Consultation and Support
What makes a good consultation and what’s needed to provide proper support? This question has haunted me for a long time and eventually I found an answer. There are many theories and practical strategies but there is only one answer to the question that always applies:
Providing proper support is when I manage to not leave someone feeling lonely.
This almost trivial insight carries weight and challenges me anew, every day. Many people associate a consultation with tips, tricks, and advice that will help them to navigate or follow new paths in their lives. Every piece of advice delivers a punch - a desired one - but one that has impact nonetheless. After having practiced for almost more than three decades, I have inevitably come to the conclusion that punches never really help, but rather promote the avoidance strategies of the individual.
Because: Punches don’t replace personal decisions and without the later a life that’s viewed as desirable, can’t be lived. So I am a mirror, a reflective surface, in the truest sense. Always searching for individually bearable solutions, I offer personally adjustable strategies that can help with getting oriented. Besides the search for resources and resilience, one’s own power of resistance, I offer impulses that lead towards antifragile growth. Meaning the kind of growth life itself offers, completely independent from experiences in the past. This means: we’re not getting stronger despite having lived through a crisis but because we are living or have lived through it. With the crisis we expand our own toolbox and find our own solutions.
Cookie-cutter solutions are seldom a fit but there are three points that are always true:
- Empathy offers a good opportunity to create the space in which solutions can be found.
- A culture of not knowing is the best foundation for finding new paths.
- We can only heal if we connect with ourselves, the ones around us and nature.
Individuals as well as couples are welcome in my practice.
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