Being a psychologist is about so much more to me than listening to people and helping them with their problems. To me, being a psychologist is about helping people find themselves, building a relationship with themselves and discovering parts of themselves that they never knew existed, with the hope of making life more manageable and fulfilling. Through each encounter I have with a client, the same is also true for me: I get to discover parts of myself as a therapist that I did not know before and thus through each encounter I become a different version of myself as Christel the psychologist, but also as a human.

The therapy process is such an intimate and meaningful journey, which I feel very privileged to share and witness with each one of my clients. I believe that life is not black or white and that we need to find ways to tolerate and become comfortable with the grey areas. Therapy is not about eliminating all negative emotions or experiences we have in life, but rather about us finding ways to not have to avoid or distract ourselves so much and being able to tolerate and survive difficult and uncomfortable feelings in life. Often when we can stop fighting ourselves and our desires, feelings, needs and beliefs, we can get to a point of accepting ourselves (everything about ourselves) and decide how we want to manage those moving forward. Through acceptance we can learn to let go of some of those coping mechanisms that is no longer useful to us, although it might have been at some point.

I believe therapy is a long term journey, and therefore I encourage all my clients to be patient with themselves and with the process. We cannot expect ourselves to just be a different version, with different coping mechanisms and beliefs, when it took us our whole lives to become that person. This process looks different for each individual and there is no set structure or recipe that I follow in therapy. It is rather a process which we need to explore and adjust according to each person's needs - which can look like 10 sessions for one person or 2 years of therapy to the next.