The following areas give an overview of the support available at this practice. If what you are dealing with does not fit neatly into one category, that is completely normal — feel free to get in touch and we can talk through what might be most useful.
Individual therapy
Many people come to therapy on their own — to make sense of a pattern they keep finding themselves in, to process something that has happened, to understand themselves more clearly, or simply because something feels stuck and they are not sure why. You do not need to be in crisis to benefit from therapy, and you do not need to arrive with a clear problem to solve.
Individual therapy at this practice can support people experiencing depression, anxiety, and a broad range of mental health challenges. This includes working with personality-related patterns — including those associated with borderline and narcissistic personality organisation — not as fixed diagnoses, but as ways of understanding the relational and emotional dynamics that can make life feel difficult or stuck.
I work with trauma of any kind — whether from childhood, adult relationships, cultural displacement, or specific events. This includes the processing and recovery from sexual abuse and from experiences of violence. Addiction, both substance-related (alcohol, drugs) and behavioural (gambling, compulsive sexual behaviour, and related patterns), is also an area I have worked with extensively, approached within the relational and systemic context in which it develops and is maintained.
I also work with dependency and relational patterns sometimes described clinically in terms of anxious attachment or personality-related traits — including what is colloquially called “love addiction.” These patterns often involve a painful cycle of intense connection, fear of abandonment, and difficulty sustaining a stable sense of self within relationships. Understanding these dynamics systemically is often more useful than a purely diagnostic frame.
Personal development — understanding yourself more clearly, relating more effectively, and living more intentionally — is a legitimate and valuable reason to come to therapy. This includes working through inner conflicts, questions of meaning and direction, religious or spiritual tensions, the impact of your choices on others, or a recurring pattern of decisions that keeps producing painful results.
Self-harm (self-mutilation) is something I can work with, though a safety plan is required before this work begins. Please see the Safety & Support page for more information.
Couples therapy
Couples work is a significant part of this practice. I work with partners navigating growing apart, a breakdown of trust, communication difficulties, emotional disconnection, or the aftermath of relational harm. This includes relationship trauma, betrayal, and the impact of past experiences on current intimacy.
Sexual concerns within relationships are something I work with openly and without judgement. I also support couples facing the strain that parenting young children or teenagers can place on a relationship, disagreements about parenting approaches, and the particular challenges that arise when partners have different cultural backgrounds or value systems.
For couples on the brink of separation or legal proceedings, systemic therapy can sometimes offer a different path — one that allows both people to explore what is possible before entering a process that is emotionally and financially costly. This requires both partners to be genuinely willing to engage.
Domestic violence and relationship harm can be worked with therapeutically, but a safety plan must be in place before this work begins. Please see the Safety & Support page for more information.
Family therapy
Family therapy looks at the patterns, dynamics, and communication within a family system — not to assign blame, but to understand how difficulties develop and are maintained within relationships, and how things can shift.
I work with families navigating conflict, communication breakdown, significant disagreement between family members, and situations where strong and entrenched positions have made it hard to move forward. This includes families dealing with the impact of mental health challenges, addiction, trauma, or personality-related difficulties within the family system.
Family therapy is available for families with young children, families with teenagers, and families navigating the transition into adult relationships between parents and grown children. Where there are active safety concerns within the family — including neglect or abuse — a safety plan will need to be in place before therapeutic work begins.
Parenting support
Parenting is one of the most demanding relational experiences there is, and it rarely comes with adequate preparation. Parenting support at this practice is not about being told what to do — it is about understanding the dynamics at play, developing more effective ways of connecting and communicating, and finding approaches that work for your family.
I work with parents of young children, parents of teenagers, and parents navigating the often-complex shift into a relationship with an adult child. This includes support around behavioural challenges, emotional difficulties, parent-child conflict, and situations where a parent is concerned about their child’s wellbeing or development.
I also work with parents who want to move away from physical punishment or emotionally harmful patterns — not with judgement, but with genuine support for change. And I work with parents carrying concerns about neglect or abuse within their family system, where a safety plan will be part of our work together.
Neurodevelopmental differences — including ADHD and autism in both children and adults — are something I work with in the context of family and parenting dynamics. The focus is not on diagnosis or treatment, but on understanding how these differences affect communication, connection, and the day-to-day experience of family life, and on finding ways to work with them rather than against them.
Co-parenting support
Separation and divorce do not end the parenting relationship — they change it, often in ways that are painful, complicated, and hard to navigate. Co-parenting support is for parents who are separated or divorcing and want to find a way to parent together that protects their children from the weight of adult conflict, even when the relationship between the parents is difficult.
This work focuses on communication, boundaries, and the practical and emotional challenges of raising children across two households. It can also support parents who are considering separation and want to understand what co-parenting might look like before making decisions, and parents who are already in entrenched conflict and are looking for a way through.
For couples on the brink of legal proceedings, systemic therapy can sometimes offer an alternative — a space to work out what is possible together before the process becomes adversarial. This requires both parents to be genuinely willing to try.
Work and professional support
Work-related difficulties are rarely just about work. Conflict with a colleague or manager, a sense of being chronically misunderstood in professional contexts, patterns of difficulty that follow you from one workplace to the next, or the stress of navigating a workplace that does not reflect your cultural background or identity — these are relational and systemic challenges as much as they are professional ones.
A transcultural systemic approach can be particularly useful here, especially for people working across cultural contexts or in environments where their background or identity creates an additional layer of complexity. I work with professionals navigating workplace conflict, people experiencing burnout in relational or caring professions, and individuals trying to understand why the same dynamics keep showing up in their professional lives.
This support is available as individual therapy or, where appropriate, as a focused piece of work specifically around professional challenges.
Neurodiversity support
Neurodiversity — including ADHD, autism, and related differences — shapes how people experience themselves, their relationships, and the world around them in profound ways. And yet much of that experience goes unrecognised, misunderstood, or only partially understood — sometimes for decades.
I work with neurodivergent adults and with families and parents of neurodivergent children. This is not diagnostic work — it is relational and systemic work that focuses on understanding how neurodevelopmental differences affect communication, emotional experience, relationships, and identity, and on finding ways to navigate those differences with more clarity and less conflict.
For adults, this often includes making sense of a late diagnosis, understanding how ADHD or autism has shaped their relationships and life choices, and developing a more integrated and compassionate understanding of themselves. For families and parents, it includes learning how to communicate more effectively, reduce friction, and support a neurodivergent child or partner without losing sight of the relationship.
LGBT and identity
I work with LGBT individuals, couples, and families in relational and systemic contexts, and welcome people of all identities and orientations. This is a space without assumption or judgement — about who you are, who you love, or how you understand yourself.
Support in this area includes working through the relational challenges that can arise around sexual orientation and gender identity — including within families and partnerships, and in wider social and cultural contexts. This may include navigating coming out, managing the responses of family members or communities, or working through the particular relational dynamics that can arise in same-sex or queer relationships.
In terms of gender identity, I can work with individuals who identify as transgender within a relational and systemic frame — supporting the relational challenges that arise around gender identity, including within families and partnerships. I do not provide gender-affirming clinical assessment or treatment, but I can work with the relational and emotional dimensions of that journey.
For people whose sexual or relational identity has been shaped or complicated by religious or cultural context, I am particularly experienced in holding that complexity without reducing it.
Cultural identity and belonging
Finding a therapist who genuinely understands the experience of living between cultures — or of not quite belonging to any single one — is not easy. This is an area where my clinical training and personal experience intersect in ways that directly shape how I work.
My postgraduate specialisation in transcultural systemic therapy means I am trained to work with identity, belonging, and psychological experience as they are shaped across multiple cultural, relational, and contextual systems. Culture in this framework is not a fixed category but something fluid, relational, and always evolving — and therapy that treats it as fixed often misses what matters most.
I work with people navigating bicultural and intercultural relationships, the psychological and relational challenges of immigration and settlement, a sense of disconnection from their cultural background or heritage, and the experience of belonging to a minority group in a context that does not fully see or hold their identity. I also work with the specific challenges that arise for people who live between cultures and do not feel they fully belong to any single one.
This work is relevant in Aotearoa New Zealand, where cultural identity, history, and relational belonging are complex and multi-layered — and where experience is often understood only through a bicultural lens that does not capture the full range of people’s lives. It is equally relevant for clients based internationally or for those who have moved between countries and find that sense of rootlessness has followed them.
Groups, workshops, and training
Alongside individual, couples, and family therapy, I offer group programmes, workshops, and psychoeducational sessions on a range of topics. These are designed for people who want to deepen their understanding of themselves and their relationships in a structured, supportive setting — and who may not need or want individual therapy at this point in their lives, or who want to complement the individual work they are already doing.
Groups and workshops are offered on topics including:
— Attachment and relationships — understanding how early attachment shapes the way we connect, disconnect, and relate as adults
— Emotion regulation — developing a clearer relationship with emotional experience and learning to work with it rather than against it
— ADHD and neurodiversity — practical and relational understanding for adults living with ADHD or autism, and for families and partners
— Conflict and communication — understanding the dynamics beneath conflict and developing more effective ways of navigating disagreement
— Couples groups — a structured group experience for couples wanting to strengthen their relationship or work through recurring patterns in the company of others
— Co-parenting — for separated or divorcing parents wanting support in building a workable co-parenting relationship
— Social skills and connection — for adults who find social interaction difficult or who feel disconnected from the people around them
— Neurodiversity in relationships and family life — for families, partners, and parents navigating neurodevelopmental differences together
Groups and workshops take place both online and face-to-face, depending on demand and topic. They are formed when there is sufficient interest, so availability varies. If a particular topic resonates with you, you are welcome to reach out and register your interest — when enough people have expressed interest in a topic, a group will be scheduled.
Training sessions on specific topics are also available for organisations, teams, or professional groups on request.
If you are unsure whether what you are dealing with fits any of the above, please get in touch. You do not need to have the right words for it before you make contact. The first step is simply a conversation.
Who I work with
People come to therapy for many different reasons, and no two situations are the same. Over the course of my career I have worked with individuals, couples, families, and whānau across a wide range of life challenges. Below is a broad overview of the areas I work within.
If you are unsure whether what you are dealing with fits, feel free to get in touch. The first step is simply a conversation.
Individual therapy
Many people come to therapy on their own — to make sense of a pattern they keep finding themselves in, to process something that has happened, to understand themselves more clearly, or simply because something feels stuck and they are not sure why. You do not need to be in crisis to benefit from therapy, and you do not need to come with a clear problem to solve.
I work with individuals experiencing depression, anxiety, and a broad range of mental health challenges as they show up within the context of a person’s relationships and life circumstances. This includes working with personality-related patterns — including presentations associated with borderline and narcissistic personality organisation — not as fixed diagnoses, but as ways of understanding the relational and emotional dynamics that can make life feel difficult or stuck.
I also work with dependency and relational patterns that are sometimes described clinically in terms of anxious attachment or personality-related traits — including what is colloquially called “love addiction.” These patterns often involve a painful cycle of intense connection, fear of abandonment, and difficulty sustaining a stable sense of self within relationships. Understanding these dynamics systemically and relationally is often more useful than a purely diagnostic frame.
Addiction — both substance-related (alcohol, drugs) and behavioural (gambling, compulsive sexual behaviour, and related patterns) — is an area I have worked with extensively. My approach looks at addiction within the relational and systemic context in which it develops and is maintained, alongside the individual experience.
Trauma of any kind is something I work with — whether from childhood, adult relationships, cultural displacement, or specific events. This includes the processing and recovery from sexual abuse and from experiences of violence. Self-harm (self-mutilation) is also something I can work with, though a safety plan is required before this work begins.
I work with LGBTQ+ individuals and couples in relational contexts and welcome people of all identities. In terms of gender identity, I can work with individuals who identify as transgender within a relational and systemic frame — supporting the relational challenges that arise around gender identity, including within families and partnerships. I do not provide gender-affirming clinical assessment or treatment.
I have particular experience working with men who find it difficult to express or identify their emotional experience — including men who have been socialised to suppress vulnerability and who find this creates significant difficulties in their relationships and inner life. I also work with men who have experienced abuse within relationships, men navigating identity and personality-related difficulties, and men who have turned to controlling or violent behaviour and want to understand and change those patterns. This work is approached with both honesty and care.
Personal development — understanding yourself more clearly, relating more effectively, and living more intentionally — is a legitimate and valuable reason to engage in therapy. This includes working through inner conflicts, questions of meaning and direction, religious or spiritual tensions, the impact of choices on others, a pattern of decisions that keeps producing painful results, or work-related concerns such as conflicts with colleagues or management.
Couples therapy
Couples work is a significant part of my practice. I work with partners navigating growing apart, a breakdown of trust, communication difficulties, emotional disconnection, or the aftermath of relational harm. This includes relationship trauma, betrayal, and the impact of past experiences on current intimacy.
Sexual concerns within relationships are also something I work with openly and without judgement. Alongside this, I support couples facing the particular challenges that arise when parenting together — including disagreements about parenting approaches and the strain that parenting young children or teenagers can place on a relationship.
For couples who are considering separation or are on the brink of legal proceedings, systemic therapy can sometimes offer a different path — one that allows both people to explore what is possible before entering a process that is emotionally and financially costly. This requires both partners to be genuinely willing to engage.
Domestic violence and relationship harm can be worked with therapeutically, but a safety plan must be in place before the actual work begins. This will be arranged as part of the first session.
Family therapy
I work with families across the full range of family life: parenting young children, navigating the teenage years, managing the shift into adult relationships between parents and grown children, and the challenges that arise when family members strongly disagree. This includes co-parenting after separation or divorce, and situations where parents and adult children are in significant conflict.
I work with parents who have concerns about a child’s behaviour, emotional wellbeing, or development; with parents who want to move away from physical punishment or emotionally harmful patterns; and in situations where there are concerns about neglect or abuse within the family system. Where there are active safety concerns, a safety plan will need to be in place.
I also work with the relational challenges that arise around neurodevelopmental differences — including ADHD and autism — in both children and adults. The focus is not on diagnosis or treatment, but on understanding how these differences affect family dynamics, communication, and connection.
Identity, culture, and belonging
A significant thread of my clinical training and practice is transcultural systemic therapy, which means I have a particular interest in and experience of how identity, belonging, and psychological wellbeing are shaped across cultural and relational systems.
This includes people navigating bicultural relationships, challenges related to immigration and settlement, a sense of disconnection from their cultural background, or the experience of belonging to a minority group in a context that does not fully reflect or hold their identity. I work with both the psychological and relational dimensions of these experiences.
A note on safety planning
Because I work as a sole practitioner and am not directly reachable by phone during sessions, I treat safety planning as a standard part of how I work — not only when risk has been identified, but as a general foundation for all clients. It does not need to take up session time unnecessarily.
To make this as straightforward as possible, I offer a simple downloadable safety plan template on the Safety & Support page of this website. You are welcome to complete this before our first session if you would like to come prepared — or if you prefer, we can work through it together at the start of our work. Either way, having it in place early means we can get on with the actual therapeutic work from session one.
The Safety & Support page also contains a full directory of crisis and emergency services, including regional contacts for Hawke’s Bay, national New Zealand helplines, and guidance for finding local support if you are based outside the region or overseas.
A safety plan is specifically required before beginning work in any situation involving risk of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, risk of harm to others, domestic violence, or child safety concerns. If you are unsure whether this applies to your situation, please raise it when we first make contact and we can talk it through.
About my approach
Rather than focusing on symptoms or individual behaviour in isolation, I am interested in patterns — how they form, what they mean, and where they come from. This means exploring relationships, emotional experience, cultural context, and the systems that shape who we are and how we relate.
My practice draws on systemic therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and a transcultural relational framework. The thread running through all of it is that connection matters — to ourselves, to the people close to us, and to the contexts in which we live.
Systemic therapy looks at the person within their systems: family, relationship, culture, and community. It is grounded in the idea expressed by Aristotle that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” — meaning that we can only really understand a person when we understand the relational and contextual world around them.
Emotionally Focused Therapy, developed by Sue Johnson, brings a structured attachment-based approach to this work, with a particular focus on emotional bonds, relational safety, and the way in which our earliest attachment experiences continue to shape how we connect — and disconnect — in adult life.
Together, these approaches place emotional experience, relational dynamics, and meaning-making at the centre of the work — rather than focusing primarily on symptom reduction or behavioural change alone.
Transcultural systemic perspective
My postgraduate specialisation in transcultural systemic therapy shapes how I understand identity, culture, and belonging in clinical work. Culture, within this framework, is not treated as a fixed category but as something fluid, relational, and always evolving. People move between cultural and relational contexts across their lives, and identity is shaped through that movement.
When identity is understood in overly rigid or categorical terms, there is a risk that the internal complexity of a person’s experience goes unrecognised. In clinical practice, this can manifest as tension, fragmentation, or a sense of disconnection from self or others. A transcultural approach makes space for multiple belonging, evolving meaning, and integration across different cultural and personal contexts.
This is particularly relevant in Aotearoa New Zealand, where cultural identity, history, and relational belonging are complex and multi-layered — and where experience is often understood only through a bicultural lens, which does not always capture the full range of people’s lives.
Background and training
I hold a Bachelor of Social Work from the Netherlands, where social work training is closely aligned with counselling and therapeutic practice. I have been working in counselling and therapy since 2001.
My postgraduate training includes a one-year systemic therapy qualification (2007) and a two-year post-master specialisation in transcultural systemic therapy at CTTO Amsterdam, completed in 2009. I have also completed the externship and advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy in Berlin and am registered with the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT).
In the Netherlands, I worked primarily within mental health services alongside maintaining a private practice. After moving to Aotearoa New Zealand — following a personal connection with my partner, whom I met in Amsterdam — I continued working across mental health services, addiction services, Oranga Tamariki, and child and family support. I formally established my current private practice in 2026.
I have lived in Auckland and Tasman, and am now based in Hawke’s Bay, which I consider home.
For a fuller picture of my professional background, work history, education, and connections, you are welcome to visit my LinkedIn profile.
Professional registrations:
NVRG — Dutch Association for Systemic Therapy: www.nvrg.nl
ICEEFT — International Centre for Excellence in EFT: iceeft.com
CTTO Amsterdam: www.cttoamsterdam.nl
Social Workers Registration Board (NZ): www.swrb.govt.nz
ANZASW: anzasw.nz
Ways of working
Individual therapy is available both online and face-to-face. Online sessions work well for people who live remotely, are based internationally, or are managing work and family commitments.
Couples therapy is available online and face-to-face.
Family therapy, including work with wider whānau, is offered face-to-face to support deeper relational engagement and shared in-person process.
Groups and workshops are offered periodically for people who want to deepen their understanding of relationships, communication, attachment, parenting, and mental health in context — without necessarily requiring individual therapy. These can take place online or in person. If you are interested in a particular topic, feel free to register your interest and groups are formed when there is sufficient demand.
At the heart of this work is a belief that difficulties are not only located within individuals, but within patterns of relationship and context. By understanding those patterns — where they come from, how they are maintained, and what they mean — new ways of relating and experiencing life can emerge.
If any of this resonates with what you are looking for, I would welcome the opportunity to work with you.