Haptotherapy puts your inner feelings central and uses this as a basis to provide you with improved insights on your emotions and how you connect with yourself and with others.
Connection literally means feeling together (contact). While feeling you connect with yourself, with others and with the world around you. In our society, the emphasis is mainly on thinking and doing. Feeling can easily fade away and you can feel detached from yourself. If the ability to connect is not well developed or damaged, it is difficult to make or experience real contact with others, but also with yourself. This affects how you feel, and it can lead to dissatisfaction, unrest, disrupted relationships and the emergence or worsening of physical and / or psychological complaints.
To be physically touched is the most direct form of contact. It is about touching or being touched in the feeling. It lets you reflect on your feelings and puts you in touch with your body. Your body gives you signals about how you feel. If you don’t like something or feel overwhelmed, you can literally freeze. If you really like something and are enjoying it, your body relaxes. By (learning to) listen more to what you feel and experience inside of you and by understanding the influence of your feelings on your thoughts and behaviour, you make choices that suit you more easily and you are less guided by what people say. expected of you. This way you stay closer to yourself. When feeling, thinking and acting are in harmony with each other, you are “at your best” and you are comfortable.
Haptotherapy is therapy based on experiences in which physical, emotional, psychological and social aspects are involved in the treatment. The haptotherapist works together with other experts such as a physiotherapist, doctor or specialist, psychologist or company doctor.
Physical complaints:
- Tension complaints: stiff painful muscles, joint complaints, headache, abdominal pain, back problems.
- Fatigue and/or sleeping problems.
- Medically insufficiently explained physical complaints.
- Hyperventilation, chest, throat and jaw complaints.
- Chronic illness with complicated acceptance or context.
- Decreased feeling contact with the body and emotions.
Psychological complaints:
- Fear and panic.
- Gloominess and mood swings.
- Exhaustion.
- Restless, irritable, tense.
- Concentration problems.
Work-related complaints:
- Work stress.
- Burnout.
Goal of therapy:
- An improved contact with body and feeling. Learning to feel and handle feelings.
- To improve insight into the origin and maintenance of physical stress complaints.
- Restoring balance between tension and relaxation.
- Improve confidence in physical functioning, a positive self-image and sense of self.
- Reducing physical tension complaints.
- Feel good about yourself again.
Forming therapy:
- Body work and role play.
- Mindfulness (attention training and awareness).
- Body awareness, relaxation exercises, breathing therapy.
- Body-oriented mentalizing: learning to reflect on the body, inner experiences and thoughts.
- Exposure.
