About me -

I was born in November 1968 in a hospital in a small town at Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada.
My mom and dad were 21 and 20, Dutch immigrants. When I was one, they moved back to the Netherlands.
A couple years later my brother was born and our little family was complete.

It was a very dysfunctional family, characterized by ever recurring spells of alcohol abuse, narcissism, codependencies, trauma bonding, lots of gaslighting, fighting, screaming and throwing stuff around. No one else knew how bad it really was, because my parents would do anything to present us as a happy, decent, middle-class, church-going family. It was a very toxic, stressful and extremely confusing environment to grow up in. My little brother had autism, a developmental disability we knew nothing about, we just noticed that he was “different”.

At age 17 I started to have the first panic attacks that developed into increasingly limiting anxiety disorders. Though I had always been an A-student before, I had already started doing worse at school, fully addicted to everyday smoking and drinking more and more often, desperately trying to figure out my own identity. Terrified of the panic attacks and the anxiety disorders, I started reading up on anything I thought might be connected to this problem. On good days I would go to the library and spend some time there looking for new books to hopefully help me. On bad days I would have to prematurely leave the library empty-handed, because of a panic attack. That is, if I had actually been able to leave the house at all.

A period of 30+ years followed, with better and worse phases, but always dominated by a deeply instilled fear inside of me, plus an unconscious feeling of being a worthless person. In better phases I would tell myself that this time everything was going to finally be OK and I would venture into a new job or try and start a business. Always followed by worse phases, where everything would come tumbling down and leave me desillusioned, full of anxiety again and deeply depressed. In this span of time I saw multiple professionals: psychotherapists, psychologists and even a psychiatrist. But none of them were able to help me resolve my issues. I was prescribed antidepressants twice, but that also didn’t turn out to be the solution. I was too traumatized, a case of CPTSD.

At 29 I was driving at night in the countryside, when all of a sudden a particular stretch of the road turned out to be very slippery. I lost control of the car and hit a tree almost frontally, doing about 70 km/h. I spent a long time in the hospital, where the doctors told me I was unbelievably lucky to have survived the crash and the many injuries. During the time in the hospital I sensed a strong energy inside of me, that helped me recover much faster than the doctors believed possible. It was a sign to me that deep down inside there was still some fighting left.

In the better phases I would call upon that “little fighter” in me to force myself to do something really difficult. Before the car accident I had done some kickboxing that had me trembling with fear before the fights. Later I would force myself twice to take a return flight to another European country, be in a German city flooded by millions during the socccer world championship or randomly take rides on a bus or a train. All of them terrifyingly triggering events for me and sometimes I would curse myself for doing them when things got really rough. I nevertheless felt that I needed to do such things again and again, in order to someday get rid of this ugly “fear-thing” that made me scared of my own body and mind.

Heavily trauma bonded to my parents though, I was never able to escape their relentless toxicity and gaslighting, caught in an endless loop of keeping-me-down encounters. Even when I got married in my late thirties, became a dad and moved to Switzerland with my own family, this trauma bond would still prove to be too deep to liberate myself from. Triggered by a very difficult 5 weeks just before emigrating, where my baby son was hospitalized with a bad case of meningitis and probably triggered by the emigration itself, I was once again thrown back into a phase with severe anxiety issues in which I sometimes wouldn’t even be able to leave my front door without having a beer or glass of wine beforehand.

A couple years later, after finding out about some really bad stuff in my marriage, I seperated and later divorced from my wife. Another difficult phase started, with depression and panic attacks. I was as always still reading up on psychology, trauma, anxiety issues and much more. I was also at a point where I was in debt, very deeply depressed and starting to slowly realize that I had been living in a survival mode pretty much all my life. And the longer I tried to study my lifelong problems, the more anger and hurt I felt. Towards my parents and ex-wife, of course, but not any less towards myself. It was also clear to me that any solutions would have to come from myself. My son had been diagnosed with autism as well and I felt a responsibility towards him, so I reached out to that little fighter inside of me and started taking better care of myself.

I had had periods before where I would take better care of myself, stop smoking and exercise more. But they would never last too long, because I would still be drinking at least on weekends, not eat too healthy and be confronted with difficult personal or financial circumstances. So this time I decided to take it very slowly, but way more determined. This change of routines and habits was meant to last, that was the goal. I started losing weight because of more exercise, healthier eating and less going out and drinking. I took long walks during which I would be able to let my mind float free, as in meditation.

And with ups and downs I gradually started to “fix” myself. Over a period of several years I noticed that first of all the panic attacks seemed to happen less frequently and secondly had lost some of the intensity and duration. As always very scary, but still: shorter and less often. I was still very deep in debt though and a 20 year self-employed webprogrammer phase ended when for months on end hardly any money came in and I eventually had to do something that a couple years before would have terrified me, but now felt necessary and doable: find a job.

Up until that point I had never had any real sense of what kind of work would suit me, because I was in a constant survival mode. That had changed significantly and I allowed myself to look for ads with my heart. It didn’t matter what kind of work it would be, but it DID matter if I would feel something in my heart. That’s when I stumbled upon a short ad: an organisation was looking for “interns” who would want to learn how to take care of severely handicapped people. That was it for me, I applied, got hired and have been working there for some years now.

Having been forced as a child to automatically always keep my “internal antenna” geared towards the wants and needs of my parents, plus having grown up with my autistic brother and especially raising my awesome autistic boy are all things that now help me be empathic and caring towards my clients at work. I work in several groups with many different clients and already did many internal courses on working agogically and other topics. Furthermore: I will be going back to school this year! Out of something really bad came something really good.

I eventually gave up smoking cigarettes for good and reduced alcohol to just a few times a year. I lift weights at home, have been able to pay a large part of my debt by now and learned to create healthier bounderies towards my parents in particular and other people that seem or are toxic in general. My life has finally shifted from surviving to actually living. Which not only makes me extremely grateful, but also fills me with a strong desire to help other people who still struggle with the stuff that I have struggled with for so very, very long.

So, if you struggle with these kinds of issues, please LET’S TALK!

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