Cas Hebbink

I'm a psychological counsellor from Amsterdam, living in Berlin. During my life, I have struggled with challenging behavioural patterns, such as excessive gaming, drug use, watching pornography, and procrastinating. Consequently, I have long been interested in figuring out how to change these destructive tendencies and develop healthy, constructive habits instead. Over the years, I've frequently beaten myself up over my self-proclaimed "failures", shamed, blamed and resented myself for not being able to overcome what I judged to be my demons. More recently, however, I've come to realize that my issues were not with my behaviours themselves but rather with my appraisal of them and my resulting self-condemnation. Thus, through mindfulness practice, self-inquiry, personal psychotherapy, group therapy and much self-study, I've learned that behavioural change follows from self-acceptance, compassion and understanding rather than self-censorship, contempt and criticism. Through the struggles with trying to control, improve and heal myself, I've learned a lot about the human psyche, behavioural change, emotional regulation, mindfulness, honest communication, trauma processing, somatic processing, problem solving and the importance of taking responsibility for one's life and accepting who one is. During my psychology studies, I've gained the most from setting up and participating in a peer-support group in which we openly explored our experiences. I learned to cultivate attitudes of unconditional positive regard, genuineness and empathic understanding towards myself and others. I learned how to receive others more wholly and help them come closer to themselves by immersing myself in their experience as best as I could. I want to share what I've learned with others who, like me, need support in their life. Through my counselling service, I wish to help you help yourself by providing you with a loving, caring environment to facilitate your personal growth.