Stephen van Beek
MA (Tripos), DCTP, Member CAPT

"We make art from the quarrel with ourselves, mere rhetoric from the quarrel with others."- W.B. Yeats

Welcome! I started this site to help you select the therapist who is right for you.

I hope you will take some time to fully explore the site and benefit from the valuable information offered by our many skilled members and the site's many resource pages. I am confident you will find amongst us the therapist who can best aid you in your quest for a more fulfilled life.

It’s a very good thing to be considering therapy, no matter what your situation is at the moment. What is more important than being in touch with who we really are? To live fully we have to be real to ourselves, secure to love fully, work joyously, and create from the heart. Once we relate to ourselves, we can truly relate to others, and then our friendships and loves will flourish.

A while back an old chum surprised and delighted me when he remarked that despite the many variations in my work life, it seemed to him as though communications always played the key role in my life. I hadn’t really noticed that, I was just busy doing what came naturally to me. 

I’ve worked as a teacher, a consultant, an organizer of different ventures (like this Toronto Therapy Network website) and for many years as a therapist, but the same fundamentals have applied. I think each of us has a life theme, an authentic psychic destiny to fulfill that means who we are and grounds us in existence. When that life theme gets lost and obscured we pay a huge emotional price, until we recover it.

My own therapy has proven to be the key factor in my recovering a full and richer sense of my self that keeps on growing. It has been my most significant  learning process, and source of a vital maturation. It has spurred my other creative projects and of course it vitalizes my work as a therapist.

Recently I have posted some short articles describing some of my own discoveries through the therapy process that may interest you.

My approach to therapy is explorative and expressive. As you learn about how the past, present and future connect with each other, you will experience new freedom to make fresh choices that are creative and aware.  Your therapy will be about the many things that matter to you - love, gain, loss, pain, joy, fear, failure, success, longing, anger, sorrow, and all the rest of it. My role is to be your guide, someone who has been exploring longer and has some maps and useful skills to share with you as we travel your path together. It’s a private shared conversation unlike no other.  From this journey arises an ever-flourishing inner strength that is authentic and not merely based on crude power.

Over the past fifteen years I have had the good fortune to work with many creative personalities, both within and outside the arts, and have developed some interesting and useful ways of helping those with creative issues unravel their 'balls of string' and optimize their talents & potential.

I have had, and continue, a long and varied professional training. I have been very involved in the furtherance of the psychodynamic modality in Canada.

My approach emphasizes the analysis of core life patterns and the development of creative ways to overcome them in practical daily life, as well as psychodrama, and somatic work through the use of trance. You can read more about all of this here.

My practical experience in business as, among other things, Toronto's first full-time professional coach, is an asset in understanding how we act both in our own interest, and against it. Therapy is particularly useful for those seeking a footing in this commercially-driven world.

My special interest in Daseinsanalysis and Self-Psychology stems from their capacity to help us understand how we may develop a personal stance that is not flooded by the normalizing codes of socially-ordained language and behaviour. You might be surprised by my including money as a focus of analysis, but how we relate to it is highly significant for our way of becoming more fully ourselves.

The relationship between the mind and the body continues to fascinate me. I studied the Alexander Technique for many years along with Hatha Yoga, later qualified in the Trager Technique, and for many years studied T'ai Ch'i Chu'an, along with the Feldenkrais and Franklin approaches to physical re-integration and re-development. In the past three years I intensively studied the Pilates Method. Recently I qualified as a certified Pilates Matwork teacher. All these approaches call forth our free and active imagination, rather than simply strenuous effort, and so are very similar to the process of a deep psychotherapy.The integrative capacity of Trance , which integrates sensation and insight, makes it an especially useful therapeutic modality.

I offer several modes of work, both individual and in groups. Individual work is always the foundation, in my view. Group Therapy is an extremely effective means of moving ahead, so I lead groups for those committed to deepening their self-understanding in collaboration with others.

My affinity for relationship has led me to work with couples of all kinds who are concerned with their relationship issues.

I'll end this with a word or two about on-line and phone therapies. Despite, or perhaps because of, the constant pressure of modern life, science and technology have created some new ways to reduce distance. Thanks to the power of technology, we can do effective and creative therapy from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and across time zones. You have a choice of live video and/or just voice options. While some clients work with me this way across oceans, it also beats commuting across the crowded GTA!