Welcome to Head and Heart Work — therapy and counseling for adults
Whatever is troubling you, you can rely on me to listen carefully, to warmly empathise with you, to understand you on your own terms and to believe in you and your potential. You are not ‘treated’ as a ‘patient’ with a ‘disorder’ but encouraged to take steps towards your own goals using your own resources — and you are never judged.
The sessions of individual or couples therapy and counseling are a peaceful, respectful, safe holding space where you can freely express what is bothering you. You are unconditionally accepted as a unique, special individual and guided through a process of learning, healing and personal growth that is attuned to your personality and needs.
You are invited to confront the core problem, to set clear, realistic goals, and to pursue them effectively. The ultimate aim? To realise your true self and your true potential by transforming the core problem into a useful asset. Because integrative therapy and counseling focuses on what is essential in each step, it’s short-term: in most cases, 3 to 6 sessions are sufficient to achieve a breakthrough.
Individual therapy
Individual therapy: the integrative way
Learn, heal and grow by deeply exploring your ‘inner world’ of thoughts, feelings and sensations. Bring conflicting parts of you into closer connection. Transform storm into calm.
What’s holding you back? Usually, it’s a deep-seated negative self-image, a self-sabotaging part and/or an undermining sadness, fear, loneliness, emptiness, hopelessness or powerlessness. You can imagine your goal – how you want to think, feel and behave – so how come you’re not living it? How did you lose sight of your true self, your core qualities? We explore how your core problem grew in your past and family background, revealing old pain and self-limiting ‘scripts’.
We map out goals and strategies for change. I guide you; you do the head and heart work. On the way, you discover inner resources and new options. Imagination powers change.
Relationship therapy
Relationship therapy: the integrative way
When love turns to war, two key questions need to be explored. What core qualities drew the two of you together when you were still in love with each other? And what dysfunctional patterns now threaten to tear you apart?
During fights, shut-downs and freeze-outs, you lose connection and unsafe feelings get triggered. Irritation, annoyance or anger erupt. But extensive couples research shows that when the love bond is threatened, intense underlying emotions such as fear, shame, helplessness and powerlessness are felt.
Successful couples don’t ‘take it out on each other’ but express their most vulnerable emotions and unmet attachment needs. Integrative relationship therapy enables both of you to safely share your core emotions and unmet needs. You transform conflicts into opportunities to forge a new, realistic love alliance.
Your biggest problem is your greatest opportunity
Integrative therapy and counseling brings about fundamental, lasting change on problems ranging from trauma (emotional damage) during childhood, adolescence or adulthood to tough decisions and challenges in the here and now, from inner conflicts to relationship and ‘mid-life’ crises, from coping with anxiety, depression and grief to developing personal qualities, performance and spirituality. The problems page lists complaints that previous clients have worked on and transformed into opportunities and strengths.
About Rob Stuart
I’m a warm-hearted Englishman with a lively sense of humour and abundant life experience. I’m empathic and compassionate towards my clients, and strongly concerned about their mental, emotional and spiritual welfare. Having been in individual and relationship therapy myself, I know how awful it can be when your troubled, desperate and demoralised, unable to see the way out. To me, clients are not ‘victims’ who need help; they are survivors asking for guidance in finding and utilising the internal and external resources they need in order to help themselves.
How we work together
At Head and Heart Work, my private practice established in Utrecht in January 2009, I have accumulated thousands of hours experience working with a wide variety of clients and problems. My prime aim is to guide them towards achieving their own personal goals using their own resources and self-healing power.
My approach combines the integrative methods and models taught at the Dutch Academy for Psychotherapy in Amsterdam, where I received my professional training, with my own insights into human change processes. Those insights are drawn from my own life and therapy experience, exchanges with a wide variety of therapists, counselors and other remarkable people, and extensive reading on psychology, psychotherapy and personal development.
I don’t believe in a professionally detached, clinical attitude or one-size-fits-all ‘standard treatment protocols’. For each unique and special client or couple, a unique and special therapy is created. You are assured of warm, personal attention, ample time and space to discuss your problems and consider options. You are offered an innovative, flexible, deep approach tailored to your specific needs.
Testimonials
When individual clients or couples complete a course of Head and Heart Work therapy and/or counseling, they are asked to give a short testimonial describing their experience of the learning, healing and growing process and how it has benefited them. For me, there is nothing more moving and rewarding than reading their words.
Inspiration
The therapist’s most efficacious ‘medicine’ is the spoken word, which has power to change minds and move hearts. Inspiring quotes from the wise can also powerfully transform our inner world and enable us to bring out the best in ourselves.
“There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them?”
— Mark Dunn, Under the Harrow