“It's all your fault!”
By means of: Priska Voskuil-Van Dijk in Newsletter VvCP April 23, 2021
“It's all your fault!”
In connection to a respectful divorce
This is the title of the book that our board member Willemijn van Strien wrote. The book has just been published!
On the back: “In It's all your fault Willemijn van Strien teaches the reader to take his or her own part in the conflict. There is a lot involved that we are not aware of. Everyone can learn to deal with this, but at the same time we discover that although the solutions are simple, the application is not easy. Patterns learned very early appear to get in the way of learning new behavior.” According to Willemijn, the book provides you with tools to improve the relationships in your life. She has developed a method for this “through which you learn to stand differently in the world and the world will then react differently to you”. By means of three steps, namely: self-reflection, repairing and (re)contracting, it is possible, according to Willemijn, to improve your communication. Her aim is to stand up for children in general and for the child in her in particular. An important motivation for Willemijn to write the book is the realization that a child's brain is sensitive to external influences (arguments, stress, violence, nutrition) and that this determines how the child develops and later enters into relationships. The last chapter of the book is devoted to “Collaborative Divorce”.
Willemijn emphasizes that the book has no scientific pretensions. She uses, among other things, scientific research that has been done on Transactional Analysis and other working methods. The method of communication improvement that she developed is also a combination of various techniques acquired in sixteen years of her own practice, thirty-four years of working life and fifty-seven years of life experience. The method is not easy, according to Willemijn. “Only if you make yourself responsible for your life and if you are really prepared to practice, will it work. The extent to which you take yourself seriously determines the success of this method”.
And an important lesson from Willemijn already starts in part 1: “First me”. She writes:
“An enlightened egoism leads to mutual benefit. It sounds contradictory, but people are most useful to each other when they each pursue their own advantage.” (Spinoza)
“During my working life I have increasingly come to see the importance of what I call “healthy egoism”. A portion of healthy egoism, or if you like, autonomy, is simply necessary before an individual can enter into a healthy relationship with another. Many relationship problems arise from a lack of autonomy, from the partners merging too much with each other. That is why this first part starts at the beginning. And that is you, to be precise: that is your brain.”
An invitation to continue reading the book!
