About me
I'm Viktorija Pileckaite, a Muslim psychologist.
A psychologist working with Muslim women, with a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Psychology from German universities. This page is the long version: where I come from and what I trained in.
How I got here
The short version of a long road
I reverted to Islam young, and I have now been Muslim for twenty-two years, alḥamdulillāh. I married, and moved to Syria.
We left during the war. That is a sentence that takes two seconds to read and some years to live, and I mention it here only because it shapes how I sit with people who are frightened about a move, a country, a decision that cannot be undone. I am not working from theory when a woman tells me she is afraid of what hijrah will cost her.
For the past fifteen years I have lived in Jordan. It is where I studied psychology — as a mother of two, which is to say slowly, in the time that was left over, over a number of years.
So the path was Vilnius, then Damascus, then Amman. Alḥamdulillāh, it has been twenty years in the blessed Bilād al-Shām.
Why psychology, specifically. It was an Islamic motivation before it was a professional one. I wanted to learn something genuinely useful for Muslims, and to be involved in something that mattered. More than that, I hoped Allah would make my knowledge and my skill a sabab — a means — for somebody's healing.
Alḥamdulillāh, I see it. I watch clients improve, and that is the thing that makes the years the study cost feel well spent — in what it did for them, and in what it did to me.
Training & qualifications
Still a student, deliberately
I have been working in online counselling for around five years. Behind that:
Bachelor of Science in Psychology
FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany — September 2020, 180 ECTS. Overall grade sehr gut (1.3), ECTS grade A — Excellent.
Thesis: a systematic literature review on approaches to reducing stereotype-threat effects, also graded 1.3 / A — Excellent.
Master of Science in Psychology
PFH Private Hochschule Göttingen, Germany — October 2024, 120 ECTS. Overall grade sehr gut (1.53).
My specialisation modules were Klinische Psychologie and Grundlagen und Vertiefung Psychologischer Beratung und Coaching — clinical psychology, and psychological counselling and coaching. So what I offer you is precisely the thing I was trained to do.
Master's thesis, graded sehr gut (1.0): a meta-analytic review evaluating the efficacy of different interventions on work-related outcomes in adults with ADHD.
Modern Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy
144 academic hours at the B. D. Karvasarsky Institute of Psychotherapy and Medical Psychology, St Petersburg — November 2021 to March 2022.
Shorter courses
An 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course (2021), foundations of DBT (4.5 hours), CBT for mood and anxiety disorders (6 hours), and psychodiagnostic assessment using the MMPI (8.5 hours).
In training now
A four-year modern psychotherapy programme and a schema therapy training, both at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, taken through blended learning. Certificates follow on completion — I'll add them here when they do.
I list the ongoing training deliberately, because I think it matters: this is a never-ending journey and I have a long way left to go. I have a whole list of high-quality courses I plan to do, alḥamdulillāh. May Allah make this way easy for me and beneficial for both me and my clients in Dunya and Akhirah.
Personal details — date of birth, place of birth and student numbers — are blacked out on the scans below. The institution, qualification, date, grade and seals are untouched, which is everything you would need to check them.
Bachelor of Science in Psychology · FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany · 2020 · grade 1.3, ECTS A — Excellent
Master of Science in Psychology · PFH Private Hochschule Göttingen, Germany · 2024
Master's transcript · 120 ECTS · overall grade sehr gut (1.53)
Modern Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy · 144 academic hours · Karvasarsky Institute of Psychotherapy and Medical Psychology, St Petersburg · 2021–2022
8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course completed · Mindful Academy Solterreno & MindUp · 2021
Foundations of DBT · lecture course on the materials of the PESI DBT Intensive Certification Training Course · 4.5 hours · 2022
CBT for bipolar affective, anxiety and depressive disorders · 6 hours · 2022
Psychodiagnostic assessment using the MMPI · 8.5 hours · 2023
Something you will notice
You will not find a photograph of me here
This is a deliberate choice, and I would rather explain it than leave you wondering.
As a Muslim woman I do not put my image online. Not a professional headshot, not a warm candid one at a desk, not the carefully-lit portrait that every other practitioner page opens with. An illustration, my bookshelves, and the places that shaped me are what you get, and they are what you will keep getting.
I know this runs against every piece of marketing advice there is. People trust a face. I accept the cost, because the alternative costs something I am not willing to spend — and because I would rather you judge the work by whether it is any good.
So I have replaced the face with something more useful. The first session is free. You get one hour to hear how I think, how I ask questions, and whether this is the kind of help you were looking for — before any money changes hands and before you have committed to anything.
You should not have to buy a cat in a bag. You shouldn't have to buy one on the strength of a photograph either.
How I work
Healing is from Allāh. The means are our responsibility.
Shifā' comes from Allāh alone. The question that matters in practice is what we are supposed to be doing while we ask Him for it.
My answer is to take a correct means, properly, and leave the outcome where it has always been — which puts all the weight on one word: correct. I use two sources to decide, and nothing else: the Qur'ān and the authentic Sunnah as the salaf understood them, and research that shows mechanism and evidence. Where they genuinely conflict, the error is in the research.
In practice that means CBT, exposure and response prevention, DBT skills and psychoeducation — and no Sufi methods, nothing energy-based, nothing that touches shirk, no bidʿah, and no treating your dīn as the symptom.
The full version has the evidence and the references: the two categories of valid means from Ibn ʿUthaymīn, the three levels of error, where family constellations and hypnosis fall and why, and why I don't build on “Islamic psychology”.
If that is the kind of help you were looking for
The first session is free, so you can hear how I actually work before anything is decided.