More and more people feel lonely, even within their families or communities. Relationships require attention, humility, responsibility, and effort to survive, while family unity can erode not only through major crises but also through a lack of dialogue, resentment, and unrepaired wounds.
We spoke about loneliness, family life, the formation of adolescents and the role of psychotherapy with Dumitrina Gazzi, a priest’s wife, teacher and systemic family and couples psychotherapist. The interview was conducted as part of the #FridayForLife series.
Alexandra Nadane: You are a wife, a priest’s wife, a psychotherapist and a teacher. How do these different roles come together in your life?
Dumitrina Gazzi: I do indeed have these four roles, but they appeared one by one, at different stages of my life, and I had the time I needed to integrate them. Each has added something significant to how I relate to myself and understand people, relationships, and my responsibility to be there for others. Each has also helped me draw closer to God.
I strive to put my role as a wife first, because my family is where I maintain my balance and regain my energy. I believe that when family life is cared for, when the relationship between husband and wife is alive, and when both are attentive to respect and communication, attentive to cultivating love, they can give more and do so more authentically in their other roles.
Of course, our family has had its challenges, too. But God has enabled us to build a life together, a space of belonging, love and mutual support, a place where both my husband and I feel safe. We both see our other roles as ways in which God has blessed us to serve in the world at this time. Each of us supports the other’s work, rejoices in its fruits and prays that the Lord will enlighten the other in fulfilling it and give them the strength to remain with Him in each of their roles.
Loneliness, one of the deepest forms of suffering
A.N.: People come to a psychotherapist with very different situations. What pain do you encounter most frequently?
D.G.: I would choose loneliness, in its various forms, as one of the deepest and most frequent forms of suffering I encounter in my practice. It may involve the actual absence of people from the lives of those I work with, or their conviction that they are not seen, heard, understood or respected within their family or workplace.
Many people live surrounded by family, colleagues or a community, believe in God and yet feel lonely. Sometimes this loneliness forms the background against which anxiety, depression, conflict between couples, perfectionism, difficulties in relationships or burnout manifest themselves. At other times, it shows up as a conviction that they are not good enough, loved enough, appreciated enough, or important enough to others.
Society constantly encourages us to become higher-performing and more efficient and to desire ever more. This pressure for “better” and “more” can distance us from God, other people, and ourselves. We can reach the point where we no longer know how to remain with ourselves and with the Lord when we are no longer excelling, and where we find it difficult to ask for help.
For this reason, the beginning of change can appear very simple: acknowledging that we are struggling, allowing ourselves to be seen and saying honestly, “This is my story, these are my wounds, these are my weaknesses and limitations.” This is the moment when we make room for God to help us, either directly or through the people around us.
For others, change may come when they choose to stop looking at themselves and instead look towards the Lord and towards other people. When they choose to believe wholeheartedly that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, and gentleness truly are “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22), and that we should ask the Lord for these rather than demand them of ourselves or others.
It comes when they believe God’s promise to those who seek first His Kingdom and righteousness — the promise that “all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33; Luke 12:31). When they choose to seek to acquire the Holy Spirit and systematically give what they themselves lack and do not receive: a kind word, help, appreciation, support and love.
A.N.: Society discusses self-love a great deal. From your experience, how can we develop a healthy, honest attitude toward ourselves?
D.G.: It is a very sensitive subject, and I do not know whether I can get to its essence in just a few words. It has indeed become a cliché to hear that we need “to love ourselves”, “to become the best version of ourselves”, “to meet our own needs first”, and so on. We discuss these things so much that they can become trivialised, or we can develop an aversion to such expressions.
Jean-Claude Larchet speaks of philautia [self-love] as a passion, but also says there is “a virtuous form of philautia, which belongs to human nature”, recalled by Christ when He speaks of the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 19:19; 22:39; Luke 10:27).
Virtuous self-love would mean “loving yourself as a creature of God, created in His image, thus loving yourself in God and loving God within yourself” (The Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, Sophia Publishing House, 2001, p. 124).
We can therefore certainly have a healthy and honest attitude towards ourselves, but we are called to something much greater than that.
Until we reach the level of virtuous self-love described by the great French theologian, we could at least seek to relinquish dysfunctional beliefs about ourselves, pathological guilt and self-devaluation, which we often confuse with humility.
We could care for our body as a “temple of the Holy Spirit” who is within us and whom we have from God (1 Corinthians 6:19), paying attention to what, how and how much we eat; how much exercise we get; how much time we lose in front of screens; what we say and how we say it; how we present ourselves in the world; whether we act with dignity and responsibility; and how much we remain with the Lord in our hearts throughout the day.
Fulfilled families know how to repair and reconnect
A.N.: You are also a couples and family psychotherapist. What is the “secret” of functional families?
D.G.: I would answer that it is embracing life in Christ, but that would exclude many families that are not in the Church and are nevertheless genuinely fulfilled and worthy of admiration for the way they live, love, and work in the world.
I would therefore say that every family has its own “secret” and its own resources. There are, of course, no perfect families, only people who manage to recognise their mistakes and limitations, repair the relationship and reconnect.
Connection within a family does not arise or endure on its own. It requires conscious, committed and continuous effort from everyone involved.
Every family experiences misunderstandings, frustrations and moments when one person falls or hurts another. What makes the difference is what happens afterwards. We can remain trapped in pain, pride and the conviction that “I am right”, or we can seek to repair what has been wounded between us, aware that there are two people in a relationship and that each contributes to allowing situations to escalate.
Fulfilled families can communicate, be grateful, negotiate differences, acknowledge their mistakes, ask forgiveness, repair what can be repaired, and reconnect. They demonstrate realism and discernment.
In a Christian family, faith in God is added to all of this. Prayer, participation in the life of the Church, confession and receiving the Holy Mysteries, and the awareness that we are at every moment in God’s presence constitute a very powerful resource and a strong shield for our family.
A.N.: What problem most frequently destroys unity within a family?
D.G.: It is rare for a single challenge to have the potential to destroy a home’s unity. Even when it seems a family is falling apart because something very serious has happened, we discover that either the two people never truly managed to become one, or their relationship had already been significantly eroded over time through small, repeated, overlooked things that were never repaired.
A lack of presence, insufficient time spent together, lack of dialogue, prioritising other things over the relationship between spouses, accumulated resentment, overlooked and unprocessed pain, frequent criticism, sarcasm, the need to be right at any cost and, above all, losing direction and a shared vision of marriage — all these are drops that contribute to filling the cup.
In my practice, I often meet people who speak about their spouse as though they were an adversary. It seems as if each has compiled a case file of the other person’s mistakes and shortcomings. The relationship has become a battlefield, and neither is willing to negotiate or take a step towards forgiveness and reconciliation.
As family and couples therapists, we work with the relationship, not with two separate individuals. We are not there to restore justice or to “fix” one person or the other. We seek to clarify the dynamic between them and support them in finding different ways of relating so that this dynamic can improve.
People find it very difficult to move beyond reactivity and resentment. It takes time before they are willing to care for the relationship between them as though it were a living organism in pain.
Whatever the other person does may not seem sufficient to erase their debt and allow the relationship to move into another stage. Unfortunately, people are often unwilling to continue working in therapy long enough to move through this thick layer of pain and take responsibility for caring for the relationship between them.
And when there are children, we see the consequences of the atmosphere they live in at home and the impact of their parents’ difficult relationship.
Our professional roles, and our roles as parents, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and so forth, rest upon our relationship as a couple. Ideally, this should be the relationship in which our attachment needs are met, where we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable and authentic, and where we learn to cultivate love.
A healthy family begins before the wedding day
A.N.: You have experience in both education and psychotherapy. If we could teach adolescents one thing that would later help them build healthy families, what would it be?
D.G.: It is very difficult to choose just one thing. Thinking about the adolescents I have met over the years, I would say the ability to hear the voice of their conscience is extremely important—that inner radar which, when connected as closely as possible to God, guides them toward wise choices and helps them resist pressures from both outside and within.
This finely tuned hearing needs training. Otherwise, we risk confusing the voice of conscience with the voice of fear, guilt, the desire to please others or our own impulses.
A healthy family demonstrates emotional maturity, responsibility and the ability to communicate, forgive, set boundaries and remain alongside the other person when things become difficult.
It is therefore important for adolescents to recognise which people will help them grow, where they need to establish a boundary, when they are wrong and how to make amends, when to compromise and when something should not be open to negotiation.
A healthy family does not begin on the wedding day, but much earlier: with what a young person saw at home, how they were treated during childhood, how they learned to make choices, say “no”, acknowledge their mistakes, respect another person’s boundaries, avoid confusing love with emotional dependence, and not remain in a relationship solely out of fear that otherwise they would be alone and suffer.
An adolescent who learns to listen to their conscience will have a better chance, when the time comes, of choosing a life partner based on that person’s character rather than merely physical attraction or social validation.
They will be able to observe whether the other person shares similar values, whether they are responsible, whether they respect others, whether they know how to take responsibility for their choices and mistakes, whether they can ask forgiveness and manage conflict, and whether they can continue to love even when the other person seems difficult to love.
In short, whether we call it critical thinking, discernment, lucidity or wisdom, this inner radar, connected to God, seems to me an invaluable resource for an adolescent, just as it is for every one of us.
The therapeutic relationship comes before technique
A.N.: What thoughts would you share with psychotherapists at the beginning of their careers who are seeking to understand people’s problems and how they can support them?
D.G.: I myself consider that I am still at the beginning of the journey, and I hope to preserve the awareness that every day in my practice is a new beginning — that I need to approach every person who chooses to work with me with the same attentiveness, prayer and humility as I did at the beginning.
As psychotherapists, we need to continue doing our own therapeutic work, receive supervision and peer consultation, and continue learning.
However much we study and however much training we undertake, in the consulting room we ultimately remain alone with the person in front of us. We are there only with what we can bring into the present from what we have learnt, with who we are as people, and with the extent to which we have developed our capacity to call upon God and receive the other person without trying to change or “fix” them.
It is important to remain curious and humble and not to believe that we must have all the answers.
Before any technique, our primary instrument remains the therapeutic relationship. Techniques are, of course, very useful tools in working with people, but very often the most valuable thing someone can receive in therapy is the experience of being listened to without judgement, of being received with prayer, respect and responsibility, and of being helped to discover that, despite all their wounds, there are resources within them that they have not yet seen.
Brief biography: Dumitrina Gazzi
Dumitrina Gazzi (b. 1980) is a clinical psychologist, systemic family and couples psychotherapist, and teacher. She graduated from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași and completed a master’s degree in Clinical Assessment, Counselling and Couples and Family Psychotherapy.
She trained in systemic family and couples psychotherapy and works in private practice in Iași. She has worked in education for 23 years, giving her extensive experience with adolescents and young people and the emotional challenges specific to this stage of life.
She is married to Fr Dr Eugen Gazzi.
