Hannah-Valeria Grishko, LCSW

Hello! If you are looking for an skilled, experienced and caring therapist who actives listens and offers feedback, you arrived in the right place. My expertise gained through 24 years of practice coupled with life and professional experiences in Ukraine, United States, United Kingdom, France and Israel, offers a unique outlook at life’s challenges, especially when you are living not in the country of your birth.  My fluency in French, English, Ukrainian and Russian and deeper understanding of cultural adaptation and growth that can happen in moving abroad offer a different dimension of understanding and insight to your therapy with me.

My solid educational background in the form of BA in Psychology (Honors) from the University of Chicago and MSW from New York University serves as an important base to my ability to think analytically, creatively and in depth as well as to thrive for excellence when working with you.    My areas of specialty are:

• Grief, loss and bereavement (trained by David Kessler, in addition of my years of experience in this area)

• Trauma and trauma-informed therapy with adults and children, including sexual abuse and domestic violence

• Adjustment to immigration and identity formation for children, adolescents and adults

• Child psychotherapy/parenting and family work.

• Working with couples and other relational difficulties

• Depression and anxiety.

I offer an integrative approach that fits your needs as close as possible.  This approach includes talk therapy using different methods, body awareness, mindfulness or Jungian Sandplay therapy.  I introduce these ways of working in the first few sessions, and we review your progress with me as we move along.  Your therapy will be a collaborative experience between us.  I bring my utmost positive regard, warmth, relatedness, high level of clinical experience and commitment to your well-being to ensure that you feel safe and protected in the therapeutic space with me. We know from research and years of clinical practice that your relationship with a trusted and competent therapist is key to a successful therapy for you. 

When dealing with traumatic experience or any situations where you lived through strong emotions, sometimes talking is not enough.  Trauma is not only limited to acts of extreme violence or war.  In fact, my definition of trauma includes a wide range of painful emotional experience, ranging from rape, betrayal or divorce.  What is often needed is an integrated approach that helps the body to process what happened on the somatic level.  I am a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), which means that I have additional training in the most current approaches to working with trauma, such as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR and other ways of incorporating our growing understanding of neurophysiology of trauma.  I am also trained in IST (Immediate Stabilization Technique) that helps people to process traumatic events. 

I am a Certified Jungian Sandplay therapist and a Teaching Member of Israeli and International Society for Sandplay Therapy (ISTA and ISST), which is the highest level of membership and training.  Jungian Sandplay is a non-verbal, creative and expressive therapy that allows you to express and work through challenges and dilemmas from a completely different angle, especially when words are just not enough! By accessing your creative and image-based right brain processing and symbolic language, you can gain access to a new level of inner resources and address your challenges in a way that bypasses your rational side.  The tactile element of Sandplay is an inviable tool in a healing process.

My work has been published in the Journal of Sandplay Therapy, and I contributed a book chapter to a volume called Into the Heart of Sandplay Therapy.  I also offered professional training and participated in conferences in Israel as well as Romania, Russia, China, Israel, UK and the United States.