Welcome
2025 Online IoPT Education Course
This online IoPT Education Course with me starts in January 2025 and runs through until December. If you want further information go to the webpage.
Next In-person Workshop... in Utrecht
Thursday 5th September...
I am doing an in-person workshop in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on Thursday 5th September. This workshop is being organised by Rens Meijkamp through Art of Being Yourself. For more information and to register for this workshop click here.
My latest book...
This book is primarily about love; love as the basic force of life; love that is lost or never born in the relationship between mother and infant; love that is the underlying need of the child; love that is delusionary, holding us in endless hope; and love that is honest and true, based on reality, and then possible in our relationship with ourselves, and those we truly love. Love is the turning point from trauma to health.
This is a varied collection of thoughts and ideas, some full-length essays, and some short statements, all of which have IoPT (Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy*) thinking underlying them.
Becoming ‘IoPT-Informed’ does indeed take us on a journey where everything in the world can be considered through the lens of IoPT thinking. IoPT then becomes not just a theory and a therapeutic method, but a psychology and a philosophy that can inform and explain what happens in our own personal world, and in the wider political and social world. All of the major topics we are collectively struggling with every single day, and those personal musings about our own life... all can be considered from an IoPT perspective.
This is a book above all to be enjoyed, and from which perhaps to learn something more about who we really are, individually and collectively.
Due out shortly.
Some quotes from this next book:
"Love is the turning point from trauma to health."
"Clarity is the domain of the healthy ‘I’. So, if you feel confused about anything you can know that you are in that moment functioning more from your trauma survival instincts, and the best solution then is to set an intention to resolve your confusion and gain clarity."
On creativity:
"To be oneself and resolve one’s own trauma is the most creative thing we can do."
On the need to explain oneself:
"Any time you find yourself explaining yourself to anyone, think about this... are you trying to gain your mother’s love? The impulse to explain yourself is a symptom of the Trauma of Identity and the Trauma of Love."
On confronting our traumas:
"We need good contact with a resourceful ‘I’ to confront our traumas."
On hatred:
"I don’t think we talk about hate enough; we are too enamoured with our illusions of love. And yet the Trauma of Identity and the Trauma of Love are symptoms of hatred, sufficient to desire or wish the non-existence of the child, and then the potential hatred of the child’s continued existence."
and...
"Hate comes where hate is"
and...
"Where love exists, there can be no hate, and where hate exists there is no love."
On healing the world:
"Just three generations would make the world an infinitely better place, if IoPT-informed. The topic of trauma becomes more mainstream, and each generation becomes more familiar with the impact of trauma and the individual healing impulse becomes more embedded and normal in society."
Why do we want to become an IoPT practitioner?
"What is your answer to the question 'Why do you choose to work as an IoPT practitioner?'"
Two fundamental questions:
"How do I keep my mother in my psyche, and... Why do I keep my mother in my psyche?"
On pain and suffering:
"Pain happens, but suffering is optional."
The 2025 ONLINE IOPT EDUCATION COURSE with me starts in January 2025.
Please note that I am only available to work with people on their personal issues at the Online Working Sessions days (once a month). I do not do individual sessions now. You can find some suggested IoPT practitioners here.
I am semi-retired now, and apart from the Working Sessions Days mentioned above, and the 2025 Online Education Course, all my work is in the capacity of professional teaching, support and supervision with IoPT student practitioners.
Who am I?
"It is only when I know more clearly who I am, when I make the focus of my exploration my internal world and everything that happened to me, when I have been able to feel my own underlying pain about what happened to me, and feel the feelings involved in being me, that I can say anything truthful about myself."
"With any event that occurs in my world, whatever my reaction, I must ask the question: what has happened to me that this is my reaction to this external phenomenon now? There is injustice and wrong out there... of course there is, but my tolerance of that, the pain or suffering it causes me, is to do with who I am and what, from my own past, still causes me suffering and is re-triggered. by present day events."
(quotes from my book Trauma and Identity)
"Be in love with your life. Every minute of it." Jack Kerouac.
Becoming Your True Self is on video!
I have done a series of three videos based on this book:
Video 1 - Talking about Trauma
Video 2 - Beginnings
Video 3 - Healing Trauma?
Interview with Pedro Lechuga-Farias
For more videos with Vivian click here.