About me

Systemic Therapist — Hastings Aotearoa – New Zealand & Online

I am a systemic psychotherapist with more than 25 years of clinical experience working with individuals, couples, and families across a wide range of mental health, relational, and life challenges. My practice draws on systemic psychotherapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and transcultural thinking — not as separate tools, but as an integrated way of understanding people and what they carry.

I work with complexity. That is not a disclaimer — it is what I am trained for and what I find genuinely meaningful. Systemic psychotherapy is often associated with couples and family therapy, and while that is part of what I do, it is a much broader discipline than that. It is a full psychotherapeutic approach — one that works with the complete range of individual, relational, and life difficulties, and understands them within the relationships, histories, and systems that shape them. People come to this practice with depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, grief, relational distress, and more. Some carry a diagnosis. Some are navigating something that has not responded to other approaches. What they share is that their difficulty makes more sense — and becomes more workable — when it is understood in context rather than in isolation. A fuller account of what systemic psychotherapy is and what it can reach is on the Approaches page.

My manner in sessions is calm, empathic, patient, and personal. I take people’s situations seriously without reducing them to a label or a treatment protocol.

How I work

My practice is grounded in three approaches that I bring together as an integrated whole.

Systemic psychotherapy understands distress in context — shaped by relationships, family history, cultural worlds, and wider systems, rather than located only within the individual. This is a meaningfully different starting point from most therapeutic models, and it shifts both where we look and what becomes possible.

Emotionally Focused Therapy brings close attention to emotional and attachment experience — how connection, disconnection, and isolation shape wellbeing — and works with this at the level of the individual, the couple, or the wider family system depending on what is needed.

Transcultural thinking approaches culture, identity, and belonging with genuine curiosity rather than assumptions. Ethnicity does not equal culture, and I do not prescribe what someone’s background should mean to them. The work creates space for people to discover who they are and how they relate to the cultural and religious worlds they carry — on their own terms.

In practice these three do not operate separately. Sessions are responsive rather than formulaic, and work with what is actually present rather than what is planned.

A fuller account of all three approaches — what they are, how they connect, and what the research behind them shows — is on the Approaches page.

Who I work with

I work with adults, couples, and families. People come with a wide range of difficulties:

Depression · Anxiety · Trauma · Addiction · Grief and loss · Relationship difficulties · Co-parenting challenges after separation · Personality-related challenges including borderline, avoidant, and narcissistic patterns · Eating difficulties · Perinatal mental health · ADHD and neurodiversity · Autism spectrum · Abuse — survivors, people considering leaving, and people who want to change their own behaviour · Parenting challenges · Migration, cultural, and religious challenges in individuals and families · LGBTQ+ related concerns · Chronic illness · Work-related stress

Some people come with a diagnosis. Others come with a feeling they cannot name. Some have had support from multiple services, tried different approaches, and found that something was not fully reached. This practice is a good fit for anyone carrying something complex — and particularly for those whose difficulties touch multiple areas of life without any single approach having brought lasting change, or whose challenges are rooted in relational experience, family patterns, or cultural and life transitions.

My background

My path into this work was not planned. I began studying social work in the Netherlands — a four-year degree that integrates counselling and psychology alongside social and cultural studies — because I was drawn to the subject mix. I had actually wanted to study cultural anthropology but could not see where it would take me practically. Social work felt like the closest fit. Becoming a therapist was not part of the plan.

What changed that were three student placements: in addiction, with refugees, and in acute psychiatry. What I encountered in all three was the same thing — how deeply isolation, broken connection, and relational disruption were woven into people’s suffering.

That led directly to my graduating research project, Werken aan Intimiteit — Working on Intimacy — in which I explored how the quality of close relationships shapes psychological wellbeing, and how reconnection can be part of healing. Looking back, it mapped almost exactly where my career would eventually go: systemic psychotherapy, emotionally focused therapy, and transcultural work. I just did not know it yet.

I was offered a counselling role in my final year of study in 2001 — took it as a job, not a calling — and ended up staying for seven and a half years, learning from an experienced clinical team. Three and a half of those years involved working alongside mental health services with asylum seekers: complex trauma, sustained uncertainty, cultural worlds in collision. That work was formative in ways that still shape how I sit with people today. It also led me to a one-year postgraduate training in transcultural systemic work, which I found so compelling that I followed it immediately with a two-year post-master specialisation in systemic psychotherapy.

What followed was a broad range of clinical settings: crisis youth and family services, child and adolescent mental health, a research project working with children with morbid obesity, addiction treatment, specialist psychological residential care and aftercare, and private practice — running in parallel for much of that time.

In 2019 I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, where I have since worked for the Salvation Army Bridge Programme, Manaaki House Community Mental Health Centre, Oranga Tamariki, and Barnardos Aotearoa. Each gave me a different window into this country’s therapeutic landscape — and a clearer sense of what I believe is missing from it. That eventually brought me back to private practice, and to building something where systemic and transcultural psychotherapy can be offered properly — an approach that remains almost entirely unavailable in New Zealand.

A personal note

My own background is culturally and religiously mixed — navigating what looks from the outside like a majority position but is in reality the meeting point of two minority identities. I have experienced exclusion and racism, including in professional settings. My cultural identity is not simple; it is made up of many parts and connections, and I have spent my life moving between worlds that do not always recognise each other.

That has not always been comfortable. But it has made multicultural settings feel like home in a way that monocultural ones never quite have. My closest friendships across my life have reflected that mix — people who shared my background wholly or partially, and people from backgrounds that might surprise you. I have always been proud of that.

Moving to New Zealand has been its own navigation. Coming from a country with a long history of multicultural complexity, I found myself in a place where identity is often understood through a bicultural lens — Māori and everyone else. I understand the historical and political reasons for that framing, and I respect what it protects. But in my experience, and in my work, reducing identity to two categories leaves a great deal of who people actually are unnamed and unexplored. Many people carry layers of cultural identity, belonging, and history that do not fit neatly into any box. Some are not even aware of those layers yet. Part of what this practice offers is a space where that complexity can be held, examined, and owned where it is relevant to what brought you here — without you being simplified into something more manageable but less true.

I do not think my path was accidental. The work I do, and the way I do it, grew directly from who I am and what I have had to navigate. That is part of why it speaks to me as deeply as it does.

Training, qualifications & Experience 

Bachelor of Social Work — CHE, Netherlands Postgraduate Transcultural Systemic Approach (1yr) & Post-master Transcultural Systemic Psychotherapy (2 yrs) — at the CTTO Amsterdam Aditional: Emotionally Focused Therapy — ICEEFT Externship and Advanced Training Psychodynamic Group Therapy — basic and post-master 

25+ years of clinical experience across the Netherlands and Aotearoa New Zealand, in private practice & community & residential treatment.

Meir System Therapy is a practice for face-to-face  therapy and support, based in Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand.

The work is also available online, across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.

Who the practice is for

This practice is for individuals, couples, families, and professionals who are experiencing emotional, relational, or life difficulties and want to understand themselves and their relationships more deeply — especially where things feel complex, stuck, or difficult to put into words.

You are welcome here when navigating challenges such as mental health difficulties, relational or family stress, trauma, addiction, personality-related struggles, or ongoing patterns that feel hard to shift.

Some people come with formal diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism spectrum, post-traumatic stress disorder, or addiction. Others come without any diagnosis, but with a sense that something is not working internally, relationally, or in their life more broadly.

Often, difficulties are not experienced in isolation, but as multiple overlapping factors at the same time. Within families, different individual experiences, stressors, or diagnoses can interact in ways that make relationships and daily life more complex and harder to navigate.

From a systemic perspective, all of this information can be helpful in understanding the picture, but it is not the whole picture. We also pay attention to the wider context — including relationships, communication patterns, family dynamics, culture, identity, work, and the environments you are part of.

This may also include experiences around parenting, co-parenting after separation or divorce, considering separation, or navigating the impact of these changes within family systems.

Many people come when they are living with overlapping experiences — where emotional, relational, cultural, and practical pressures are all interacting at once.

This can include experiences shaped by culture and identity, such as immigration, bicultural relationships, religious or value differences, or navigating belonging across different worlds.