My Story
Hello, my name is Vera Braghiroli.
I trained in Integrative Counselling at the Minster Centre in London, one of the longest-established integrative training institutions in Europe, where I'm now working towards a Master's degree and an Advanced Diploma in Integrative Psychotherapy. I came to this work later, after another profession and years of full-time parenting. Both shape how I listen.
I earned my first Master's degree in Public Relations at IULM in Milan, before moving to the UK, where my family now lives. My career took me into advertising and marketing for international television networks, between Italy and the UK. Those years gave me a close view of pressure, performance and burnout. Then I became a mother.
Motherhood shifted my values and priorities. I chose to home-educate our child throughout primary school and trained as a Hand in Hand Parenting instructor. All of it made me want to become better at connecting with people as we actually are, including myself. So I trained as a counsellor.
Udaya is my private therapy practice. In Sanskrit, Udaya means rising or dawn, carrying a sense of expansion and light, of something emerging. It felt right for describing the new beginnings my therapeutic work aims to foster.
I practise within the BACP Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions and the UKCP Code of Ethics and Professional Practice. To help me maintain a reflective and ethical practice, I receive regular clinical supervision.
Alongside my private practice, I volunteer with the Listening Post, a counselling charity providing low-cost support across Gloucestershire, and support children with social, emotional and mental health needs in a school. This work adds the lenses of family systems, attachment and safeguarding to how I sit with adults navigating their own histories.
What I believe
As human beings, we grow and thrive best through deep, caring connection with others, in mind, body and soul.
Each person deserves to be understood as a whole, within the context of their time, culture and community.
Each of us has intrinsic worth and dignity and, given the right conditions, the capacity to change and heal.