Relation Emotion Therapy and Coaching

Your feelings are at the heart of your decision-making. With healthy emotional regulation, you don’t get stuck in patterns.

When something feels good, we go for it. When something feels wrong, we hesitate. Emotions determine almost everything. Sometimes we get stuck in limiting feelings and patterns keep repeating. Healthy emotional regulation helps you make decisions that are good for you, your partner and your family. You feel relief, you can say sorry and you feel free.

• Individual. You learn to change unwanted behavior and patterns that come from how you feel. Because feelings shape your daily choices, this can be life-changing.
• Relational. Why can you love someone so much and hate that same person at the same time? Because of emotions. With RETaC, you rediscover what you truly feel and learn to create a loving relationship.
• A new method for coaches and therapists. RETaC was developed by modeling how our emotional brain creates emotions. This leads to deep and lasting transformation.

RETaC will change the way you think change works.

Do you want to become exceptionally effective as a coach or therapist? Sign up for the RETaC coach training.

Your emotions don’t arise the way you were taught: your brain predicts what is going to happen.

The predictive brain

Your brain constantly monitors subtle signals from your body, such as your heartbeat and tension in your stomach, throat and gut (interoception). It links these signals to memories to predict as accurately as possible what is coming. This is useful in new situations, but feelings can also be linked to experiences that consistently produce the worst prediction. All you notice of this process is the emotion. RETaC is based on neuroscientific research by, among others, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and is not the same as EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy).

Why relationships affect us so deeply

From birth, thousands of experiences with your parents and surroundings teach you what, for example, intimacy and togetherness mean. This learning is unconscious and forms the basis of relationship emotions. Your emotions arise in relation to your environment! You experience those emotions as the result of what the other person does or doesn’t do. Later, this can make you feel that your partner or someone else causes your feelings. In reality, old unconscious prediction loops are being activated.

Why insight and techniques are sometimes not enough

Emotions cannot be overruled by cognition. Communication advice, attachment styles, nonviolent communication and family constellations are valuable, but when things get emotional, relationship emotions win. With RETaC, we make the unconscious process conscious and change the predictions, so that emotions change lastingly.

RETaC (Relation, Emotion, Therapy and Coaching) works with the process that creates your feelings, not only with the thoughts and beliefs that come from them. It is modeled on the natural way your nervous system produces emotions. This lets you reach a deeper layer of change.

Modeled on your nervous system

Modeling, studying what works and applying it, is a well-known approach. What sets RETaC apart is what has been modeled: the way your nervous system creates emotions. That nervous system sets its own rules, and those rules keep themselves in place. In self-organization theory this is called self-referential. RETaC uses that same process to change deep patterns.

A sixth sense: interoception

Every problem and every solution has a strategy, a kind of step-by-step plan. That plan often runs through the five senses that register the outside world: seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. RETaC focuses on the sixth sense, interoception. This is the perception and processing of signals from your body: changes in heartbeat, breathing, tension, warmth, pressure or sensations in your belly and chest.

RETaC uses these signals not only as a sign of an emotion, but as an entry point to explore and change the underlying emotional pattern. In this way you uncover a deeper, more unconscious part of your experience. From this sense arises a step-by-step plan of its own, with different results.

Start with the feeling, not the belief

A belief shows itself in language, for example: “My husband eats chips so loudly that I can’t relax.” A sentence like this describes the surface. You don’t yet know what you experience underneath. RETaC therefore always explores the feeling itself. A different belief doesn’t necessarily change that feeling, and in the end the felt experience determines what changes. If you explore the feeling purely as a feeling, it is easier to reach its origin.

RETaC doesn’t deny the importance of beliefs. They are concepts that are part of the pattern, but not always the first lever. Take “I’m not good enough.” This is not just a thought you replace with a more positive one. The question is also: which feeling makes this belief real and self-evident for you? If that feeling changes, the meaning of the belief can change too.

Behind a feeling there is also a whole: your past, the meaning you give things, expectations, emotion, behavior and how you experience reality. A belief is the language of one piece of your perception. “Change the belief and you change everything” is therefore only part of the story. The opposite, “work with the emotion and your problem is solved,” is too simplistic. RETaC works with the source from which your emotional response arises. This way, not just one belief changes, but the unconscious whole that determines how you experience reality.

How a feeling arises

Emotions are not simply a reaction to what happens outside us. Your nervous system and brain constantly interpret internal and external information based on earlier experiences and expectations. As a result, a situation can trigger a reaction now that is stronger, more persistent or different from what you can explain rationally. An emotion is the end result of a system that organizes itself: an emergent property, not the result of a single cause.

There are two kinds of such self-organizing systems:

• Autopoietic: the system maintains itself by repeating its own patterns. Your prediction loop, how you expect things to go, works this way.
• Self-referential: the system builds its own reality with its own rules. RETaC works this way.

That is why changing one belief at most changes one part of a larger whole. Deep change happens when you uncover (and change) the process that creates, among other things, your beliefs. RETaC designs its interventions to match how emotional patterns themselves are formed and maintained. So it’s not about correcting or controlling a reaction from the outside, but about letting the system develop new information and new coherence, so that the reaction itself changes.

Always generative

RETaC works generatively in every process. We use the natural feedback loops of the nervous system that create emotions to let new feelings arise. At the same time, problem feelings dissolve, even those from the distant past. The generative aspect therefore works in two directions.

The new feelings keep producing change far into the future. Often something arises that you could not have imagined beforehand. Robert Dilts calls this generative genius.

RETaC aims not only to help people handle a reaction better, but to change the pattern that reaction comes from. This calls for a different perspective of time, feelings and of relationships.

Past, present and future in one pattern

RETaC does not treat past, present and future as three separate domains. An emotional pattern arises from earlier experiences, is activated in the present and contains expectations about what will happen. RETaC interventions involve all three dimensions in the same process, always systemically and simultaneously. The goal is not only to look differently at an event from the past or to learn different behavior for the future, but to change the pattern that connects past, present and future.

Core feelings: why knowing is not enough

Feelings determine behavior, so that is where the work takes place. People often know very well what sensible or desirable behavior would be, and still act differently. You know a small remark is no reason to get angry, but you feel the anger rising anyway. You know you don’t need validation, but you feel rejected anyway. You know a situation is safe, but your body reacts as if danger is near.

This gap between knowing and doing shows that rational insight alone is not always enough to change deeply rooted patterns. That is why RETaC looks for the core feelings that organize the automatic reaction. These core feelings form at a young age.

Broad emotions, relational origin

RETaC does not limit the emotional domain to a few basic emotions such as fear, anger, sadness or joy. Rejection, powerlessness, insecurity, shame, loneliness, inadequacy, connection, trust or safety can also be part of a pattern. It is not only about naming the emotion, but about its function and organization in your personal and relational system.

The relational side is essential. Many persistent emotional problems have a relational component, and the most important issues people experience are relational or carry an unconscious relational component. You don’t develop your emotional world in isolation: feelings of safety, rejection, connection, recognition, trust or inadequacy arise to a large extent in relation to others in childhood. RETaC therefore explores not only “what do I feel?”, but also how a feeling was formed relationally and is activated again in new situations. The relational side is not a separate part of the method, but interwoven with the way RETaC looks at patterns.

From coping with a reaction to changing the pattern

Many interventions help people cope better with difficult feelings or reactions. RETaC aims to change the underlying pattern itself. The intended result is that the old reaction becomes less self-evident, or is no longer activated at all. After a successful intervention, clients don’t describe it as “I can cope with it better now,” but as “it just doesn’t happen the way it used to.”

Research shows that long-recurring patterns change lastingly with RETaC, without anyone having to keep working on it consciously. This is because RETaC works generatively: the problem feeling dissolves and the new feelings keep producing change by themselves. The pattern is not suppressed or constantly readjusted, but gets a new foundation that keeps reinforcing itself.

New techniques, often surprisingly simple

Anyone familiar with other change methods, such as NLP, Neuro-Semantics or systemic work, will recognize elements in RETaC. These are applied very specifically, however, attuned to how the emotional nervous system actually creates emotions. The difference therefore lies not in any single element, but in the combination: interoceptive information, emotional prediction, core feelings, relational patterns and the connection between past, present and future.

From this combination, Wassili Zafiris developed the RETaC interventions. These techniques make solutions possible that previously seemed out of reach. The techniques are also often greatly simplified: less cumbersome, without losing depth.

Connection and spirituality

According to Radical Remission, you practice spirituality by doing an activity that encourages you to feel: your body, your emotions, up to a deep sense of calm and peace. By that definition, RETaC is a spiritual practice. Our feelings arose in interaction and keep us deeply connected. RETaC teaches you to experience that connection instead of shutting yourself off from it. By engaging with that connection, you can update emotional patterns. You experience more and more calm, and your relationships become more unconditional.

Family lawyers and divorce mediators call RETaC the missing link, especially where the legal route doesn’t bring a solution and emotions stand in the way.

Emotions in divorce and family law

Clients going through a divorce feel hurt, misunderstood or betrayed, and are afraid of the future: will I have enough money, where will we live, how will we handle the children? These feelings come along to the negotiating table. This makes divorce mediation and family law cases needlessly painful and lengthy, while parents stay connected for years to come.

What RETaC changes

With RETaC, clients learn that their feelings are often not caused by the other person, but arise unconsciously from experiences in their own past. They project less and begin to listen to each other’s wishes and needs. This opens the way to a different dialogue, with less resistance, less fear and anger and more willingness.

What does RETaC offer family lawyers and mediators?

• New communication tools for limiting feelings and emotions.
• A method to change emotions through the body, with individual clients and in the dynamics of a divorce mediation.
• Smoother negotiations, because emotions truly settle.
• A contribution to a healthier long-term relationship, especially for co-parenting after divorce.

In three days, you learn how emotions arise, map relationship patterns and transform them.

Day 1: the neuroscience of emotions

• The latest knowledge about your emotional brain and a new theory of how emotions arise.
• You explore and practice the fundamentals in a playful way.
• You explore where your feelings come from and your own patterns in relationships.

Day 2: mapping relationship problems

• Which basic issues arise in relationships, and what are the challenges of a blended family?
• Why do we blame each other for our feelings, and what is the secret behind a crisis in your relationship?
• You transform patterns in yourself and in your relationships, and learn to guide others in doing so.

Day 3: transforming relationship emotions

• You map relationship-emotion-prediction loops and change them, in yourself and in others.
• You change patterns that have been running for years.
• You discover how to create new predictions together.

The RETaC Practitioner certification is a 7-day training and the follow-up to the Foundation training. You learn advanced intervention techniques to work with individuals, couples (and teams):

• individual obstructive patterns, relational patterns, and the dynamics of disturbed relationships and relationship crises.

The goal

The RETaC Practitioner gives therapists, coaches and anyone working on personal development the insights and tools to transform deep and persistent patterns. Despite many attempts, some patterns keep returning, with considerable impact on our (relational) life and that of the client. In this training you investigate the cause and core of these issues and learn to intervene sustainably and effectively in the individual feelings behind them. The training ends with a certification.

What makes this training different

• Our emotional world developed in interaction, we explore the interconnected nature of our personal and relational issues. That is why RETaC works for personal issues as well as relationship issues.
• Relationship problems start with your own feelings, so that is where we start. You work on your own feelings first, one person at a time. This is different from classical relationship therapy, where both partners work together at the same time.
• Feelings in the broadest sense. You learn to work with all feelings, not just relationship-related ones.
• Personal development. You explore your own obstructions that can occur when working with deep feelings, and how to deal with them effectively.
• Online supervision between the training days.

Training overview

Prerequisite: 3 days RETaC Foundation

What will you learn during the training days?

Part 1: RETaC Advanced 1 (2 days)

On the first day you set personal goals and work them out step by step during the training.

• Solving the unsolvable. How can you find solutions for problems that seem unsolvable? With a deeper understanding of how the emotional brain works you learn how to do that.
• The meta model for the emotional brain. The emotional brain uses different “rules of the game” than the cognitive brain. You learn when to use the meta model questions and when not, which questions are relevant, and how to apply them in real individual conversations. The model is applied in a significantly different way than usual and lets you reach deeper layers of personal transformation considerably faster.
• Complex equivalences. These are descriptions that show a feeling has become linked to an experience. They are very relevant when working with the emotional brain. You learn a new theory for how they emerge and how to find- and solve them effectively.
• 3 core interventions. How to work with someone who is stuck in a feeling. What to do with clients who “don’t feel anything or don’t seem to feel anything“. How to deal with feelings that are experienced as overwhelming.
• Development questions. A unique aspect of RETaC: a series of questions that plays into how our neurology forms and creates our emotional reality. They speed up the formation of new prediction loops and help resolve old loops more quickly.

Part 2: RETaC Relationship 1 (2 days)

Our emotional brain has largely developed in interaction with our environment, so issues with partners, parents, children and family are no surprise. They can drag on for years without a real resolution. In this part we explore the fundamental aspects and deep entanglement we have with our environment.

• Relationships and space. Three approaches to investigate and transform the inner landscape of relationships: Social panorama (Lucas Derks), Metaphors of Movement (Andrew Austin) and Family constellations (Bert Hellinger). With RETaC you use them in a new way, which increases their effectiveness.
• Decision space. Because our feelings determine our choices, we make decisions unconsciously all the time. You learn the core aspects of decision space, how to accelerate decisions and how to remove obstacles.
• Inner knowing. Sometimes you know exactly what you should or should not do, for example not eating chips or not reacting irritated, but you do it anyway. What role does the emotional brain play here, and can you strengthen inner knowing so that you actually act on it?
• Unfulfilled desire. Your partner just won’t do what you long for: doesn’t clean up, doesn’t listen, misunderstands you. Through RETaC and the neurological logic of the emotional brain, you can now work with issues where the solution depends on someone else.

Part 3: RETaC Relationship 2 (1 day)

• De-blaming. We accuse others more often than we (dare) admit: what someone else does wrong, how they are less, how we judge them. Blaming has a very specific neurological prediction loop. You learn to work with it so that it no longer has to happen.
• Mediation: intention versus prediction. You learn how intention and prediction are two different aspects and how to work with conflict and crisis situations involving multiple people: relationship and family conflicts, work-related problems and divorce situations.
• Very strong emotions. Working with emotions such as hatred and revenge.
• You learn to manifest a future in which winning and losing no longer play a role and everyone in the system wins. This is a must if you want to improve ties in relationships.

Part 4: RETaC Advanced 2 (2 days)

• Manifesting a vision. Having a vision is one thing, manifesting it is something else. With RETaC you learn how that is possible.
• Bodily identity. We mainly know identity as a concept, an idea often worked on with visual methods. Knowledge of the emotional brain shows there is also bodily identity, which is crucial for our well-being. You learn to work with it and how it relates to well-being, health and deeper issues such as autism and anxiety disorders. You work on a health goal and transform unhealthy prediction loops.

Online supervision

Between all parts of the training there is online supervision of 1.5 hours each time. The moments are set at the start of the course.

After the Foundation and the Practitioner training you can continue your learning journey with the 9-day RETaC Coach certification. In the Foundation and the Practitioner you learned exceptional methods of change for individual and relational emotional regulation. In the Coach training you will learn the advanced models of change based on a deeper understanding of the emotional prediction loop and new models of change for complex issues. This a generative method that will enable you to solve problems and reach goals in a unique and effective way.

What you will learn

Working with RETaC as a coach

• Learn to work generatively and solution-focused with RETaC.
• Use the logic of the emotional brain to facilitate lasting change effectively.
• Learn what the 6 (new) markers of the emotional brain are and how to work with them.
• Find out what the essence of all problems is.
• Discover what the basis of health and healing is.

Analyzing and solving

• Become more effective at analyzing what a client says and what is relevant.
• Learn to build a coaching process and coaching trajectory.
• Learn to build complex equivalences and cause-and-effect relationships to help your clients.
• Discover the emotional difference between: solving, understanding, knowing, confirming, enough versus scarcity, choosing.
• Resolving the most complex conflicts and double binds quickly and elegantly.

Yourself as a professional

• Discovering what makes you unique as a coach or therapist.
• Laying a solid foundation to start or improve a coaching or therapy practice.

Advanced coaching topics

• Working models: learn coaching models to help you analyze, focus and steer coaching interventions.
• Health models and interventions: find out which methods you can use for health complaints.
• RETaC, anchoring and conditioning: learn about a new perspective on classical conditioning and emotional regulation. You will learn how interoception and experience got connected in the first 16 years of our lives and why that matters for coaching and therapy.
• Conflict models: you will learn how to apply RETaC with conflict regulation.
• Trauma models: you will learn how to apply RETaC with trauma, phobia and physical problems.
• Emotional models: working with emotions can seem obvious, but research into emotional regulation has brought to light new, highly relevant emotions for a healthy and prosperous life. You explore those emotions and learn to work with them.

Program

Module 1 (2 days): goals and listening

• Setting personal goals, setting goals as a coach and working out business goals.
• What to listen for in a client: content-relevant versus emotionally relevant.
• Learning to recognize levels of change.
• Crucial change principles: solving, understanding, knowing, confirming, enough versus scarcity, choosing.

Module 2 (2 days): developing yourself as a coach

• Distinguishing yourself as a coach and developing your voice as a coach.
• Coaching generatively (solution-focused) and involving the body in coaching.
• Guiding extreme fear or phobia with RETaC and learn about reality testing.
• Working through the development questions: the how and why behind them.
• Applying Cartesian logic to expose and deconstruct complex equivalences.

Module 3 (3 days): healing and recovery

• You will learn what recovery loops are and how to complete them.
• Learn to change stuck grief and conditioning.
• Discover what the influence of time is on healing and how this plays out emotionally.
• How do you leave an issue behind you? Learn a TAOistic philosophy applied to RETaC.
• Discover a new level of healing and recovery for health complaints.
• Resolving double binds and conflicts with RETaC.
• Learn the ultimate relief question.

Module 4 (2 days)

• Testing and certification.

Peer supervision

Between the blocks there are online peer supervision sessions to deepen and work out what you have learned.

Contact us for more details.

The RETaC Foundation training, the RETaC Practitioner training and RETaC for your relationship workshop are accredited by the Dutch Professional Society for Hypnotherapists, NBVH.

We are in the proces of accreditation with the Dutch Professional Organizations of Family Lawyers and Mediators.

The RETaC Foundation training

3 days, from 09.30 till 17.00

Locations

Training dates 2026 – 2027

Preparation

• • Read RELIEF, how the predictive brain shapes our relationships, the way we feel about ourselves and even our reality.

• • Read Happiness is Depressing.

RETaC coach

Would you like to become a RETaC coach/therapist? You can! The RETaC coach certification consists of: the Foundation training, the Practitioner training + 9 days Coaching training. Contact us for more information about this transformational program.

RETaC training prices

Early bird prices apply until two months before the start of the training.

The price of every training includes

• Training days
• Coffee, tea and refreshments
• Syllabus
• RETaC certificate

The RETaC Foundation training, Greece

Extra costs: travel, hotel and meals are not included. The experience will be fantastic! The training location will be within travel distance from one of the large airports.

In RELIEF, how the predictive brain shapes our relationships, the way we feel about ourselves and even our reality (June 12, 2024), Wassili Zafiris describes how the emotional brain influences our daily choices and decisions. Subconscious predictions influence our reactions to our partners and children and how we feel. In RELIEF, Wassili explains step by step how our emotions are created and how this process shapes our reality.

We are controlled by unconscious feelings from our body that were formed in our youth. Prediction loops that repeat themselves are the basis of fundamental problems we can experience in our relationships and lives. The good news: these prediction loops can now be changed!
You can read more about this on the books page. RELIEF can also be ordered there.