I’m Gijs Van Breugel.
I work as a psychotherapist and coach from my home in Normandy, with clients around the world, in English, French, and Dutch.
My work is online and built around continuity, depth, and real contact.
I work across a broad psychological range and do not limit my practice to one diagnosis, one niche, or one fashionable method.
I use different therapeutic approaches depending on the person, the problem, and the stage of the work.
I keep my practice deliberately small. I prefer real work with a limited number of people over a full calendar and a thin relationship.
Below on this page you’ll find the formal side of my work as well: training, credentials, and professional background.
I am not here to fix you. I am here to help you stop fixing yourself in all the ways that have kept you busy, intelligent, exhausted, and still stuck.
Many of the people who end up here are not new to inner work.
They have read. Reflected. Analysed. Tried to understand themselves. They often know a great deal already.
Some have had therapy before. Some have done years of self-help. Some know exactly what their patterns are and can explain them beautifully.
And yet something in their life still does not move. Or does not hold. Or keeps collapsing in the same places. That is where my work begins.
I am Gijs Van Breugel, psychotherapist and coach.
My work is not soft, vague, or built around performance. It is also not cold, distant, or hidden behind clinical language. It is human and pragmatic.
I want to know what actually happens to you when the week starts moving again.
What takes over.
Where you disappear.
Where you adapt.
Where you tighten. Where you go numb.
Where you keep functioning while something deeper is quietly falling apart.
I do not care much for the performance of progress. I care about the moments when something real finally gets through.
The moment you stop explaining yourself so well.
The moment you notice what you are actually doing to yourself.
The moment the old structure shows itself clearly enough that we can work with it.
The moment you stop sounding convincing and start becoming present.
That is where Real Therapy becomes useful.
I work across a broad range of psychological suffering and patterns.
Some people come with a diagnosis already in place. Others arrive with something they cannot yet name.
I am comfortable working with both.
Labels can be useful. Diagnoses can matter.
But they are not the centre of my work. The centre is always the living structure underneath: how your suffering is organised, how it keeps repeating, and what kind of therapeutic work is actually needed to change it.
That is also why I work the way I do.
I do not believe much in one good hour followed by six days of carrying the rest alone. Insight matters, but insight is rarely enough by itself. If the work only reaches you while we are talking, it often does not reach you far enough.
So between sessions, I stay connected. Not to manage you. Not to hover. But to make sure that what we touch does not fade back into noise, or worse, into oblivion.
Real Therapy, for me, is not just something that happens when the camera is on.
It is a working relationship that stays alive while real life is still happening.
That changes the nature of our work: It becomes less about reporting back once a week, and more about actually working with what is happening while it is still warm.
It becomes less polished. Less theoretical. Less performative.
More real. More useful.
More capable of reaching the places where change either begins or keeps failing.