I grew up in the Netherlands, where I met my kiwi husband. After I completed my Master of Science in Developmental Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, we moved to Aotearoa to be closer to his family. I have never looked back! I fell in love with this country and its rich nature and culture, while also being intrigued by its social disparities and journey towards healing the ongoing effects of colonisation, as well as my role in this as a psychologist.

Working for Autism New Zealand during my first few years in this country, supporting whānau with education, training, and other supports around living with neurodivergence, inspired me to become a registered Educational Psychologist. After my graduation in 2017, I worked for 5 years at Explore Behaviour Support service, mainly working with whānau to support the challenges they experienced with young people’s behaviour (though also for adults), in relation to their diagnosed disabilities and neurodivergence.

I left this role in 2022 to work as a Family Therapy practitioner at Stand Tū Maia, following my growing passion for working in a trauma-informed and holistic, therapeutic way with tāngata whaiora. Applying skills and expertise from multiple modalities around children’s and their parents’ experiences of trauma, encouraged me to dig deeper into Traumatic Stress studies. This led towards moving into deeper trauma healing work, learning to apply holistic brain-body based therapeutic modalities, in a systemic context.

I started my private practice taking on ACC contracts for Behaviour Support (for people with Traumatic Brain Injury), and more recently in the Sensitive Claims Service. This work is ongoing, and I welcome (self-)referrals from people who are looking for a psychologist to work either short-term or long-term on healing from the effects of past and present stressful experiences.