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about the practice

A second career built on deep training, professional experience, and a genuine understanding of what it means to lose, and find yourself.

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Yolande Barkhuysen, Master of Counselling

QUALIFICATIONS

  • Master of Counselling

  • Bachelor of Counselling

THERAPEUTIC MODALITIES INCLUDE

  • Internal Family Systems (IFS)

  • Narrative Therapy

  • Person-Centred Therapy

  • Schema Therapy

  • Attachment-Based Therapy

  • Complicated Grief & Loss

  • Interpersonal Therapy

  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

  • 15 Years Management & Leadership

  • Several Years EAP (Employee Assistance) Experience

my story

I came to counselling the long way around.

For fifteen years, I worked in management and leadership, navigating organisations, leading teams, and understanding the pressures and complexities of professional life.

Then, like many of the people I now work with, I encountered experiences that exceeded my usual capacity to cope. Major transitions, significant losses, the dislocation of migration, and the disorientation of finding that the identity I had built no longer quite fit.

Each of these brought me to a question I hadn't expected: who am I now?

That question led me back to study. I completed a Bachelor and then a Master of Counselling, and have since built a practice grounded in this same territory.

I spent several years working in Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP), supporting professionals facing the kinds of challenges that emerge when pressure is sustained and the usual ways of coping no longer hold.

Much of my work now centres on identity disruption and the gradual process of making sense of who you are when what once fit no longer does.

Clients I work with are often people who have built lives that function well, until something changes. They come not always by choice, but because something in their life, or in their sense of self, no longer holds in the same way.

This work takes time. It unfolds at your pace, and continues for as long as it’s needed.

my therapeutic approach

The approach is integrative, meaning it is shaped by what each person needs rather than a fixed method applied to everyone. Sessions are collaborative and follow your pace. The focus is on making room for complexity rather than reducing everything to symptoms alone

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Narrative Therapy

Person-Centred Therapy

Schema Therapy

Attachment-Based Therapy

Interpersonal Therapy

wondering if this is the right fit?

I welcome a brief initial conversation - no obligation, no pressure.

Yolande Barkhuysen, Master of Counselling

Australian Counselling Association (ACA) | ACA College of Supervisors

If you are in crisis, please contact Lifeline 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636