In conversation with….

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‘Wanda Verbeek’s threshing sledge’

Today I was a guest of Wanda Verbeek, who provides psychosocial therapy to both adults and teenagers. She welcomed me warmly into her cozy living room, where she has set up a special room for her clients in the addition—though, as it turns out, no client has ever sat there yet. They prefer to sit at the long table in the middle of the living room. And yes, I was allowed to take a seat on the couch. Across from me, Wanda sat in the therapist’s armchair. But of course, it wasn’t a therapy session; it was a fascinating conversation about her life, her faith, and her vision for helping people—both in society and in the church.

I told her that I would, of course, mention this: that I had the distinction of sitting on the client’s couch. And that I was just barely not slumped over, as Freud used to require of his patients. Wanda laughed: “Fortunately, we’ve come a long way since then.”

Faith from Home

Wanda grew up in a family where faith was always present. Her mother was already a believer, but the big turning point came when her father had a radical conversion to faith at the age of thirty. The family switched from the traditional church to an evangelical congregation (the ECG and later the ACG), where Wanda immediately felt at home.

Her own “moment of faith” came through a dream when she was about seven years old. She dreamed of a playground full of children playing, with Jesus in the middle. There was a big fence around it, and Wanda was standing on the outside; she wanted so badly to be part of it. Jesus said to her, “Then you may give your heart to Me.” She woke up, ran to her father, and said she wanted to give her heart to the Lord right then and there. Together they knelt down in prayer. “I can still picture it clearly,” she says. It was a moment that set the course of her life.

We know from the Bible that God speaks through dreams—think of Joseph, one of Jacob’s twelve sons, or Joseph, the father of Jesus. It’s remarkable to hear that it still works this way, even in the life of a little girl in an ordinary Dutch family.

A heart for care

The urge to care was in Wanda from an early age. For St. Nicholas Day, she invariably asked for toy hospitals and doctor’s kits. She knew what she wanted to be even as a child. Her father was a nurse at the hospital and later worked as a manager at Tot Heil des Volks, a social services organization. Her mother was a caregiver, and Wanda and her sister also chose nursing. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She worked for years in the surgical ward at Amstelland Hospital, where she cared for people with serious conditions such as breast cancer with great love and dedication. “I did it with total devotion,” she recalls. It was demanding work, but it suited her perfectly.

Foster Children and an Unexpected Calling

In 2007, Wanda and her husband Michiel’s lives took an unexpected turn. Through a community outreach center in the village—a place where young people would pop in for a chat between outings—they met a pregnant teenage girl. Wanda and Michiel almost impulsively offered to care for the baby.

Two years later, the phone rang on a Thursday, just as Wanda and her family were about to get into a canoe in France. “Do you still want to care for a baby?” They said yes. They came home on Sunday, and by 10 a.m. on Monday, there was a baby in the house.

Thus began a period of emergency foster care for babies who, for safety reasons, had to be placed at a secret address. No one knew the little ones were with them. Their youngest foster daughter, Noortje, was only two days old when she arrived. We’ve had the privilege of watching her grow up; we adopted her, and she’s a fantastic girl.

From Physical Care to Psychosocial Therapy

The transition from nursing to psychosocial care was gradual. A major turning point was her meeting with Christa Rosier in 2010. Christa was not only known from the Evangelical Broadcasting Network, where she worked as an announcer; she was also an artist and had a prayer ministry for people in spiritual distress. For years, Wanda struggled with severe nightmares and thought it was her own fault—that she wasn’t trying hard enough or needed to be a “better” Christian. Christa was the first to pray for deliverance with her, after which the nightmares stopped.

However, Wanda also noticed something: after a deliverance process, people were often left with grief and deep-rooted patterns that you can’t simply “pray away.” “Sometimes prayer is desperately needed, but you can’t just dismiss someone’s wounds or patterns.” She began guiding people through pastoral care, but soon reached her limits. What do you do with severe depression, serious trauma, or hyperventilation?

The decisive moment came during a conversation with her neighbors, when she was asked: “What would you do tomorrow if you no longer had any fear?” There were, after all, all sorts of objections and obstacles: she had a family with growing children, and then there was time, a job, and not to mention the costs. But Wanda heard herself say: “Then I’ll study psychology.” That night she lay awake. The following Monday, she enrolled at De Roos (now located at the CHE in Ede). Step by step, she built her way to her current practice.

Letting Go of Old Beliefs

Her faith has fundamentally changed over the years. She mentions a few beliefs she has been able to let go of over the years and that have lost their power. (I wish I were never bothered by them again, but that’s not true; I do want to remain honest.)

• A Christian just has to fight: She always thought she had to be the best soldier in God’s army. Work hard, put on her armor, never let up. “It wore you out.”
• Polishing yourself for God: The idea that you must first be “in order” before God accepts you. Looking back, she recognizes that her need to please was tied to the dynamics of her childhood, during which she became sensitive to moods and expectations. “I projected that image onto God.” Now she knows that God’s love is unconditional.
• The “if-then” mindset: “If I dutifully give my tithes or read the Bible every morning, then God will bless me.” With God, there is no “if-then.” A certain “quid pro quo” mindset is wrong. God wants a relationship, a friendship with us, not a negotiated agreement.
• The either-or mindset: God is either a sweet teddy bear or a strict judge. She discovered that He is a God of both-and. A Jesus who overturns tables and at the same time prays for forgiveness for His executioner. “Our thinking is often too limited; we try to cram Him into a box.”

The church as a patient

If she were to have the church as a patient on her couch, what would the diagnosis be? Wanda doesn’t hesitate: “The church is still quite sick.”

She sees too little space for people going through difficult processes. Grief that lasts longer than six months is often not understood; then it becomes uncomfortable. Too often people hear: “It really has to be over by now.” Judgment is passed where compassion is needed. The medicine? Proclaiming a God of both-and. Yes, believing in healing, but also making room for the time it takes. God called Moses, but then had him tend sheep for forty years first. “As a teenager, I thought: no, please don’t make me wait that long. But in hindsight, I needed that time too.”

She quotes psychiatrist Dirk de Wachter: we have forgotten the art of “being unhappy.” Suffering is no longer allowed, not even in the church, even though the Psalms lament more often than they rejoice. “It is no coincidence that those laments are at the heart of the Bible.” Edith Eger is also a source of inspiration for her: even in Auschwitz, she retained the strength to shield her inner world, while she was forced—she was only 16 years old at the time—to dance for Dr. Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” in the barracks; her mental survival strategy proved stronger than death.

For people without faith in the depths of darkness, Wanda has a powerful message: “If you’ve lost hope for a moment, lean on mine.”

The Threshing Sledge

Hanging on the wall in her practice is a special object: a threshing sledge. Michiel had this specially shipped from Eastern Europe as a wedding gift, a reference to Isaiah 41:15-16. A text that Christa Rosier once gave her.

“Behold, I have made you a sharp threshing sledge, a new one with double blades. You will thresh the mountains and crush them, and make the hills like chaff.”

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@wimvanputten