Modita van Zummeren had 20 years experience as a medical doctor and struggling through depression. After fighting the depression for decades, she discovered how healing through depression is possible. This is the principle of her book, “Depression, a Stepping Stone Towards Bills”.
Now she is trained as a therapist (in bodywork, gestalt, zen counselling), as well as a family constellator and facilitator of meditation.
Her book, ‘Depression, a Stepping-stone towards Bliss’ is available now on Amazon. You can learn about her services and work by visiting her website: genietenvanmeditatie.nl
The video version of this episode is also available at the bottom of this post.
“A life can only flow if the parent only gives, and the child only receives.”
– Modita van Zummeren on Family Constellations.
Modita shares that she often had a disdain for her own physical body. She wanted to be mentally and spiritually better without having to be tied to this body. It was when she started to learn and experience the ways emotions show up in the body physically that she started to have breakthroughs.
She is also a firm believer that there is only so much you can learn from going to group therapies and talk therapy. She jokes that she was once a “group junkie” and eventually learned that once she left the group the symptoms kept arising.
It wasn’t until she took those practices to her everyday life that the depression started to lead way to a beautiful breakthrough of flow and bliss. Modita very thoughtfully links the ways that healing through depression (rather than “from depression”) is actually a gift that can teach us something deeper about ourselves.
Family Constellations is also a new concept–at least to me– introduced in this episode. You can visit her website to learn more specifics, but generally the idea is a group therapy focused on healing our generational traumas. Even the best of parents are carrying some sort of trauma and this in turn is passed onto the children.
