I see psychological counseling first and foremost as a source of solidarity. My aim is to provide psychological guidance in personal matters, and the first step to go about this is usually to get a good overview of what these matters entail in the first place. As a client, you can expect a confidential environment in which I will serve as an experienced interlocutor, and together we will take a step back to look at the situation from a safe distance. To disentangle the influence of different factors in one’s life and identify circumstances that are causing distress can be difficult while in the midst of it, and in many situations such an attempt at clarification can already be quite impactful.
The other part of counseling largely revolves around the question of how one can then live best under the present circumstances. I am very interested in the scientific basis of all the different forms of psychotherapy, and my approach is to take all those techniques that have proven effective and to suggest them in practice as I see fit. As a psychological counselor, I want to give educated advice regarding the different ways in which one can approach a problem, and I see it as a strength of my practice as a counselor that I am not confined to any particular discipline of psychotherapy.
Depending on the situation, different strategies can be useful for dealing with the challenges of everyday life. As a psychologist, I will therefore adopt different roles to support you, depending on your demands. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of systemic therapy, my practice can be summarized in four distinct roles:
- inform, educate, instruct (teacher)
- listen, relieve, clarify feelings and create space for exploration (facilitator)
- encourage to explore experiences and views of oneself and one’s environment and to draw conclusions based on those explorations (consultant)
- provide feedback as well as my own observations, review and evaluate goals (evaluator)