Welcome to my website. My name is Francisco Beisterveld and I offer psychotherapy in Nijmegen.

I’m specialized in working with people with more complex, long lasting or and/or traumatic complaints, often connected with (early) childhood experiences.

I work from a client-centered tradition. This means that as a therapist, I strive to offer you a warm, empathetic relationship in which you feel unconditionally accepted and in which you feel that I’m genuine. According to Carl Rogers, these are the necessary conditions for therapeutic change.

More practically, I work with the concepts and techniques from Emotion Focused Therapy for individuals (to be distinghuished from Emotionally Focused Therapy which is a form of couples therapy). This is a pretty recent therapy modality within the client-centered tradition.

To describe it in a few words: my primary focus is to establish and maintain a relationship with you in which you feel safe and understood (also at an emotional level). Apart from contributing to such a relationship, my empathy will also invite you to allow and help tolerate difficult emotions. By (safely) experiencing difficult emotions, you will slowly get in contact with where it hurts most. This is what’s called the ‘core pain’ in EFT-terms. The core pain are the most dreaded feelings connected with difficult life experiences. It’s for example this deep sense of loneliness, attachment fear, deep shame or guilt. The core pain is the emotional equivalent of our self-image (and ‘other-image’). Accessing your core pain, you will have the chance to process the painful life experiences that lie underneath. I will be there with you throughout the process. Most emotional pain was incurred in isolation or in relationships where the other person (e.g. a parent) wasn’t fully accepting or empathetic. Part of the healing in our therapy is that you will face old painful experiences within a safe, warm, accepting and empathetic relationship.

Apart from processing difficult life experiences, I will help you accessing so-called adaptive emotions to transform your core pain. Every human being has the capacity for a whole range of helpful emotions. These are necessary for our survival, but also to thrive. Examples are adaptive anger in situations where people cross your boundary or adaptive sadness in situations where you lose something/someone important. Usually it’s the case that at the time of experiencing the painful life experience, specific adaptive emotions were not allowed. 

An example of adaptive anger that was silenced

If you had a parent who could be unreasonably angry, you were probably not allowed to express anger so you could stand up for yourself. 

An example of adaptive sadness that was silenced

Some people have had experiences of loss (e.g. losing a best friend). When they expressed hurt or sadness to a parent, the parent could tell them to toughen up or to 'stop whining'.

We need these adaptive emotions to transform your old pain. A deep sense of shame connected with experiences where you felt humiliated can for example be transformed by feeling anger and sadness towards the person(s) who were involved. This approach is quite different from more cognitive therapies, in which the idea usually is to cognitively ‘rewrite’ what happened. Emotional memories cannot be overwritten in a cognitive way. We need emotion to change emotion.

An important technique to help you contact your own adaptive emotions is chairwork.

Expertise

  • anxiety/panic
  • complex trauma/emotional neglect
  • narcissism
  • attachment anxiety/early childhood trauma
  • depression
  • AD(H)D
  • giftedness
  • HSP (highly sensitive person)
  • OCD/obsessions
  • loneliness/difficulties feeling connected
  • burnout/stress
  • low self-image/self-criticism
  • bullying experiences
  • existential fears/fear of death/purpose of life
  • unresolved issues in relationships, e.g. parent-child
  • unprocessed loss

I don’t have expertise in working with people with bipolar disorder and psychosis.

Fees

My standard fee is 110 euro for 45 minutes.

In case the sessions are paid by your employer our business, then the fee is 200 euro excluding VAT for a 45 minute session.

Therapy costs cannot be reimbursed by your health insurer.

A concern of mine is that also people with less finances can have therapy. Therefore I offer reductions based on one’s personal situation. Contact me for more information.

Contact

You can contact me at 06-36056018 and francisco@mindandemotions.nl

As I give therapy during working hours, I cannot be reached by phone. Please send me an email or use whatsapp.