Pacing yourself: dogs or taking care of princess Nina

The other day I read in the newspaper that people who have dogs live longer and lead happier lives. That is something I can certainly understand. Personally I owned a dog only once in my life. When I was growing up I had a lovely mut called Timmy who was the best dog in the world to me.

The last couple of years I have been very fortunate to live close to friends who own a little King Charles Cavalier. She is called Nina, also anwsers to Pien and is a princess. I sometimes pick her up in the daytime to spend time at my house and on occassion she comes to stay for a few days. The princess has her own chair in my room and nobody must dare to sit on this royal seat. If a mere mortal is stupid enough to try this a staring match is the result together with attempts to weary the mortal until it will give in. Those tactics are jumping on top of the person, more staring, trying to lick your face and jumping off again within minutes only to repeat the whole process. How can that not bring a smile to your face?

Now dogs pick up on their person's moods pretty well. They will be there to comfort you when you need it. You will get your excersise because they have to go out several times a day and no the garden is not good enough for a princess [except when it rains, royalty does not like to get wet]

Nina picking up on stress means that she will be in my face on days that she thinks I am working too much. She will put two paws on my chair and demand attention instead. If the attention is not forthcoming, princess Nina will try to climb onto the laptop. No simply does not excist in the royal vocabulary. by this time I am laughing so hard that my stress is much less already and I then take time out to play with her. Oh yes, she has her own toys at my place too.
After play or a walk I notice that I have fresh energy and often new perspectives to get back to work and in fact I do get more done this way.

I can recommend this stress reducing method to everyone. You get a great deal of love and trust in return.

[one of my favorite you tube videos about another cavalier king charles called Winston]

No real post this week

I am breaking my one post per week rule this week. Why? I was about to fall into the trap of working too hard again. It snuck up on me this time because I was sticking to the hours I can work in a week. But I was forgetting that I haven't taken any holiday time out of the 12 weeks I have allotted myself per year and four months have gone by already.

When you work from home and you don't go away for a break this is the biggest trap. It is so easy to forget about your time off when you see the long list of things still to do and you see that interresting email come in.

No more! I have to practice what I preach and I am signing off for the rest of the week. Next week I will only work at half speed as well and I will see if I am in the mood for posting. Rules are there to be broken if the need arrises. A valuable lesson for those working at home.

BTW a friend shouting at you to stop helps as well. :)

How do you know a therapist/counsellor is qualified?

This is a topic that comes up again once in a while. In a lot of countries counsellor or coach or therapist are not protected titles. What it basically comes down to is that anybody can start a practice or an online business as a therapist. It is not illegal and many clients are not aware of this.

It came to the forefront of my mind again as I am following the case of Keith Bakker this week. For the non-Dutch, he is a Dutch therapist who works with addicted people [ a lot of teenagers] to get them clean again. He has his own clinic and had a tv programme. He has now been accused of sexual harassment of several clients.

In his defence he has always been straight about the fact that he is not a qualified therapist or counsellor. He was an ex-addict who used his experience to help others. Sometimes those methods were extreme as he has admitted to taking clients home with him when he thought they needed it. And this is where the boundaries begin to blur. 

[I will not go into the fact if I think he is guilty or not] The fact is that even for the laywers it is now confusing. He is not a  qualified therapists so they cannot convict him of doing anything wrong as such and there is no licence to strike as he doesn’t have one. See the confussion? It is a very interesting case to follow and to see the outcome.

How can something like this be prevented? Or at least the chances of it happening made smaller? Counselling, therapist etc should be protected titles. And only used by somebody with the proper training.  A clinic like this should not be able to open it’s doors without the proper papers and it’s therapists being trained. I am not saying Keith did not help a lot of people. Some people are natural healers, but still next to that he should have gone through the training as well.

Until that happens what can you look for as a client to protect yourself?

• ·         Look at what credentials [and evidence for those] a counsellor boasts. On my website I have put as many links as I can for the evidence of my schooling

• ·         Are they a member of a professional body? I am a member of the NAC [ Dutch counselling association]

• ·         Any mention of an ethical code on their website? And a way to complain if needed.

All this will help you to pick somebody who has gone through the training. If you are unsure ask them about it.

I hope this helps you find the therapist that suits you!

Books that inspired me.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I add added a new box to the blog and have named it 'books that inspired me' Here I will feature books that have done just that.

Image by .nele via Flickr

Although I love the internet, if I need information I will still turn to books. Be it travel guides, computer manuals or professional literature. I want to have books laying next to me that I can open, make notes in[if they are my own] and just have as many as I like open at the same time.

From a young age I have always read a lot. My mother read me stories and took me to the local library. Many books have inspired me over the years. A lot of these have been novels, but some of them have been professional literature.


One such book is Elaine Aron's 'the highly sensitive person'.  When I picked it up in the local bookstore [boekhandel verkaaik] about ten years I had no idea what the title meant, I had never heard heard the term highly sensitive before but I knew I was sensitive so it seemed an interresting read.


Pretty soon I could not put it down anymore. All those years I had thought I was weird for being affected by sounds, smells and crowds. Now I found out 10% of the world's population was like me! Our brains are wired differently and that is why we pick up things more intensely but we are not weird! It was such an eye-opener and this book prompted me to read more on the subject and to change things in my own life so I began to enjoy being an HSP


It became much easier to pick out others like me, and I sound found out that many of them did not know they were a HSP and they did not talk about it because like me they had thought they are weird. This is one of the reasons that today I love to work with highly sensitive people. To show them that they are not weird and to teach them how to love their gifts instead. To find peace with who they are and enjoy life to the fullest. And this amazing journey began by picking up one book.

Musing about human nature [the alphen mall shooting]

Image via Wikipedia

This week I just feel I want to write something about the shocking events that happened in my country last saturday. A young man in Alphen aan den Rijn, a town of 75000 inhabitants walked into his local shopping centre and started shooting. He killed 6 people and wounded several others before shooting himself through the head.
It is the first time something like this has happened in this country. We have seen it on the news, often it is very far away like in the US. And all of us thought, this is not going to happen here. Of course there have been shootings in the past, but those are almost always criminals or problems in within families.
Nothing on this scale. Our weapons laws are pretty strict as well and that usually helps.


How do people react?

Image via Wikipedia

For days afterwards it was the only thing people talked about. Perfect strangers would start to talk to you in waiting lines, waiting rooms and on trains and busses. Everybody felt the need to share. Most have no link with Alphen or the people who were killed and yet there is this human need to share to feel close to others, to try to understand and of course complain about what went wrong. He should never have been given a gun permit, it was all the fault of computergames and the violent ones should be banned. You hear that a lot on the street. 


People in Alphen also come together to work through their grief. There was a remembrance evening on sunday and on tuesday morning the shopping centre opened again with people applauding the shopkeepers. The news showed people hugging each other and crying, laying flowers and signing condoleance registers. Anything to give what happened a place. They are the ones who will have to go back to the shopping centre and try not to think about what happened every time they shop. It is a good thing to see people come together to support each other in any way they can. Dutch victim support is there, churches are open all day long for those who want to talk, religious or not. In this way they are helping people to heal by sharing and being heard. And this way reducing the trauma of what happened. Forget? No, but to give it a place in their lives and to move on.


We should never forget people like Margriet ter Haar. This 68 year old owner of a small shop gave her own life while saving total strangers. She is a true modern hero.


I hope something good will come out of all the grief and pain. Simply that people will care about their neighbours more. Not many noticed that the 24 year old shooter was troubled. These mass shooters are often young men who are somehow not connected to society. They are lonely and often have been bullied as youngsters. I hope we will start caring for these young men, to show them that there are people who care and befriend them. We are all unique and to offer a helping hand can go such a long way, together we can make this world a happier and safer place.

Related articles

• Six People Killed In Netherlands Shooting (news.sky.com)