English-Speaking Therapist in Utrecht.

The work

The work I do is relational and focused on pattern. I don't run intake checklists. I don't assign homework. I pay attention to what happens in the session. The moments when something shifts or goes flat. The pattern that keeps showing up underneath the problem. Most people already know their own story. They still keep landing in the same place. What's missing is someone watching in real time, someone who can name what you cannot see from inside it. More on how I work, and how I work with couples.

Why people in Utrecht work with me

Three reasons. Speed, first: against a twenty-four-week GGZ average, I have room now and need no referral, which matters when your contract, your visa, or your project timeline does not pause for the queue. Fit, second: my entire practice is internationals, and the academic and medical worlds Utrecht runs on are ones I know from the inside, so nothing needs translating. Privacy, third: a university city is a small world (your supervisor, your department, your huisarts all a few streets apart), and I work entirely outside the Dutch system, so there is no GGZ file and nothing any of them could ever encounter. And if the right answer is GGZ care or someone local and in person, I will tell you so.

What people bring to online therapy

The people I work with in English come for a wide range of reasons: anxiety, depression, stress and burnout, anger management, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, loneliness, self-esteem issues, procrastination, sleep problems, attachment patterns, self-sabotage, perfectionism, identity questions, and existential concerns. Online counseling makes this work possible from wherever you are, whether you need an English-speaking therapist, a virtual counselor, or simply someone who can work in your language at a depth that matters.

How it works

Sessions are online via secure video call. I work with individuals and couples (60 minutes). Before your first session, we have a free 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.

The Utrecht patterns

Utrecht runs on knowledge work. The university and UMC Utrecht anchor a population of PhD candidates, postdocs, physicians, and research staff. The science park's biotech and tech companies join them, along with the banking and consulting offices in between. A four-year PhD contract makes the math brutal. A twenty-four-week wait is an eighth of the funding period spent standing still. Postdocs stack short contracts across cities and countries. They arrive here carrying whatever the last three moves did not settle. Clinicians at the teaching hospital spend their days inside other people's crises. They learn to file their own under later.

The city itself compounds it gently. Utrecht is compact, pretty, bike-scale, and young, and its Dutch social world largely formed years ago in student houses you were never in. English works everywhere here (in the lab, in the seminar, at the register), and almost nowhere does it go deep. You can function fully in this city and still have no one to actually talk to. The international student who stayed for a job or a partner. The third year turns out lonelier than the first. The spouse who followed a tenure-track offer and is rebuilding a career from a canal-side flat that looks, from the outside, like the whole problem is solved.

A young, capable, forward-motion city can make a quiet struggle feel off-script. It is not. It is what the script tends to produce.

Therapy in Utrecht: a knowledge city on a national waiting list

The Dutch access problem is national, and Utrecht sits in the middle of it in every sense. Public care runs through the GGZ on a huisarts referral, basic insurance covers it, and half of adults now wait past the agreed fourteen-week norm, often for treatment in Dutch. Couples work is not covered anywhere. If it is the two of you, see my couples therapy in the Netherlands page. Private English-speaking depth therapists run roughly 90 to 150 euros a session and tend to be booked. For a city whose international population is built around universities, a teaching hospital, and research careers that run on tight clocks, half a year in a queue is not a plan. This is private depth work in English, paid directly, outside the GGZ. The 2026 figures are in my Netherlands guide to insurance, cost and waiting lists.

Counting the wait

This is worth saying plainly in a city full of people who read methods sections. The old figures for average waits have stopped. The last ones published are from early 2023. Back then the average total wait was about fourteen weeks for basis GGZ, and about twenty-one for specialist care. Updates were paused while the country moves to a new way of counting, built on claims data. The national health institute plans its own new figures for the end of 2027.

But a new count has started. A dashboard built from insurance claims went public in July 2026. Its first figures look back at people who have begun treatment. Anyone still on a list is not in them yet. Just over half began treatment within fourteen weeks of referral. About eight in ten began within six months. About one in twenty waited more than a year.

That is a real problem for the way careers run here. A four-year contract needs a date. So does a two-year postdoc, or a grant with an end on it. The covered route cannot give you one.

My own timing is the one thing I can state exactly. There is no list, and we can usually begin within days of the first call.

Questions people ask from Utrecht