Pauline van Borrendam

Haptotherapist

Pauline van Borrendam has been a haptotherapist for 30 years. She works in her own private practice. A haptotherapist helps you find balance in your emotional life. Working with affective touch, from an inner attitude of warmth and respect, the haptotherapist acknowledges the client exactly where he or she is in that moment. When people feel really accepted, and experience that in their body, they open up and get to know themselves on a deeper level.

Shortly after completing her haptotherapy training, Pauline found out that she had had a very traumatic childhood, to which she had no conscious memory. Looking back she saw that there had been signs all her life, the most striking of which were major dissociative symptoms; when you are not well connected to yourself in your body.
In the following years, she recognised that all of her clients who suffered more chronic symptoms had experienced childhood trauma, that was now hidden in their body. Unaddressed childhood trauma can lead to many psychological and physical complaints.

Pauline discovered how to build a stable base in your body, as a foundation for healing trauma. She learned how to acknowledge, soothe and heal fears, anxiety, loneliness, grief, anger, tension, sleeplessness, shallow breathing, headaches and so on.

There is a lot of attention for trauma today. Pauline completed Janina Fisher's TIST training; Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment, in April 2025, and is now a certified TIST therapist as well. In TIST you work with parts of your consciousness that have split off during trauma. These parts make themselves known in your body, in feelings, in ways of behaving, and also in thoughts and beliefs. TIST fits perfectly with the haptotherapy approach.

The core approach of both haptotherapy and TIST consists of felt connection in the body, deep acceptance and empathy, as the primary forces which lead to healing. Where other approaches often use ‘tools’, focus and attention, haptotherapy and TIST hold back on rational or will-driven attention, and help you find that inner state in which you experience a deep sense of acceptance, safety, surrender and love. The healing that comes from that entry point is unmistakably clear and palpable in your body, and it lasts.