I am a native to the Maastricht region. I graduated as MSc. in Mental Health Care Psychology in 2017 from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and began my work as a therapist in 2018.
I work exclusively with individuals on a one-on-one psychotherapeutic basis. I have most of my experience in long-term psychotherapy, usually for problematic patterns that developed in childhood. I however also work on a more short-term basis, especially with students who are only here for a limited time.
My technical orientation is experiential and psychodynamic, combining a direct (body and feeling) experience focus – similar to mindfulness – with the depth of psychoanalytic work with the unconscious.
What this means in practice is that we will be exploring your embodied experience in the moment as you sit with me and talk with me about the problem that you would like help with. It also means that we are attentive to defense strategies that you habitually apply to distance from yourself and others, to avoid intimacy, and to habitually repeat a kind of self-neglect as you experienced in early life.
I am always learning, not just from my courses, but also from my colleagues through individual and group supervision. I learn from my clients, from their experiences and what they tell me. And, yes, finally I also learn from formal schooling. I have taken several psychodynamic and psychoanalytic courses, both in The Netherlands, The UK (London), and in New York with the W.A. White Institute. Most of my training has been in a group of therapies called EDT – Experiential Dynamic therapy.