Eugene Berezin, MA

How I got here

I have had more than one career. I worked in technology and in business before I trained in psychology, and I moved to the United States from Russia in 2013 — which meant rebuilding a professional life from the beginning, in a second language, in my thirties.

I mention that because it shapes how I work. I know what it is to have your body and your circumstances stop cooperating with the life you had planned, and to have to find a different route rather than a better version of the same effort. A great many people living with persistent pain are in exactly that position.

My clinical background is over ten years across mental health settings — as a psychotherapist, youth counsellor, case manager and social work professional. That is unglamorous work and it teaches you things that a weekend hypnosis certification does not: how to sit with someone who is not getting better, how to tell the difference between a person who needs encouragement and one who needs to be believed, and how to notice when what is presenting as a pain problem has something else underneath it.

How I actually work

My training runs through clinical hypnotherapy, motivational interviewing, Internal Family Systems, cognitive behavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. In practice, that combination means I am unlikely to just read suggestions at you.

People who have lived with pain for years have almost always developed a part of themselves whose entire job is managing it — vigilant, exhausted, and deeply suspicious of anything that sounds like being told to relax. Steamrolling that part does not work. It has usually been protecting you for a long time and it has reasons. Much of the real work is getting it on side, and IFS is where I learned to do that.

Motivational interviewing keeps me from pushing. Pain clients have generally been pushed quite enough. ACT gives us somewhere useful to go when the honest answer is that some discomfort is going to remain and the question becomes what kind of life is built around it.

Credentials, plainly

• Registered Hypnotherapist, Washington State Department of Health, licence #HYPN.HP.70073119
• Master of Arts in Psychology, Moscow State Pedagogical University
• 10+ years in mental health as therapist, counsellor, case manager and social work professional
• Trained in clinical hypnotherapy, motivational interviewing, Internal Family Systems, CBT and ACT
• Verified on Psychology Today
• Languages: English and Russian

What I am not: I am not a physician, I do not diagnose medical conditions and I do not prescribe or advise on medication. I will always tell you when something needs a doctor.

On being an affirming practice

I built my practice as an openly gay clinician, and LGBTQ+ clients remain much of my work. This site is for anyone in pain — the mechanism does not care who you are — but I am not going to be coy about where I come from, for two reasons.

First, if you are queer and you have ever had to manage a clinician's discomfort while trying to describe your own symptoms, you will know how much energy that costs and how badly it distorts the appointment. You will not have to do that here.

Second, being a clinician who has spent a career with people the medical system tends to under-believe has made me better at this particular job. Pain is chronically under-believed too — especially in women, in people of colour, and in anyone whose scans look normal. Coming in braced for scepticism is common, and it is worth naming rather than letting it sit in the room.

Everyone is welcome. Nobody has to explain themselves.