Zeljka Tomas
Counsellor
I specialise in:
About me
The largest part of my life I spent working in science, but my never-ending curiosity and the urge to discover a deeper meaning and understanding of our inner worlds and a search for greater sense of purpose and autenticity in my own life led me to the studies of body-oriented therapy and movement, learning more about the human psyche and how it relates to our body, and finally to become a body-oriented psychotherapist and trauma-informed dance teacher. Witnessing my clients evolve into more open, self-loving, and conscious people by shifting their limiting patterns and opening themselves to more aliveness and abundance in their lives touches me deeply, and the gratitute I feel for being a supportive ally on their journey ensures me that I truly chose the right calling. Since the recent pandemic locked all of us down, I started offering online session and currently most of my practice is online. I recognize and make use of the positive sides of online therapy, and since I had time to practice, I found successful ways to work around the limitation it has. In my online practice I worked with people living in Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and UK, which gave me an opportunity to have an insight into sociocultural specificities important for successful therapy. I also offer dance classes for women who would love to explore their relationship with femininity and sensuality in a more conscious and mindful way. As a trauma-informed dance teacher, I can clearly see how these topics often open personal and transgenerational traumas which can be safely explored without retraumatization with a therapist who has deep compassion and knowledge gained not only through formal education aimed at working with trauma but also from personal experience.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
As a body-oriented psychoterapist, I see the mind and body as an integrated whole. In our sessions I will pay a lot of attention to how you describe feelings and physical sensations that you sense, and what you experience in your body in relation to those feelings. This is maybe the greatest difference between therapies that rely solely on the talking and body-oriented approach.
You probably already noticed that you know a lot about yourself and your problems, and although you understand everything, nothing crucially changes, at least not in the long run. That happens because we can understand everything on a mental, even on an emotional level, but the real change happens only when that knowing is also truth on the level of you body. Only then you can truly embody the change and that's why body-oriented approach is so valuable.
In our sessions I hold a safe space for you in which you will feel really heard and seen with acceptance and without any judgment. In that space we co-create an opportunity for you to see yourself in a different way, with compassion and hopefully curiosity as limiting patterns that were once protective emerge and tell a story of your life that is still stored in your body.
In the course of therapy, we will look into these limiting patterns and circumstances that created them, and gently unfold them in order to find a way towards more authentic and fullfiling expression in you life. Experience of this new way to approach life and integration of this change set a path for moving from learned helplessness towards empowerment and greater sense of purpose in your life.
.jpg)
