A bit on our therapies

Our journey began with a deeply personal experience that would ultimately shape the direction of our life's work. More than four decades ago, Nik was told he had just eight weeks to live. Faced with an uncertain future, he embarked on an intensive search for answers. A pursuit that not only transformed his own life but also challenged many of the assumptions he encountered along the way.

Through years of dedicated study, Nik became increasingly aware that some long-held ideas within psychology and mental health had gone largely unquestioned despite evolving scientific understanding. This inspired a commitment to explore alternative ways of understanding psychological distress and developing more effective approaches to treatment.

When Nik and Eva began working together, they combined their knowledge, experience, and shared determination to help people achieve lasting change. Over more than three decades, they have studied human behaviour and psychology extensively, refining their ideas through clinical practice, research, and tens of thousands of therapeutic interventions. This work has culminated in the development of three pioneering therapeutic approaches designed to address both behavioural and trauma-related difficulties in innovative ways.

Schema Conditioning Psychotherapy® is a behavioural change therapy that focuses on identifying and reshaping the underlying patterns that influence thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. Visual Schema Displacement Therapy (VSDT®) and Visual Schema Detachment & Restructuring® (VSDR®) are trauma-focused therapies that utilise guided visual imagery and eye movements to help individuals process distressing memories and reduce their emotional impact.

Our work continues to be guided by a simple but powerful principle: to question, to innovate, and to develop therapeutic approaches that are both compassionate and supported by scientific evaluation, with the ultimate aim of improving lives and offering genuine hope.

Our core belief is that people are not born with the psychological difficulties they later experience in life. Rather, their challenges develop through life experiences, learned responses, and the way events are interpreted, with trauma often playing a significant role. By understanding these processes, people can challenge unhelpful behaviours and create meaningful change.

Visual Schema Displacement Therapy®

Visual Schema Displacement Therapy (VSDT®) is an eye movement-based therapy developed to help individuals process traumatic experiences and reduce the emotional impact of distressing memories. Since 2015, we have collaborated with renowned psychology professors at universities in Amsterdam and Utrecht, where an ongoing programme of scientific research has evaluated the effectiveness of VSDT®. This research has resulted in a growing body of peer-reviewed evidence. In June 2019, studies published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry demonstrated the therapy's efficacy in comparison with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR). A further study, published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in April 2021, reported comparable findings. Most recently, a clinical study involving individuals with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in March 2024, concluded that VSDT® is an effective treatment for PTSD, supporting its use as a valuable therapeutic option with outcomes comparable to EMDR.

VSDT® however also integrates a number of additional visual and cognitive techniques that differentiate it from EMDR, forming a unique therapeutic framework developed through years of clinical practice, innovation, and scientific evaluation.

Today, VSDT® continues to be the subject of ongoing research as we seek to further strengthen its evidence base and contribute to the advancement of effective, evidence-informed trauma therapies.