The Embodied and Relational Self in Context

Posted on 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 can we be “together” yet feel so alone?  One way of understanding this is that a sense of a “self” is being created from our...Read More

The Embodied and Relational Self in Professional Identity

Posted on 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 of waiting.  And if you look carefully, you’ll see that they’re also the seedbed of creativity and growth—what allows us to do the daring and...Read More

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

Posted on 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 der Kolk, 2018).  Indeed, when psychobiological conditions are apt the inherent self-organising systems of the mind-body begin a process of restoration and growth whereby intuit...Read More

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

Posted on 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 the energy of our words and by way of our nonverbal expressions that can be heard and seen, but the other person does not create...Read More

You Care too Much: The Nature of Caring in Counselling

Posted on 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 based practise, I am beginning to understand what it really means, at a practice level, to live in alignment with this innate capacity to care. ...Read More

Corrective Emotional Experience: The paradoxical line in my understanding

Posted on 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 affirmation, appreciation, and affection.  And ultimately under these needs lay a seeking Self who needed to be seen, to be heard, and to be understood....Read More

Transference: From past to present and into the future

Posted on 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 energy and information flow.   Correspondingly, transference is the phenomenon that powerfully evokes a seemingly grounded sense of what is relationally known (metal process) from a...Read More

Defence Mechanisms: In my Defence

Posted on 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 full well what these sensations are telling me; and I know full well why they have risen in this specific moment.  These sensations are those...Read More

To Love and To Suffer

Posted on 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 – questions of dying and of death that reflect questions of life and of living?  Is it possible to simultaneously acknowledge the known and the...Read More

Within the Window

Posted on 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 others as well as the supportive internal presence of those with whom we have close connections.  It varies from moment to moment depending on how...Read More

Containment and Non-Reactivity

Posted on 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 accurate empathy is known as attuned responsiveness. … Therapists want to help clients experience [their emotions] more fully [rather than just cognitively labelling, explaining, or...Read More

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

Posted on 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 to dismiss that this same enmeshment, if not explicitly conceptualised, has the potential to create group and individual levels of segregation and identity disintegration that...Read More

Case Study: A Spiritual Identity Crisis

Posted on 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 come from? Why are we enfolded in both weakness and in hope (Vanier, 1998, p. 163)? How is it that some of us seem to...Read More

WoW! A biopsychosocial model of holistic wellbeing

Posted on 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 sometimes-subtle capacity to promote optimal functioning by way of enhanced adaptability and resilience (Sarafino, Caltabiano, & Byrne, 2008; Siegel, 2012).  Yet, quite often this evolutionary...Read More

Holistic Wellbeing: A Biospychosocial Perspective

Posted on 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 as holistic wellbeing; ailments prevail when the holistic being is out of balance. Conversely, when the scientific revolution unfolded it began to stress a separation...Read More

A life worth living: The potential within

Posted on 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 of despair, and love in spite of fear... I now know that in darkness there is light. (2 Cor 4:8-9; Phil 4:12-13; 1 Cor 13:13)...Read More

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

Posted on 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 easily identifiable conflicts that reflect our society’s perception of conflict as unpleasant and stressful (Eunson, 2007). The purpose of this article is to utilise the...Read More

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

Posted on 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 existence seemed indifferent, dismissible, and worthless. Lost was me without worth; it was a sense that there was no such thing as an identity within...Read More

Interpersonal Trauma

Posted on 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, when the relational self is affected by prolonged interpersonal trauma (IT), what are the effects on an individual’s overarching sense of safety and significance: on...Read More

Positive Psychology

Posted on 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 to facilitate optimal well-being and the emotions that radiate from love. As such, there is a need for a counselling perspective that integrates a continuum...Read More