually held weekly and last one hour: they can be carried out in an inpatient setting (during hospitalization) or outpatient (in agreement with the local doctor, as an integration and completion of a shared treatment pathway).

Psychodiagnostic and Testistic Evaluation

In some cases, on medical indication, psychodiagnostic evaluation tests are carried out in order to clarify the diagnosis in case of clinical doubts. The psychological evaluation is a process that takes place between the clinical psychologist and the patient suffering from a psychological distress and that allows to outline a picture of psychological functioning, the prognosis and the methods of therapeutic intervention. The purpose of this assessment is to relate the discomfort subjectively experienced with the maladaptive symptoms and behaviours that result.
In order to make a correct assessment by the psychologist, the patient is subjected to some tests characterised by precise rules of administration and are evaluated and interpreted according to certain standards. These tests allow to outline a structural personological evaluation (reality examination, defences, anxiety…), an evaluation of the functionalities of the main instruments of relation that the subject develops during his existence (attention, language, memory and orientation, praxis, gnosis, …) and an evaluation of the intellectual capacity of the subject aimed not only to measure the intellectual capacities of the subject but to identify information on the functioning of basic aspects of the self.

  • Psychotherapeutic treatment with EMDR technique

    Responsible of the service: Patrizia Bressan

    The EMDR method (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is mainly used for the treatment of stress-related disorders, among which Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stands out. These are the feelings that arise in an individual when he or she has experienced, witnessed or been confronted with a potentially life-threatening event, with danger of death or serious injury, or a threat to his or her physical integrity or that of others. The response to such an event includes intense fear, vulnerability, or horror.

    The focus of EMDR therapy is therefore both memories (dysfunctionally stored information) related to traumatic events from situations of evident objectivity (e.g. natural disasters, disasters, etc.), and memories from events perceived as subjectively traumatic (early, unique or recurrent stressors or deficits) having to do with dysfunctional relational aspects of attachment relationships. The goal of EMDR is to move the innate information processing system to transform dysfunctionally stored perceptions and push the patient towards self-healing. The results of treatment include reduction of the disturbance and cognitive restructuring, generating changes in physical and emotional responses.

  • Emotions Group

    Responsible of the service: Paola Del Giorgio

    Emotions are a fundamental part of our existence and accompany us from birth in every life event. Being able to recognize them, identifying them in their various components, understanding their causes, expressing and managing them, is an essential ability for our psychological well-being. However, emotions are often not recognized, but rather acted upon without awareness. They often appear incomprehensible, making the person experience an unpleasant sense of discomfort, which however remains unclear and difficult to attribute to external events. The person does not understand why he/she feels bad and consequently cannot communicate it, remaining imprisoned in a vicious circle of continuous suffering.

    The aim of the Emotions Group is to help participating patients to get in touch with their emotions, learning to identify them by giving them a name, to recognize the different correlates, both somatic and cognitive, and to be able to express them within a protected context characterized by a non-judgmental group. At the same time they can learn to better regulate particularly intense emotional states, avoiding impulsive and destructive actions. The comparison with the experiences of others is particularly significant, as it helps them to acquire greater awareness of their own psychological functioning and of the different and possible ways of experiencing and managing emotions.

  • Sentire Workshop

    Responsible of the service: Demetrio Martorano

    The experiential workshop “Sentire” is based on the idea that emotional experience is not accessible only through cognitive reflection, but can also be approached through the body, the senses, and the evocative dimension. In many patients, inner experience appears confused, poorly differentiated, or difficult to communicate: what is lived remains at the level of activation or vague distress, without finding a shared space for processing.

    For this reason, a protected, structured, and containing group setting, within which participants can come into contact with their lived experience starting from sensory and narrative stimuli (images, words, music, olfactory elements), is ideal for processing. The stimuli are not intended for interpretation, but rather function as facilitators of the emergence of experience, allowing each person to approach their internal states in a gradual and adjustable way.

    The aim of the “Sentire” workshop is to foster greater emotional awareness through direct experience: to remain in the “here and now,” recognize what emerges, find personal words to describe it, and share — if desired — parts of one’s experience within a nonjudgmental group. The work is not oriented toward analyzing clinical problems or performance, but toward the possibility of experiencing oneself in the presence of others, in an atmosphere of respect and confidentiality.

    The exchange with the resonances of the other participants is a central element of the process: listening to different ways of feeling and making meaning of an experience makes it possible to broaden one’s perspective on one’s own psychic functioning, promoting mentalization processes and greater tolerance of emotional states. In this sense, the group becomes a space for shared regulation, where individual experience can be thought about and transformed within a safe framework, while also creating a common vocabulary.

    The workshop is designed as a complementary device to individual interventions and integrates into the overall therapeutic project, offering an experiential space that values feeling as a privileged pathway to awareness and emotional processing.