Techniques & methods
In a session, I work with what you need in that moment. Below are all the approaches and techniques I use - each with its own explanation.
Techniques are never the end in themselves. They are the way back to yourself - to what your body already knows, but what your head could not yet say.
- Tuur Van HoveBy grounding I mean: getting well in touch with the earth, so that you have both feet on the ground. You bring your attention and energy down from your head - to your body, your legs, your feet.
Grounding helps you to be present in the here and now. It is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to quickly calm down and land within yourself.
Bioenergetic exercises - developed by Alexander Lowen - are physical exercises to become more aware of your own body. By engaging the body in certain postures and breathing deeper, you get in touch with tensions and emotions you have locked away.
By feeling and expressing those tensions and emotions - in movement and with your voice - you can break through them. You literally and figuratively get more peace, space and relaxation. Stuck-up energy is released and can flow again.
Bioenergetics is partly the basis for emotional bodywork and body-oriented psychotherapy.
Centering is focusing your attention completely on yourself - on your center. So that you are in touch with yourself and your body, instead of being scattered or distracted.
It is a basic skill that recurs in almost every session: the conscious choice to return to yourself.
Emotional bodywork is a body-oriented therapeutic method that works on both mental and physical health through body exercises and introspection. It has its origins with Alexander Lowen and Wilhelm Reich.
Important elements are breathing exercises, exertion, release and relaxation exercises, and voice work. You learn to formulate goals and to examine the obstacles you experience in doing so - in your head and in your body.
Reichian bodywork, developed by Wilhelm Reich, is a gentle method of exploring and releasing blockages and tensions in your body - through your breath and body movements.
Reich discovered that repressed feelings record themselves as muscle tension and blockages - what he called "body armor. By consciously breathing and moving, you become aware of this and can release it.
Body-centered psychotherapy is an umbrella term for forms of treatment that assume that the body, thoughts, emotions and feelings are inextricably linked. By working that connection, you improve the well-being of the whole person.
Its principal founder is Wilhelm Reich. Other important names include Moshé Feldenkrais, Alexander Lowen, Stanley Keleman and John Pierrakos. From this emerged bioenergetics, core-energetics, emotional bodywork, rebirthing and primal therapy, among others.
Rebirthing is a powerful yet simple breathing technique that puts you in touch with your own life energy. You connect the inhale with the exhale in a continuous relaxed rhythm, leaving out the pauses.
By breathing fully and deeply in this way, you become aware of blockages in your breathing and your body. In a series of sessions, efforts are made to free the breath, which can also release associated emotions. This gives space, relaxation and often new energy.
With targeted relaxation techniques, I guide you to deeper layers of peace in your body. This can be through focusing on breathing, through body scan, through visualization or through voice and sound.
Relaxation is not only pleasant - it is the prerequisite for any deeper work. Only when your nervous system knows it is safe can anything move.
Bonding is a primal technique - developed by Arthur Janov - that takes you back to your earliest experiences. You explore what kind of bonding (attachment) you did or did not have with your mother in your early childhood.
Early bonding experiences form the basis of how we later relate to closeness, safety and connection. Bonding helps you awaken and heal those old layers.
CBT techniques focus on the relationship between thinking, feeling and doing. Negative - often automatic and barely noticed - thoughts produce unpleasant feelings that in turn influence your behavior.
By making those thoughts conscious, examining whether they are true, and replacing them with more realistic beliefs, how you feel and how you act also shifts. Sometimes we look for the origin: the basic inner belief that underlies it.
Gestalt therapy - developed by Fritz Perls, inspired by Zen Buddhism - places awareness, meditation and the here-and-now at its center. Not the question "why?" is central, but "how?" Not insight, but direct felt experience.
You examine one specific event or situation from the inside out: how does it feel right now, and how do you react in that moment? You can also explore a part within yourself - by literally sitting in it and letting it speak to you. See also inner dialogue.
NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. Its premise is that people organize their experiences through language and patterns, and that we can control how we live our subjective experiences.
Most NLP techniques bring you back from thinking to direct sensory experience. A different way of organizing the same impression leads to different feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
Every person has an "inner child": a part in us that still lives in the feelings and beliefs of the child we once were. As long as we are not aware of it, those old layers can strongly determine our feelings and behavior - even now, as adults.
By making those layers conscious and (re)experiencing them, you can release them and live more from your adult self. Inner child work forms a central pillar in Primal Rebirth Therapy.
The inner dialogue is a gestalttechnique in which you allow a conversation to occur between two parts within yourself - for example, between your inner child and the adult you are now.
You literally move from one place to another, always adopting the body posture and mood associated with that part. Thus the inner conflict or need becomes visible and tangible.
In a family constellation, you literally put your family - or another system - in space with the help of representatives. This makes the dynamics of the system visible: who stands where, how does everyone relate to each other, what is present undercurrent?
Family constellations go beyond the individual: they show how patterns and pain can carry over from generation to generation - and how they can be broken. More about setups →
For me, meditation is not a technique - it is a way of being. Meditation is nothing but observing: observing your body, your emotions, your thoughts without interpretation or judgment. Without going into it, fixing it or pushing it away.
This is how you become a witness to all that is within you. From your center, in contact with the here and now. This gives peace, stillness and clarity.
We also work with active meditations: first moving or sounding to bring out the restlessness, then creating space for stillness.
Mindfulness is a contemporary term for what is essentially the same as meditation: being consciously present in the here and now, without judgment about what is.
The popularity of the term is relatively new, but the practice has been around for centuries. In the sessions, I use mindfulness as a basic attitude - not as a formal practice, but as a way to continually return to yourself. See also meditation.
In a guided fantasy I guide you through relaxation into a light trance, in which you get in touch with the child in yourself. I take you into a visual story - sometimes supported by music - but within that story there is plenty of room for your own images and interpretation.
Those images come from deeper layers within yourself: your hurt or happy inner child, your subconscious. Often they are beautiful metaphors that show what is really going on inside you.
Imagination is the inner evocation of an image - of a situation, a person, a place or a feeling. The use of images helps you explore feelings, thoughts and physical experiences from a particular situation more closely.
Images sometimes bypass rational thinking and bring you closer to what is really going on. A visualization can also take the form of a guided fantasy.
Dancing is a simple and fun way to get comfortable in your body. You bring energy from your head to your torso, legs and arms. You breathe deeper, you are in motion, and you can use your body to express what is going on inside you.
Dance is a regular element in group sessions and trainings - it lowers the threshold and brings connection naturally.
Drawing is another way to express what you are feeling - without words. You capture the feeling of that moment in a picture. This can be surprisingly enlightening: images sometimes show things that language cannot capture.
You don't have to be an artist. It's not about the result - it's about the process of expression.
Wondering how this feels in practice?
In a free consultation, I will be happy to tell you what approach is right for you - and what to expect from an initial session.
Schedule a free consultation
