Enrica Sarotto
Psychologist
Finding your sense of self through change
There are moments in life when what once felt familiar begins to shift.
Moving to a new country. Starting a new chapter in your career. Navigating changes in relationships. Entering a new phase of adulthood.
During these transitions, we may feel uncertain, disconnected, or caught between who we have been and whom we are becoming.
Psychological counselling offers a space to pause, reflect, and gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your experiences.
I'm Enrica Sarotto, a psychologist based in Hamburg. I offer psychological counselling in English and Italian, both online and in person.
Psychological Counselling for Identity, Belonging and Life Transitions
In Home Is Where We Start From, Winnicott reflects on the idea of home not simply as a physical place, but as a psychological one: a space in which we can feel seen, recognised, and safe enough to exist as ourselves.
Home becomes the first container of our experiences, the place where a sense of continuity begins to develop and where our identity gradually takes shape.
For Winnicott, this early experience of being sufficiently held leaves behind an inner trace: a capacity to inhabit one’s own experience, to be alone without feeling abandoned, and to move between inner and outer reality without losing contact with oneself. In this sense, home is less a fixed location than a relational and emotional condition — something that can be carried, lost, or slowly rebuilt.
This is one of the reasons Winnicott’s thinking remains so relevant beyond childhood. It speaks to those moments in which we no longer feel fully at ease in our own inner world, or when the space for reflection, imagination, and simply being seems to have narrowed. Psychological counselling can offer a similar kind of holding environment: a place where what is still fragile, unformed, or difficult to name can begin to take shape.
My approach
Often, what brings someone to therapy is not only what is happening externally, but the way these changes are experienced internally: the sense of disorientation, of not quite recognising oneself, or of feeling between different versions of who one has been.
In my work, I try to pay attention not only to what is said, but to how something is said, and what may be difficult to put into words.
I am interested in the emotional logic of a person’s experience: the patterns that tend to repeat, the places where someone feels stuck, and the moments in which something new begins to emerge but is not yet fully formed.
Rather than focusing on immediate solutions, I aim to create a reflective space in which thoughts and feelings can unfold at their own pace. Sometimes this means staying close to what feels confusing or uncertain, without rushing to resolve it.
Over time, this kind of attention can allow for a different relationship to one’s experience, one that is less organised around adaptation and more capable of curiosity, nuance, and self-understanding.
