Counseling for everyone
Our counseling interviews have the purpose of both giving support and helping to face difficulties, as well as betting on people, on their abilities and their resilience, giving people the opportunity to be seen, and to see themselves, to be recognized, and recognize themselves.
We like to think of counselors as professionals with counseling abilities, like a miner, who tries to remove the rocks after the mine has collapsed, hoping that under all the rubble, there will be gold. People who turn to a counselor are lost, scared, skeptical, sometimes vengeful, but always with one need:
to be embraced and to be listened to.
The presence of a counselor in ward or trained personnel, facilitates the relations and communications between the systems and between the patients and their relatives.
Observation is a greater knowledge of context and giving attention to the infinite related details, allow for a greater collaboration between staff-members. A more efficient intervention for people and their families is less frustrating and demotivating for the professionals, and have allowed for the stabilization of a good procedure.
Communication that heals; healing communication. That is our aim, day after day.
For professionals
Communication makes things happen, and what happens doesn’t just depend on us, but on the relationship and the context in which our communication takes place. The professional must be able to consider what to say from time to time, what to say and how to say it based on the situation, the context and the specific moment. That’s why counseling skills are so important. Skills that perfectly link the flexibility – that is the ability of the professional to know how to choose between the variety of possible positions – and the creativity.
Where the support relationship is central, for instance, in nursing, medical or rehabilitative professions, counseling helps to facilitate decision-making by exploring the surrounding context, with its rules and limits, allowing the health-care professional to personalize the interventive care by paying attention to the balance of the systems of which the patients are a part. All this within an even greater plot of connections and relationships that, though not always immediately visible, can have a powerful and, sometimes unexpected, influence.
Conversations with NINA
What happens when we open up to the power of words and listening?
Here are the stories of doctors and physicians who took stock of the principals of counseling, helping patients and families with understanding and support.

OUR COUNSELOR
Alessandra Mattiola
Alessandra is the Center’s counselor. As an instructor is concerned with development in the field of the non-technically skilled, participated research-action, methodology and training in communicative and relational contexts. She is head of Methodology of Education in the field of Obstetrics at the Obstetrical department in Verona.