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hande arıkan

There is never just one voice inside us.

“Is this all there is?”

“I keep getting stuck in the same place with my partner, my child, my manager.”

“I can't see a way out.”

“I'm going through a hard time.”

And there's one more voice, from somewhere deeper: “Maybe it can be different.”

Hande Arıkan

None of these voices is bad or wrong; each one is telling you something. Let's listen to all voices and integrate them. In person in Istanbul or online via Zoom.

How we can work together

If you're ready to look together, we can begin.

With yourself

Gestalt-based one-to-one work

One-to-one sessions to hear the voices inside you, notice what you need, and take a step that fits. Career, relationships, parenting, midlife, moving from one stage of life to the next.

With your group

Groups with Deep Democracy and Gestalt

Hands stacked together in a group session
In the same circle, hand in hand
  • Shift EQ: a training in transforming conflict and challenging situations
  • Compassionate communication
  • Occasional, spontaneous workshops
See groups & trainings

With your practice

Supervision through a Gestalt lens

As an ICF-accredited coaching supervisor (CSS), I offer individual and group supervision: a safe space to think through what happened in a session alongside what was happening in you.

What people say

For as long as I can remember, I've been curious about human nature.

Hande as a child, smiling at a sparrow on her hand

From outer voices to inner ones

For nineteen years I did what I was supposed to do: business analysis, information systems, teams on four continents, a global management role at Coca-Cola. In my mid-thirties, when everything seemed fine, I noticed a fierce restlessness inside me.

In 2018 I changed direction completely. Since then I've chosen to listen to all the voices inside me, the ones I like and the ones I don't. I know that a life where I feel at ease inside is possible, not from my training or my reading, but from living it.

The full story
Gestalt coach
since 2016, 1,500+ hours of coaching
Gestalt therapy training
Macedonian Gestalt Therapy Association, 3rd year
Lewis Deep Democracy
Practitioner and Accredited Shift EQ Instructor
ICF PCC
Professional Certified Coach
ICF CSS
coaching supervisor

Reflections

Videos and writing where I try to make hard topics simple. Three of the most talked-about (in Turkish):

Happy reflecting… All videos and writing

Whatever I've learned about life, I've learned from people's quirks.

In Gestalt, change takes a little strangeness: stepping, even slightly, outside the norm. Up for a little strangeness with me?

What is Gestalt?

Gestalt is an existential approach to therapy developed in the 1940s by Fritz and Laura Perls. It stands out for being experiential and phenomenological: rather than interpretations, it focuses on what is being lived in the moment. It sees a person as a whole, body, feelings, thoughts and surroundings, and its focus is the “here and now”.

In Gestalt-based coaching, too, we set out with a goal and ask good questions. Then we add another layer: we also look at what is happening in the moment. The place where your voice wavers, the sentence left unfinished, the tension in your shoulders. We don't just talk; we experiment, enact and feel. We believe change begins not when we try to become someone we're not, but when we fully notice who we are.

So we move towards the goal not by silencing a part of ourselves, but by becoming whole. As the different voices inside you make room for one another, the steps you take become more genuine and more lasting.

That's why Gestalt can't be done with AI. An AI can ask good questions. But it can't see the body sitting across from it, hear the silence in between, or feel what two people stir in each other. In Gestalt, that living relationship is the work itself.

VideoAll about awarenessCan I really know whether I'm aware? (in Turkish)

What is Deep Democracy?

The term “Deep Democracy” was coined in the late 1980s by Arnold Mindell, the founder of Process Work. It holds that in a group, every voice carries information, not only the majority's: minority views, suppressed feelings and uncomfortable ideas too.

South African psychologists Myrna and Greg Lewis took this idea into practice in the years when apartheid, the regime of racial segregation that divided people by skin colour until the early 1990s, came to an end. People who had been kept apart for years needed to be able to talk at the same table. So they developed a method that works in groups and organisations: Lewis Deep Democracy.

It doesn't settle for the majority decision; it brings the wisdom of the minority voice into the decision as well. By making the unspoken speakable, it turns tension and conflict into shared learning.

VideoYou can agree without giving inMaking decisions together with Deep Democracy, with Anıl Savaş Kılıç (in Turkish)