The testimonies will be grouped by type of service or type of therapy (e.g. assessment, therapy e.g. Brainspotting, CBT, CFT, IFS, ACT and so on or type of a problem e.g. therapy for trauma, therapy for social anxiety, therapy for OCD etc) and also type of clients: students, professionals, performing artists, doctors, neurodivergent clients etc
Through EMDR and brain spotting with Maja, I have felt a huge positive shift in just a few sessions. She has helped me to process significant traumatic experiences in a creative and safe enough way, as well as supporting me to trust myself along the journey. I appreciated the focus on post traumatic growth and I no longer feel defined by the trauma I have experienced. I am extremely grateful for the experience and would highly recommend Maja.
I contacted Dr. Maja regarding a diagnosis for my university needs. She responded promptly, and we scheduled an assessment for the same week. Throughout the process, Dr. Maja was not only professional and thorough but also incredibly kind and understanding. Her report was detailed, clearly outlining my diagnosis and the necessary accommodations. I can genuinely recommend Dr. Maja as a warm, compassionate, and highly professional psychologist.
I went to see Maja for help with a complex bereavement: I lost my mum to suicide when I was 13 and felt I hadn’t properly grieved her loss. My experience with Maja was honestly life-changing. Through a combination of brilliant psychotherapy and brain-spotting, Maja helped me to move to a different relationship with my mum. Before, I felt trapped in the past, constantly going over what happened, feeling bitter and angry about it. Maja took me to a new place: where I feel connected to my mum in a beautiful, loving place. Along with that, Maja offered me unconditional support, advice and understood me in a deep way which I have very rarely experienced before. I can’t recommend her highly enough.
I found Maja through my colleague – an actress who told me she was able to work through both some trauma issues (especially from auditions and issues around working with agents, which I felt I needed to address too); she also found Maja’s approach useful to building her characters and strengthening her performance. So I took a plunge and I wasn’t disappointed. Maja is a wonderful and a very knowledgeable psychologist who really knows how to work with creative (often highly sensitive) people. I feel she also understands the pressures and difficulties we are faced within the performance industry.
She uses brain-body approaches, and her way of working is aligned with polyvagal theory, EMDR and Brainspotting, somatic experiencing as well as IFS. She helped me recognise the connection between stress and tension and the effect on the nervous system, and the consequences of imbalance and dysregulation on my performance as a singer and performer. She helped me work through my blocks and really focus on building new pathways in my brain.
She knows so much about trauma and how to move beyond it! Her approach is so much focused on growth, building resources and re-igniting motivation, creativity and sheer joy. I feel like I not only came back to myself, but I have become a better version of myself. I now use the space to build my performance by using expansion Brainspotting and it is so exciting! I can’t thank Maja enough.
I was lucky enough to be put in contact with Maja through work mental health support services, to help me with my anxiety. At this point in time, I was so overwhelmed and struggling immensely with everyday tasks, I felt this would be this way forever. Following our work together she has shared tools that have helped me gain a handle on many aspects of my life. Maja’s ability to reframe and offer an objective but compassionate opinion allowed me to feel like I can put my all into this experience and ultimately get the most out of it that I could. Our sessions were always a perfect balance of finding ways to challenge my thinking and providing tools to support me while I did this, in a truly safe environment. She was eloquently able to appeal to both the logical and the emotional parts of me which were previously at war with each other. Ultimately, through our time together I feel I have been able to move to a smoother path which seems more promising than it did when I started. The positive management of my anxiety has been noted by colleagues within my team, which has opened conversations regarding their own mental health.
Maja is a credit to her profession, and I am exceptionally grateful to have worked with her.
I came to Maja in a desperate and traumatised state: crying in uncontrollable fits due to the terror I felt about my bodily state.
I was amidst the wreckage of the darkest period in my life to date, concerning illness. A few months prior, I had entered into a relationship with an unaware and unscrupulous alternative health practitioner, who had prescribed me so many supplements without truly understanding the nature of my (now formally diagnosed) condition, that I experienced an extraordinarily distressing flare, like no other before.
Maja’s rare gift is the ability to rapidly produce extremely clear and useful threads of thought for her clients to visualise, grasp onto and eventually practically use in order to get on the path to recovery. I owe my current state of much better health to various things, including a diagnosis, and conventional anti-inflammatory medication, but also in large part to Maja’s scientifically informed insight into why I was experiencing symptoms in such a violent and distressing way, and how the way I perceived the symptoms could influence their severity.
Although medication is often very beneficial for the treatment of chronic health conditions, it is rarely the whole story in terms of reaching a state of peace and balance in the body and mind. I constantly marvel at how much the techniques and lines of reasoning provided by Maja can calm both my symptoms and deep unease concerning the future of my bodily health (each influences the other, of course)!
Her voice resounds in my head when I am edging towards a fearful state, and I am able to pull myself into a brighter place. I owe my new found courageous state to her guidance and careful, intelligent reasoning in the face of complex networks of fear.
I am extremely fortunate to have found a therapist such as Maja in this time of my life because I could have so easily stumbled across someone far less knowledgeable of my kind of experience. I would highly recommend her to anyone who is experiencing strange, medically unexplained symptoms including those of MCAS, ME/CFS and related disorders. Medication and a diagnosis may well be one part of the puzzle, but so are the techniques offered by those in the know of what is really happening in the brain when experiencing symptoms of these debilitating conditions.
Learning with Maja that the brain plays such a significant role in these debilitating symptoms, and that I have the power to influence how these symptoms show up in my body was one of the essential keys to my recovery.
Several months of supervision with Dr. Maja have brought about significant changes in my perception of therapy. Maja has the ability to discern elements that go beyond the usual framework. She has provided guidance on many challenging issues where I felt stuck on my own. She was able to professionally point out errors I was making without being pushy or imposing. She instilled in me the confidence to follow my own path and trust my intuition in helping patients.
Dr. Maja provided invaluable assistance during a particularly challenging period in my life. I required a report on my mental health status, and Dr. Maja, in a highly professional and empathetic manner, guided me through numerous difficult topics. Her therapeutic approach was delicate, and she demonstrated a keen sensitivity in addressing truly sensitive issues. I wholeheartedly recommend Dr. Maja.
I am a psychotherapist working in the field of Process Oriented Psychology as well as several other modalities of trauma focused work. I met Maja a few years ago at a Brainspotting training during which she worked as a trainer’s assistant. Since then, we have been regularly exchanging Brainspotting sessions. Our practice together has been particularly important for me personally (as a way of gaining deeper insight into myself) as well as professionally (as a further educational experience). Maja is a particularly attentive and highly attuned fellow ‘traveller’, she creates a safe space in which is she is able to fully witness the other person’s process. She has a vast therapeutic experience, which enables her to warmly and emphatically welcome a wide spectrum of emotions and experiences that a client brings with them. I would highly recommend Maja not only to clients but also to fellow helping professionals who want to deepen their knowledge and process things from their personal and professional lives. In my case, our exchange has enabled me not only to experience a visible development of my professional skills but also has been a never-ending process of expanding my self-consciousness. I am full of gratitude towards Maja.
I contacted Maja because I needed a formal OCD diagnosis to get extra time for my exams as I have been suffering from OCD for many years and I feel some symptoms have got worse over the past year. She was very quick to answer over email and gave me a date for my assessment very quickly. During the assessment, she was very understanding and demonstrated care and compassion towards my symptoms. She wrote my report and sent it to me within the same day. I would highly recommend her services.
I was lucky enough to be assigned Maja as a compassion-based therapist during an extremely difficult period of my life. I’d just been through a radical hysterectomy at 40 and was working through challenges at work and home and just not coping at all. I was traumatised by the whole situation. Life felt bleak and as if things would be so forever.
I’m not neurotypical, and the CBT which I’d been offered previously hadn’t helped at all, it’d just stressed me out more than anything.
Maja taught me a lot about myself, and showed me lots of techniques to help myself get into a pattern of positive thinking. She has a good objective eye and noticed things that I hadn’t previously considered. Maja has experience with a lot of methodologies and techniques and she told me that DBT tools were the most helpful for me from her observations during our sessions, and gave me resources to continue with once our sessions came to an end.
She saw me and understood what I needed when no one else did. I can’t recommend her highly enough.
Please note this testimonial was sent to Walking with the Wounded – a charity that provides support for veterans that asked Maja to provide therapy for trauma/ complex bereavement for this client (the testimonial is used with permission from the client and the charity)
I would like to start with saying that I own a debt of gratitude for the help that your organization gave me in my time of need.
I was struggling badly after the death of my sister and felt on the edge of breaking down almost daily.
I reached out to my doctor. Who when they found out that I was a veteran, gave me priority access to mental health services.
I was assessed to have mild to moderate PTSD due to my experiences in Northern Ireland in the early 70’s.
You arranged for me to see Maja Jankowska for a 10-week course of therapy. I am writing to you to thank you from the bottom of my heart for directing me to her. Maja immediately put me at ease. She worked through my problems with me and gave me various coping mechanisms and helped me work though my problems and challenged some of my hang ups. Initially I was hesitant about attending, but as time went by I started to look forward to the sessions. I now feel like a normal person again, and was able to deal with the 1st anniversary of her death with no major problems.
Thank you all so much for your help in my time of crisis.