About Me

I have always been fascinated by how we work, what influences our health and wellbeing, and what helps us grow and move through difficult times. I first approached these questions from a humanistic perspective, through my interest in philosophy; science came later.

I built my career in health sciences and biomedical research, in Italy, in the United States and lately in Spain. Science taught me to observe, to question, and not to settle for the first answer. Above all, it taught me that when something is complex, we need to look at it from more than one perspective.

Over time, my questions began to change. I was still fascinated by the body, but it became harder to think about it separately from everything we experience. Today, I cannot think about caring for the body without considering our emotional lives, or about emotions without considering what happens in the body. This led me to become more interested in how our history, our relationships and the ways we adapt shape who we are and how we live.

Over time, those questions became increasingly personal. I felt a growing need to understand myself better and to revisit my own story, my relationships, and the ways I had learned to adapt to my experiences. This journey brought me face to face with parts of myself I had not been able to see or accept before, and helped me understand how much the way we relate to our inner world — and the way we approach others — matters.

I then began studying neuroscience, the science of wellbeing and mindfulness, while exploring the body more deeply through a Gestalt and integrative approach. My path eventually led me to person-centred integrative humanistic psychotherapy. There, I found an approach that truly resonated with me, based on curiosity, empathy and acceptance, and on trust in our capacity to grow and change. Rogers also helped me bring together two perspectives that, for a long time, I had seen as very different: the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the therapeutic encounter. Rigor and the need to understand are still important to me, but so are presence, authenticity and being open to what happens in the encounter with another person.

When I sit with someone in therapy, I put what I know aside for a moment and try to understand how they see and experience what is happening, as if it were my own experience, without ever forgetting that it is not.

And as I get to know them and work with them, something in that encounter changes me too.

Rossella Calabrese, PhD Health Sciences Researcher · Science Writer · Integrative Humanistic Therapist A scientific and humanistic perspective on health, the body, and human experience.