Little Bridges Global · About Žana
About Žana Barros Da Silva
Understanding people beyond what appears on the surface
Žana Barros Da Silva is the founder of Little Bridges Global. Her work brings together ongoing psychology studies at Klaipėda University, training in Rapid Transformational Therapy, research-based academic work and extensive personal experience of living and raising a family across different countries and cultures.
Her interest in psychology grew from a desire to understand why people can know something rationally and yet feel something very different emotionally. Someone may know that they are capable, but still feel that they are not good enough. They may understand that they need stronger boundaries, yet experience guilt whenever they try to set them. They may leave a difficult relationship and still find themselves repeating familiar patterns long afterwards.
These questions — how beliefs form, why certain patterns persist and what may help people understand themselves differently — have become central to Žana’s work with clients and to her wider academic interests.
She is currently in the final years of her psychology studies at Klaipėda University and has trained in Rapid Transformational Therapy through the Marisa Peer Academy in London.
How Žana works
Žana’s approach is highly individual. She does not assume that two people experiencing the same difficulty have arrived there for the same reason.
A person struggling with confidence may have spent years measuring their worth through the approval of others. Someone who finds it difficult to say no may understand perfectly well that they need stronger boundaries while still experiencing fear, guilt or responsibility whenever they try to establish them. A woman rebuilding her life after separation may be dealing not only with the end of a relationship, but also with long-standing beliefs about self-worth, responsibility, independence or what she is allowed to expect from other people.
Žana’s work looks beyond the immediate difficulty and explores the beliefs, emotional responses and experiences that may be contributing to the way a person feels or behaves in the present.
Her work commonly includes areas such as low self-esteem, limiting beliefs, confidence, fears, boundary-setting, difficult emotional patterns and rebuilding after significant life changes.
She has a particular interest in supporting women following separation. For many women, separation involves much more than the end of a relationship. They may also be raising children, dealing with practical and financial pressures, renegotiating boundaries and trying to rebuild confidence in their own judgement. Žana is especially interested in the beliefs and patterns that can make this period harder, including guilt, fear of conflict, difficulty saying no and the tendency to place everyone else’s needs before one’s own.
Her style is warm, direct and non-judgemental. The aim is not to tell clients what they should feel or what decisions they should make, but to help them understand themselves more clearly and work with the patterns that may be keeping them stuck.
Rapid Transformational Therapy
Rapid Transformational Therapy is a focused therapeutic approach developed by Marisa Peer. It uses hypnosis within a structured therapeutic process to explore beliefs, emotional responses and earlier experiences that may be connected to a difficulty in the present.
In practical terms, the work goes beyond discussing what a person would like to change.
Someone may already know that they want to feel more confident, stop being controlled by fear or establish healthier boundaries. What they may not understand is why the old response continues to feel so powerful even when they consciously want something different.
Rapid Transformational Therapy provides a framework for exploring those deeper associations and the meaning a person may have attached to earlier experiences. The purpose is not to impose an explanation on the client, but to understand the individual pattern more clearly and work towards a different way of responding to it.
Žana begins this process with a detailed initial consultation. This provides time to understand the client’s situation, history and goals before deciding whether Rapid Transformational Therapy is an appropriate approach for the work they want to undertake.
Psychology, research and child development
Alongside her work with adults, Žana has a strong academic interest in children, families and psychological development.
Her university work has included research-based study in developmental psychology, with particular recent interest in ADHD and the ways in which children with different attentional, emotional and regulatory needs may experience their environments.
She has also spent considerable time researching the psychological experience of children growing up internationally and families moving between countries. Her interests include adjustment after relocation, identity and belonging, school transitions, family relationships and the different ways children may respond to major change at different stages of development.
This area of work became especially important to her through the combination of academic study and her own experience as a parent raising children across several countries.
That work later contributed to the development of Little Bridges Global and to her book, The First 90 Days: A Parent Guide to Helping Your Child Thrive After Moving Abroad.
The book brings together research, developmental psychology, age-sensitive guidance and practical parenting support. It was created to help parents understand more of what may be happening beneath a child’s behaviour during the first weeks and months following an international move.
An international perspective
Žana’s understanding of relocation and belonging is shaped by a genuinely international life.
Born in Lithuania, she moved to the United Kingdom when she was young and later raised her family across several countries. With her children, she has lived in Brazil, southern Spain and the United Kingdom before eventually returning to Lithuania. She has also travelled widely and experienced different cultures, languages and ways of creating a sense of home.
Living across countries gave her first-hand experience of something that later became central to Little Bridges Global: members of the same family can experience the same move very differently.
Adults may be focused on the reasons for moving, work, housing, schools and practical decisions. A child may be experiencing something entirely different — the loss of friendships, familiar routines, a particular bedroom, grandparents, language, social confidence or simply the sense that they knew where they belonged.
The practical move may finish in a matter of days. Emotional adjustment often follows its own timetable.
Žana’s international experience informs the questions she asks and the issues she chooses to study, but it is not presented as a substitute for professional education or research. Instead, lived experience, academic work and professional training inform different parts of her perspective.
Her work is also deliberately broader than relocation. Little Bridges Global addresses family separation, identity and belonging, confidence and self-worth, changing family circumstances, neurodiversity-related transitions, parental absence and other significant changes that can affect children, adults and relationships.
Personal and professional development
Žana believes that working with other people should involve an ongoing willingness to learn, reflect and examine one’s own assumptions.
Alongside her university studies and Rapid Transformational Therapy training, she completed Architectus Da Vinci 360, an intensive year-long personal development programme in Lithuania. The programme involved sustained face-to-face participation in both small and larger groups with coaches and formed an important part of her own personal-development work.
She has also completed training designed for children’s helpline volunteers. Although she did not subsequently take up a volunteering role because of the demands of her university studies, the training added to her experience of listening to and communicating with children and young people.
Her wider development continues through university study, academic research, professional training and continued learning in the areas most closely connected to the work of Little Bridges Global.
Working with families and young people
Children and teenagers are an important part of Žana’s academic interests and of the wider Little Bridges Global mission.
She is particularly interested in how children communicate experiences that they may not yet have the language to explain directly. Changes in behaviour, withdrawal, anxiety, resistance, difficulties at school or changes in relationships can sometimes tell adults that something in a child’s world needs closer attention.
Her approach is to look at the child within the wider context of family relationships, environment, developmental stage and the changes taking place around them.
Little Bridges Global therefore provides information and resources for parents and families as well as developing support around child and family transitions.
Any direct services offered to children or adolescents are described separately within the Therapy & Support section so that parents can clearly understand the nature and scope of the service before booking.
Languages and sessions
Žana works fluently in English, Lithuanian and Russian.
One-to-one sessions are available online, with in-person appointments also available in Lithuania.
The process begins with an initial consultation lasting 30 minutes. This allows time to discuss what the client is experiencing, what they would like to change and whether working together is appropriate.
Where Rapid Transformational Therapy is suitable, the main session is considerably longer and generally lasts approximately 3 hours. The work is personalised to the individual rather than based on a standard script.
Following the session, Žana creates an individual audio recording based on the work completed together. Clients are asked to use the recording afterwards as part of the continuing process, and Žana follows up to see how they are progressing and whether any further support may be helpful.
Professional scope
Žana is currently completing her psychology studies at Klaipėda University and does not present herself as a qualified psychologist.
Her one-to-one work is based on the professional training and experience she currently holds, including her training in Rapid Transformational Therapy.
Little Bridges Global takes professional boundaries seriously. Some difficulties require medical, psychiatric, psychological, safeguarding or other specialist support, and one-to-one work through Little Bridges Global is not intended to replace those services where they are required.
The aim is to be clear about the support Žana provides and equally clear when another type of professional care may be more appropriate.
The founder of Little Bridges Global
Little Bridges Global grew from the meeting point between Žana’s academic interests, professional work and international family experience.
It was created because family transition is rarely only about what changes on the outside. A move, a separation, a new school, a changing relationship or a period of uncertainty can also affect confidence, identity, connection and a person’s sense of where they belong.
Through Little Bridges Global, Žana is developing a wider body of work that includes one-to-one support, research-informed resources for parents and families, publications and, over time, support for schools and organisations working with families through major transitions.
The intention is not to offer simple answers to complicated experiences. It is to make useful psychological understanding more accessible and to help people find practical ways forward.