Sven Collip

A reaction that is too strong. A pattern that keeps returning. An exhaustion with no obvious cause. My first instinct is not to call it a disorder. What is needed first is a place where the weight of it can be met without being judged.

Often it is not the feeling itself that weighs most, but what we think about it — the demands we place on ourselves and the judgement of our own experience. So I ask early on how you look at what you have described to me.

Often it helps to take the contradiction seriously: one part wants what another fears, and both have their reasons. When these inner parts are given a voice, much that was only felt as a block becomes comprehensible. The aim is then not to silence one of them but to find an understanding from a settled position. In my experience people find considerably more room to move that way than they can see while they are in it.

This way of looking does not come from practice alone. Several years in a Buddhist monastery shaped it. There I spent a long time facing my own psychological patterns directly, undistracted, with nowhere to step aside to. That experience still informs how I see change, crisis and what goes on inside a person. Since then, Buddhist psychology has been the foundation of my work.

My practice is in Eschweiler, near Aachen in western Germany. Alongside the work I do here, I see clients online and in English.

Online sessions are open to people living in the EU or Switzerland — the area my professional liability insurance and the legal framework I work under cover. More on that under How it works.

The first session is there to understand what brings you, and to see whether I am the right person for it. It commits you to nothing further.