Hélena Nijdam

Who am I?

My name is Hélena Nijdam and I have lived and worked in Eindhoven for the past 17 years. I had my own practice in a health center and the last ten years I worked in an institution for GGZ (mental health care). Here I mainly worked with adults from about 20 years old.

In the nineties I worked with the older (65+) people at the then Riagg in Zwolle. This gave me the opportunity to get to know the culture and customs of the protestant (flat) country and the more burgundian catholic Brabant habits. I myself was born and raised in Utrecht and have also lived near Nijmegen.

I am trained in behavioral therapy for which I endorse the frameworks, but I have increasingly developed towards integrative psychotherapy. Also because I have noticed very often that people cannot be captured in protocols. I enjoy working independently and without a contract, partly to be less dependent on all the rules imposed on us in GGZ.

Feed-back

What I often hear from clients is that I am knowledgeable, warm and ‘myself’. That they feel comfortable and allowed to be who they are. As a result, they also feel safe and can open up.
My colleagues often tell me that laughter regularly rises from my room. And that’s right! We have a ‘serious’ profession that sometimes lacks some perspective. For me it is very important that there is humor and that you can laugh. Also to keep the ‘helicopter view’. We (social workers) are very focused on the problems, the heavy side. It remains important to keep in mind that people themselves have many powerful qualities that they have been able to use up to now.

Which (mental health) issuess?

People can come to me with most issues, such as: depression, fears, PTSD, identity problems, stress / burnout, personality disorders, ADD/ADHD, addiction, high sensitivity, coaching or just questions about life.

My vision

When you are born, you come into the world with your temperament and ability for a certain character. Are you emotional, spontaneous, a group person or more withdrawn and introverted? Do you like structure and clarity or do you prefer not to impose yourself and do you prefer to draw up your own plan? Are you sensitive to what is going on around you? Do you sometimes feel like an ‘emo sponge’ or more rational, analytical? Do you suffer from too much feeling or do you find it difficult to experience emotions?
In my opinion, your personality is colored by the interaction between what is already present at birth and how your life took shape afterwards.

How has your life been further colored? Are there a lot of warm, soft, bright colors or was there previously a lot of gray and white. Or really black? Was there enough love, warmth, acceptance and safety? Were there enough ingredients to grow up to a more (full) person. Or was it different? Just too much or too little of all that or was there aggression or abuse?

In any case, it has shaped you and you have learned to deal with it your way. Learn to ignore your emotions, sometimes even turn them off. Or learn to ‘please’ and do as ‘well’ as possible to minimize the attention and avoid confrontations and thus worse. Or did you face confrontation from impulsivity and were you labeled as difficult?

Have you dealt with a more harmonious family? Then it might have been very pleasant, but it was perhaps difficult to enter into confrontations so as not to disturb this pleasant atmosphere. So you often did your best to be funny and happy? Or did you just avoid it?

Every child may or may not consciously look for the way that suits him/her in order to avoid nasty, annoying feelings as much as possible. And that is also good at that moment and makes the situation more sustainable. Even then you can of course have to deal with events that affect your life, such as bullying, illness or the death of dear people.

In your later adult life it can happen that you come across that you are so adaptive, perfectionist and confrontational. In this way you don’t show what you find important, you have learned to put these feelings aside. In your relationship with partner and friends and at work it breaks you because you cannot be who you would like to be and say what you actually feel.

This is often a period when psychological issues start to present themselves in the form of burn-out symptoms, depression, anxiety or addiction. Your body will sputter and give a signal that it can no longer do this.
It actually gives you a ‘step beside’. Even if it is not experienced that way, because psychological issues are just unpleasant and annoying. And it often takes a while before it is acknowledged that things are not going that way anymore. A step to help is often seen as a failure.

My working method

Depending on what you prefer and the complexity of the problems, we will examine how deeply the problems will be discussed. Sometimes a ‘customer’-oriented approach with cognitive behavioral therapy or a few insightful conversations is sufficient. However, if there is a need and a necessity, we will look for the relationship between the patterns you are running into now, as they have been formed in the past. I also use schema therapy and EMDR.

Everyone can cope with traumatic experiences that can have a lot of impact on you in everyday life. This can be bullying, illness or death of a loved one, anxious experiences, etc. Then I often work with EMDR, because this can lead to great results. But if not desired, other techniques are also sufficient.

English-speaking clients can also contact me.

BIG-registration Helena Nijdam: 39051883725 (clinical psychologist) en 59051883716 (psychotherapist).