I spent 7 years living and studying in a small town in the Netherlands called Groningen. And coming from an even smaller german town originally.
I am a passionate musician, yogi, sailor and outdoor lover. Also, I believe that the field of psychology holds valuable ideas and approaches to finding a healthy synchronization between our inner representation of the world and the actual world around us, as well as a more fundamental life energy within; or beyond, as you will.
Throughout my life I was fascinated by the mysterious properties of conscious life, long before I was even able to understand or use these words to describe them. The ability to introspect, the innate temptation to speculate what is going on in other people's minds and the ability as well as the failure to make use of and communicate mind content effectively are ever more interesting to me. And on top of that arose the question: what if we manage to, at least for a moment, silence mind activity to a minimum...what are we then?
What I find, personally, is an endless seeming source of pleasure and peace. However, I am aware that more and more often, people find themselves in a state of imbalance between themselves and the world. Detached from a deep within or beyond, suffering symptoms that might be due to faulty brainchemistry or braindamage, physical illness, substances or other life circumstances which they have no or little control over. I know from self-exprience, years of intrigued studying and from accompanying numerous friends and clients in phases of instability and imbalance, that there are as many trajectories and symptomatologies as there are humans suffering.
I feel not just responsible, but actually excited about trying to guide people towards activating there self-healing properties and towards learning to take care of themselves in a way that allows them to lead a life as peacful and happy as they deserve.
Life is never linear and nothing can be said to be the one cure for all mental illness or un-wellbeing. The life we know is unspeakably complex and the number of factors influencing one's development are countless. Yet, sometimes the answer to big questions might lay in the simplicity of things; I believe that many times the noise that is created in our heads by stimuli from outside and inside, such as expectations from others and ourselves, memories, rumination, worries and projections of the future, obstruct our view on the purity and simplicity of life in a given moment. Our bodies and minds are designed to receive and generate joy and pleasure in an adaptive fassion. Like a compass that leads us to what helps us flourish. If we manage to align ourselves with our inner compass (e.g. intuition), and then reinforce it by experiencing that it actually leads us to positive outcome, then our faith will grow and our wellbeing will automatically follow. Meanwhile, our general understanding and expectation of life that make up the filters through which we perceive the world will transform into more positive ones; therefore, life will (seem to) be more positive. "Smile into the world and the world will smile at you."
Actually, the abundance of evidence suggesting that positive attitude leads to a better outcome would not have been necessary for me to believe that it's true. That is not to say that negative emotions don't play an important role, too. They do! But the question is: how do you make them work for you and not against you?!
This being said, it is clear that the individual client is the center of the therapy. And an individual, of course, is never separate from the social, cultural and historical context it is embedded in. Thus, a holistic, client-centered approach will be used. With these ideas in mind, I want to collaboratively dismantel what it is, that the client is struggeling with and try to effectively activate the client's self-healing properties.