Individual Therapy
Body-oriented trauma processing and stress management uses the body's self-healing capacity.
The polyvagal theory of Dr. Stephan Porges is about the functioning of our autonomic nervous system. It can help you "befriend" your nervous system by exploring your body's responses. Unlike wildlife, we humans often cannot discharge the accumulated "survival energy" of trauma. This natural mechanism of discharge is almost always suppressed by our very powerful cognition. Sensations in the body are therefore leading in this method. The tension built up in the body during traumatic experiences is thus given the opportunity to discharge in a safe manner. In this way, other signals can go to the brain, so that we can perceive the reality around us more and more objectively. The goal is to be able to navigate through this world more and more on the basis of safety and in connection with yourself and others.
Past Reality Integration is based on an increasing number of neurological and physiological findings that we have unconscious memories that direct our perception, doing, thinking and feeling. Although our consciousness remains a mystery for the time being that needs to be solved further, research shows that consciousness only controls a very small part of our actions. Past Reality Integration offers a clear tool that helps us to investigate when we are influenced by our past and gives us tools to free ourselves from the grip of that past.
EFIT or Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy is the individual variant of EFT as we know it for couples. This therapy was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson (Johnson, 2009 & 2019) and has essentially the same therapeutic goal as couples EFT: we help clients appreciate the way they become trapped in self-affirmed patterns. From there we create emotionally corrective experiences together in which they develop new ways to relate to their own emotions and experiences, to significant others and to the existential dilemmas in life. Here too, attachment theory provides the guideline to understanding clients and their pain and directs therapeutic processes and interventions towards sustainable change.
EFIT helps clients move from a more defensive and rigid way of relating to themselves and others. Clients learn to experience their emotions in a new way, developing meaningful coherent images of themselves. This leads them to connect with themselves and significant others in a new way. EFIT thus, like EFT, has both an intrapsychic and interpersonal focus.
“Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood and untreated cause of human suffering”
Relatie therapie
Relationships with others, especially your love affair, have perhaps the most important influence on our happiness and health. At the same time, keeping our relationship good, after the infatuation phase, and under pressure from many factors, is usually very difficult. If you're both willing to take responsibility for your own part in the relationship, great things can happen. You learn to speak a new language together, which makes it easier for you to connect, even in difficult moments. Discovering together what is really going on in the relationship, in the safe setting of the therapy, is enormously empowering. I work with a combination of Emotionally Focused Therapy, Psychosomatic Experiencing and Past reality Integration. Our (often distorted) perception of our partner, and that which bothers us, appears to be largely about our own nervous system, our attachment styles and therefore about the experiences from the past. We unconsciously project our past onto our partner.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”
meditation
Mediation is a confidential and structured process of voluntary consultation between conflicting parties, with the involvement of an independent, neutral and impartial third party, which facilitates communication and attempts to induce the parties to work out a solution themselves. In case of conflict, the best method is to keep talking. But if you are at a crossroads that seems impossible, a third person such as a mediator can often clarify this, to keep talking together in a dignified and respectful way.
I offer you a situation in which valuable solutions can be investigated, in which you continue to maintain control, but together you can make the best agreements instead of starting lengthy and costly proceedings in court.
At the moment, I will only mediate when an agreement that can be approved by the court is not necessary.
“Most people listen do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply”