Rob Stuart – Utrecht-based integrative therapist, counsellor and coach

I’ve always been intrigued by what makes people tick — their deepest emotions and needs, their dreams and drives, and their inner obstacles: how they hold themselves back. Some people meet challenges and develop with apparent ease; some frequently struggle with themselves and others. How this varies from person to person and over successive life phases never ceases to fascinate me, especially the role of formative childhood and adolescent experiences, family dynamics and trauma, and intergenerational and collective trauma.

“You can achieve what you want if you want it enough”

This maxim, which I received from my mother, informs all my work with troubled clients. I believe in the best version of them. I see their core qualities. I’m their biggest fan, and I cheer them on to their goal! I’m convinced that they already have all the inner resources they need to heal whatever emotional wounds they may have suffered, to learn, change and grow, and to realise their true potential.

Demoralisation

People need therapy, counselling and/or coaching not because they’re struggling with a big problem or challenge but because they’ve become demoralised in trying – but failing – to cope with it and progress. They need the external guidance of a professional to transform that demoralisation into a clear view of the opportunities that present themselves, the path ahead that leads to their goal. In the process of becoming demoralised they’ve lost sight of their core qualities, their ‘true colours’.

Self-healing potential

Integrative therapy, counselling and coaching is all about making clients aware of this loss of insight, this inner block or blind spot, this ‘spiritual poverty’. By turning their attention inward, by shining the light of their awareness into the darkness to reveal what lies hidden or dormant, they see an opportunity to mobilise their inner resources and self-healing potential to drive change. Integration means reconnecting and revitalising disparate parts of the Self (i.e. the personality or psyche) that have been suppressed, repressed or ‘split off’.

From revelation to revolution

I’ve been through my own major and minor ‘deaths and rebirths’. I didn’t find my true vocation to work as a therapist until I was 50. I originally studied engineering and was then drawn to what used to be called ‘Third World development’. In my late twenties, on returning to Europe after four years travelling and working in Africa, which included some painful disappointments and traumatic experiences, I suffered reverse culture shock and major depression with anxiety and sleeplessness. Thanks to body-oriented group therapy I gradually recovered and started working again. Then for two decades I drifted rather aimlessly from engineering, through technical writing, public relations, translating, journalism and human-rights editing, to academic English teaching. I was paying my bills, but I lacked passion for what I was doing. Increasingly, I felt stuck and hopeless, as if my life had hit a dead end. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a way ahead. This had a negative impact on how I interacted with others. One day, a friend in Amsterdam told me she was going to train to become a therapist. A sudden stab of jealousy made me realise: “That’s it! That’s what I want to do. My whole life has been preparing me for this.” It was a revelation that started a healing journey and a personal revolution.

Deepest emotions and unmet needs

From 2008 to 2012 I trained in integrative therapy for adults at the Nederlandse Academie voor Psychotherapie. I then trained in integrative relationship therapy for a further year. Since qualifying, here in my private practice in Utrecht I’ve accumulated thousands of hours of experience guiding adult individuals and couples to get in touch with their deepest emotions and unmet needs. Having achieved that, their next step is to utilise those insights to make key changes in their ‘inner world’ – in how they deal with their own thoughts, emotions and behaviours – and thus also in their relationships with others. This empowers them to pro-actively pursue their personal goals. For me, there’s nothing more rewarding, inspiring and moving that seeing people who have been stuck for too long revitalising themselves and swinging into action again!

Strangers in a strange land

As expats here in the Netherlands we face special challenges. Having relocated from my native England to the Netherlands in 1980, and having temporarily lived and worked in East Africa, Spain and India since then, I know how deeply ‘culture shock’ – characterised by loneliness and alienation – can affect an individual, how tough it can be to settle, to find your own way and to function effectively in an unfamiliar socio-cultural context.

The healing power of empathy

Also, having received various kinds of therapy myself for deep-seated emotional problems and relationship issues, I intuitively relate to and empathise with clients struggling with a wide variety of personal and interpersonal problems. A clinical attitude of so-called ‘professional distance’ from my clients is not my style, nor do I see much merit in clinical diagnoses and medication for what, in the vast majority of cases, are deep emotional wounds. Such wounds tend to heal when there is abundant understanding, empathy and compassion — that’s the best medicine!