I am a coach and therapist.
Some of what my clients bring, I have carried too.
This work is not separate from my life: it is built from it. I came to this work through living, through what I was given, what I came to understand slowly, and what I have spent years learning to offer with greater care. That is still what guides it.
the approach
UNTANGLER is the practice created by Maura Brivio.
Both coaching and therapy as a blend.
The name came from the work itself. Not from a rebrand or a strategy, but from the thing that kept being true across years of sitting with people through what was most difficult in their lives: the problem was rarely what it appeared to be. It was older than that, more layered, more patient. And what people needed was not a solution, but a careful, honest process of finding where things had become knotted, and beginning to loosen.
That is what this practice is. And that is the person behind it.
What I offer is not a formula. It is a space, attentive, honest, and without agenda, in which something can shift that has not been able to shift before.
My work draws on both coaching and therapy, not as separate things, but as a blend that follows what each person actually needs. Sometimes that means working practically: making a decision, finding a direction, changing how you communicate. Sometimes it means going deeper into the patterns, the history, the questions that don't resolve quickly. Often it means both, in the same conversation.
I BRING THIS WORK FROM THE INSIDE
I am a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend. A professional who has spent years learning how to hold other people's most difficult questions, and a person who has had to sit with her own.
I have sat with grief, including the kind that does not always get permission. The loss of a pet, a country, a version of the future. The kind that arrives in ordinary moments, has nowhere obvious to go, and quietly takes up residence in the body.
I have been in the chapters where the question of what comes next does not yet have an answer, where something no longer fits, and what might be possible has not yet taken shape.
I have lived the mother-daughter relationship from both sides, not only as a practitioner but as a person. The particular tenderness and friction of it. What it is to love someone and keep missing. To want to do it differently than it was done with you, and to find that wanting is not the same as knowing how. That gap between intention and arrival: I know it from the inside.
And there is something particular about living between cultures, feeling fluent everywhere and fully at home nowhere. What it is to hold more than one version of yourself through the same day, the same room, the same conversation.
I am not speaking from the outside.
I don't bring these things into the room as a map of what you are going through: your experience is yours, and I will never presume to know it. I bring them as a willingness to go to difficult places, and a respect for what it takes to be honest about a life.
QUALIFICATIONS, TRAININGS & MEMBERSHIPS
Diploma in Transformational Coaching
Certificate in Mother-Daughter Coaching
Graduate of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy
L7 Post Graduate Diploma in Counselling Children and Young People
L5 Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling
Continuing Professional Development: Ongoing supervision and training in relational depth, attachment, and cross-cultural work
Senior Accredited Coaching Practitioner with the EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council)
Accredited Registrant with NCPS (National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society)
What the work has made possible
Since being adopted as a toddler, I carried a quiet but persistent sense of abandonment that I couldn’t fully articulate. After the death of my parents, those feelings became more present. Working with Maura gave me the space to slow down and begin understanding who I am beneath a lifelong sense of not quite belonging. She remained with me in the rawness of an early, primal wound, offering a calm and steady presence. For the first time, I felt truly met in my experience rather than needing to move past it.
— Adult, she/her
" Living with cancer brought an uncertainty I was not prepared for, especially around time and what lies ahead. In that space, I felt unmoored and overwhelmed by not knowing. I found myself feeling anger toward the world and even my family, things I could not bring myself to voice to them. You offered me space and the opportunity to simply be with it. In that space, I cried and let go of so many hopes I had been holding tightly. And yet, I felt a sense of relief, something like being able to breathe again. I don’t know how long I have, or if we will meet again, but I am deeply grateful for you being a safe harbour and an honest sounding board."
— Adult, she/her
When my children left home, I was unprepared for the depth of loss and disorientation that followed. What I expected to be a time of freedom instead brought unexpected questions about identity and belonging, along with a heightened emotional sensitivity that I later came to understand as part of being an HSP. The silence in the house, the shift in role, and the absence of daily care all felt amplified in a way I couldn’t easily explain. There was also a quiet fantasy of reconnecting more intimately with my husband, and the hope that this new stage might bring us closer, which added another layer of longing and uncertainty. Working with you helped me begin to normalise all of this and release the shame I carried for not being able to “hold it together.”
— Adult, she/her