Academic Articles - Chele Yntema

The Embodied and Relational Self in Context

Posted on November 10, 2022May 5, 2024 by Chele Yntema

Who are we really? And what does it mean when we say, “this is me”? What is the “this” that we call “the self”? And why are so many studies revealing that in our modern life people are feeling ever more isolated even though they are more digitally connected? How...Read More

The Embodied and Relational Self in Professional Identity

Posted on June 14, 2022November 10, 2022 by Chele Yntema

What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground...Read More

The Therapeutic Relationship and The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Change

Posted on December 26, 2021November 10, 2022 by Chele Yntema

There are certain emergent anthropological dynamics that often seem forgotten in our westernised society. Such might be, at least to me, the innate integrative capacity of the mind-body that emerges when we, as a human species, find ourselves in authentic, respectful, and reciprocal relationships (2 Corinthians 6; Cozolino, 2002; van...Read More

When vulnerability meets availability: A complex fractalated phenomenon that holds the potentiality of The Divine

Posted on October 30, 2021December 14, 2021 by Chele Yntema

Imagine various relationships you have with other people: sometimes we feel understood and our inner meanings of the mind are seen and respected. Other relationships may be more challenging, and the inner reality of our feelings and thoughts are unseen and disrespected. We send out communication to another person through...Read More

You Care too Much: The Nature of Caring in Counselling

Posted on October 30, 2021 by Chele Yntema

Nearly a year ago a professional I respected bellowed the words “You care too much!”, and as the dissonance I had been harbouring toward the role I was in came crashing down, I finally realised how important it was to me to care. Moreover, as I progress into reflective supervisory...Read More

Corrective Emotional Experience: The paradoxical line in my understanding

Posted on November 13, 2020June 28, 2021 by Chele Yntema

Under stress, Self found relentless fear and the need for a nourishing level of reception, connection, and protection. Under guilt, Self found deceptive disgust and the need for an adaptable level of difference, independence, and acceptance. Under shame, Self found unparallel grief and the need for an authentic level of...Read More

Transference: From past to present and into the future

Posted on November 12, 2020June 28, 2021 by Chele Yntema

Like an active vortex that sucks in atmospheric textures, swirls them around and spits out a reflection of our earliest years, transference is a felt sense within varied situational milieu that reflects a uniquely personal perceptual shaping of reality. This is a reality that matches early embedded emotional-motivational patterns of...Read More

Defence Mechanisms: In my Defence

Posted on November 11, 2020November 9, 2020 by Chele Yntema

As I read and as I sit here in preparation for writing my heart begins to race, my stomach fills with a tizzy of tension, my eyes open wide, I do not blink, and as I begin to hold my breath I grit my jaw and clench my body knowing...Read More

To Love and To Suffer

Posted on November 10, 2020November 6, 2020 by Chele Yntema

How is it that there can be a reckoning of the paradoxical questions that have plagued humanity for all of time? Questions of heartache and hopelessness, inequity and scarcity, disease and illness as they co-exist with questions of health and wellness, equitability and fruition, of faith, of hope, of love...Read More

Within the Window

Posted on November 8, 2020January 21, 2021 by Chele Yntema

Our nervous system’s window of tolerance – the intensity of feeling we can experience while still maintaining connection with another – is continually expanding and contracting. When we are physically alone, the continually fluctuating breadth of our window depends on the strength of the regulatory system built in relationship with...Read More

Containment and Non-Reactivity

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Chele Yntema

The therapist is comfortable sharing whatever emotions the client has and, in addition, wants to know the clients authentic experience more fully – as good or as bad as it actually is for them – without minimising or exaggerating it as others have often done. In attachment terms, this highly...Read More

The Sociology of Culture and the Paradoxical Nature of Diversity. Culturally-Infused Practice in Counselling.

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Chele Yntema

Born from and into relationship, we are - the human race is, anything but an isolated species. Indeed, there is a universal reality that self-concept and identity are insurmountably enmeshed within ever evolving cultural contexts (Lago, 2005; Lott, 2010; Matsumoto & Juang, 2008; Siegel, 2012). Yet, it would be foolish...Read More

Case Study: A Spiritual Identity Crisis

Posted on May 28, 2018June 30, 2021 by Chele Yntema

In the darkest depths of my own lost identity I once said, “Hope knows the sun has risen even when the clouds cover every ray of light”. I wonder why it is that as humans we question pain and suffering so intently, yet we continue on? Where does our endurance...Read More

WoW! A biopsychosocial model of holistic wellbeing

Posted on May 12, 2018August 14, 2020 by Chele Yntema

A Counselling conceptualisation and intervention based on a Wheel of Wellness. Though often it may not be recognised as such, suffering – psychological, physiological, and even cultural – is an entity: an energy that exists within and between the dimensions of human wholeness. This energy is an enigma with a...Read More

Holistic Wellbeing: A Biospychosocial Perspective

Posted on April 12, 2018August 14, 2020 by Chele Yntema

Since the dawn of human civilization, injuries, infections and other historically identified ailments have been prevalent concerns for the individual and the masses. Indeed, ancient texts speak of humans as holistic beings whereby body, mind, spirit and kinship work harmoniously to create an integrated inherent balance that can be reflected...Read More

A life worth living: The potential within

Posted on January 14, 2018January 14, 2018 by Chele Yntema

Though I have been troubled, I am not distressed; though I have been perplexed, anguish eluded me; though persecuted, not forsaken; subjugated, but not destroyed; I have felt what it was like to be in dire need… And so I now know, faith in spite of doubt, hope in spite...Read More

The Issue is not The Issue: Interpersonal Conflict and How to Resolve it

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Chele Yntema

The Issue is not The Issue: Interpersonal Conflict Originally featuring in a book by William Steig (1990) about identity and becoming, the character Shrek and accompanying protagonists, Donkey and Fiona, were swept up by DreamWorks and converted into characters of minimal depth whereby stereotypical anxious, ambivalent, and avoidant attachments create...Read More

My Innate Disposition: understanding my past in truth, creating coherent narrative, and coming to identity

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Chele Yntema

All alone, I sat waiting. I was lost. It was not that I did not know where I was, nor where I was going, nor even where I had come from… No, it was deeper than that. Lost was a sadness that penetrated so deep within me that my very...Read More

Interpersonal Trauma

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Chele Yntema

Introduction Although at times western society may portray that the essence of significance is individualism, there is an undeniable inherent connection between the “relational self” (Siegel, 2012, pp. 348 - 349) and a life in which we are able to attain well-being, meaning, and assurance in spite of pain. Yet,...Read More

Positive Psychology

Posted on November 19, 2017November 22, 2017 by Chele Yntema

Analysis, discussion, and framework of Positive Psychology in Counselling In a life where paradoxes are continual and individuals are dynamic yet holistic, experience is a vast entailment not only of aspects that bring about trials, tribulations and the emotions that radiate from fear; but equally of an innate human capacity...Read More

True Self Vs False Self

Posted on May 2, 2016May 2, 2018 by Chele Yntema

FROM BROKENNESS TO WHOLENESS HEALING THROUGH FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE Identity and the relentless search for self in any paradigm has been a pertinent part of society since Adam and Eve chose to gain the wisdom that broke the sanctity of their child like innocence (Gen 3, NIV; Bible Gateway,...Read More