Here's just a small sampling of what we offer to help people thrive.
Psychedelics-assisted CFT
Sound meditation
IFS
CBT
EMDR
CFT
Psychedelics-assisted CFT
Integration is the art of interpreting the journey’s mythical and symbolic layers, revealing its gifts and treasures, and anchoring them into our lives.
Research shows that journeys are a powerful way to alter perception and mood, and affect numerous cognitive processes. They are generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction (Griffiths et al.,2016; Ross et al., 2016; Grob et al., 2011; Mutonni et al., 2019; Jerome et al., 2020). Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, notes that "These long-term follow-up findings show that once people with PTSD learn that they can productively process traumatic memories instead of suppressing them, they can continue to heal themselves even after they have stopped receiving MDMA-assisted psychotherapy”.
When combined with personalized psychotherapy, a journey is a way towards healing, recovery, and self-discovery. The effect of the journey will be greatly enhanced by applying psychotherapy techniques before, during and after the journey from the framework of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). As a coach, I will help create the setting, and support and guide you during your journey, so we together we create the most healing and transformational experience.
See for more information on the treatment protocol: Pots, W. & Chakhssi, F. (2022). Psilocybin-assisted Compassion Focused Therapy for Depression. Frontiers of Psychology, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.812930.
SOUND MEDITATION
The power of sound is phenomenal. Sound is frequencies and frequencies are vibrations that our body resonates with. The capacity of sound for healing is especially impactful when we listen. My teacher of this sound meditation protocol, David Shemesh, tells us to “Follow the Sound”. What he means by that is basically to use sound as an inner kompas and resonance tool that will help us harmonize and balance.
Sound meditation is a protocol for the ceremony where we will follow the sound by allowing ourselves to enter deep meditative states while riding the waves of different frequencies. Theta and alpha sound waves stimulate a downregulated system, while beta states stimulate our more active sympathetic system. As we all know, our monkey mind can come alive at any time, and sometimes it’s hard to make it stop, to just not think for a moment and rest. A lot of our living being, our sympathetic nervous system is activated and we’re not resting.
With the vibrations of different sounds, we can reach the body to get back to a rest-and-digest state again, while also creating opportunities to process stuck and unresolved emotions.
A sound meditation journey is a profound practice that combines the ancient wisdom of sound healing with modern techniques of meditation. It is an immersive experience where participants are guided through a sequence of sounds and vibrations designed to induce deep relaxation, inner exploration, and spiritual growth.
For more information on Sound meditation see the website of Alexandre Tannous: https://soundmeditation.com/
COMPASSION FOCUSED therapy (CFT)
A relatively new way to influence your negative thoughts and feelings is to create and increase your level of self-compassion. A lot of people suffer from a lack of self compassion, even when they are compassionate towards others. Compassion is an evolved motivational system designed to regulate negative emotions through attuning to the feelings of self and others, and expressing and communicating feelings of affiliation, warmth and safeness. People that have experienced traumas in their lives tend to be harsh on themselves, sometimes as a way of control to make the world more predictable. Building self-compassion is particularly helpful for individuals with a heightened threat mode and self-critical styles of thinking, characterized by the tendency to negatively evaluate and judge aspects of the self.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) is a therapy that is developed by Paul Gilbert, originally for people with chronic depression. Several meta-analyses demonstrate efficacy for compassion-based interventions in various (non)clinical populations with moderate to large effects on depression and well-being. The primary aim of CFT is to help clients develop compassion and create a better sense of social connectedness to understand and respond to their distress from the perspective of a compassionate mind. Through the incorporation of a range of compassion-based skills, attributes, and qualities, clients become more distress aware and insightful, learning how to develop empathy and distress tolerance and how to take wise and compassionate action to address distress. Exercises are breath work combined with compassion focused imagery exercises.
For more information on CFT: http://www.compassionfocusedtherapy.com/.
You can fill in the questionnaire to see what the level of your self-compassion is: https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-test/
internal family systems (ifs)
The Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) is an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is made up of parts, each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities. IFS uses family systems theory to understand how these parts are organized.
IFS posits that the mind is made up of multiple parts, and underlying them is a person's core or true Self. Like members of a family, a person's inner parts can take on extreme roles or subpersonalities. Each part has its own perspective, interests, memories, and viewpoint, and are related to someones personal life or history. A core tenet of IFS is that every part has a positive intent, even if its actions are counterproductive and/or cause dysfunction. As they say in IFS, there are no bad parts. There is no need to fight with, coerce, or eliminate parts; the IFS method promotes internal connection and harmony to bring the mind back into balance.
IFS therapy aims to heal wounded parts and restore mental balance by creating a cooperative and trusting relationship between the Self and each part. The first step is to access the core Self and then, from there, understand the different parts in order to heal them.
For more information on IFS: https://selfleadership.org
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.
The central aim of ACT is to create psychological flexibility by teaching skills that increase an individual's willingness to come into fuller contact with their experiences, recognition of a person’s values in life, and commit to behaviors that are consistent with those values. ACT encourages people to think and feel, without attempting to change or suppress their thoughts and feelings, and helps people move in a valued direction, with all of their experiences and learned behavior patterns. Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises you will learn how to connect with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. In the therapy skills are taught to recontextualize and accept these private experiences, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.
For more information on ACT: https://contextualscience.org/about_act
EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIzATION AND REPROCESSING (EMDR)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a therapy for people who as a result of traumatic events experience psychological difficulties in their lives. Certain events can leave a distinctive mark on people’s lives. A large part of people affected by negative events process on their own accord using their own resources. Others develop psychological problems, usually whereby the traumatic event is being re-experienced, for example in fearful images (flashbacks, intrusive images) and nightmares. Other symptoms that often occur are fear and avoidance responses. This is generally referred to as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety based disorders. These are problems caused by a specific, horrific event, whereby thinking of this event still gives a strong emotional reaction.
Traumatic or impactful experiences in the past are often connected to our core vulnerabilities. Feelings of anxiety, stress and powerlessness can be trapped inside a memory, and (un)consciously pop up in your daily life. Those feelings in your daily life are more rigid and not as easy to process when the feeling is in fact related to wounds from the (recent) past. The desired way to work is to heal specific wounds that are connected to a feeling of unworthiness or powerlessness, and as a result this will have influence on your wellbeing and core beliefs.
For more information, see the website about EMDR: http://www.emdr.com/ or read through the Dutch flyer of EMDR.
cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression and anxiety disorders. Numerous research studies suggest that CBT leads to significant improvement in functioning and quality of life.
CBT is a treatment approach that helps you recognize negative or dysfunctional thought and behavior patterns. It aims to help you identify and explore the ways your emotions and thoughts can affect your actions. Because emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are all linked, CBT approaches allow to intervene at different points in the cycle.
For more information on CBT, see https://www.abct.org/