My story
From success to recovery.
CLAIREN was founded for people whose lives look composed from the outside while privately becoming harder to manage. My own experience is part of why I understand that position so well.
Why this page exists
If you are considering treatment, you are not choosing a service. You are deciding who you can trust with something deeply personal and difficult to say out loud.
My own experience of addiction and recovery, and more than fifteen years of clinical practice, shaped the principles CLAIREN is built on: discretion, individualised treatment, continuity, and an understanding of the person behind the addiction.
What happened
For many years, my life looked successful from the outside.
At 24 I graduated with honours and began building a career as a senior account manager for an international publishing company. By 27 I had founded a B2B marketing agency in the heart of Amsterdam. It grew to a team of fifteen, produced award-winning work and served major clients across Europe. I was engaged to the woman I loved and travelling constantly.
Privately, things were beginning to unravel. What began as drinking with clients and colleagues became something I could no longer control. I disappeared for days at a time, missed meetings, and grew steadily more distant from the people closest to me. My fiancée and my assistant sometimes covered for me, preserving the appearance that everything was fine.
I had achieved most of what I once believed would make me happy. Behind it, I was struggling to get through the day. The qualities that had made me successful, drive, ambition and the need to appear capable, were the same ones that made it harder to admit how much trouble I was in.
I made promises, to myself and to people I loved, and I meant them. Addiction does not respond to intention alone. It cost me money, relationships, trust and dignity. At one point my business partners met without me to decide whether I had become a liability to the company I had helped build.
I tried to regain control in ways that seemed reasonable at the time: therapy, exercise, antidepressants, holidays, more promises. None of them addressed the addiction itself. Eventually, after another hospital admission, close friends intervened and helped me into a private clinic in the UK, away from the environment that had let me keep denying how serious it had become. That decision changed the course of my life.
For the first time I experienced treatment that brought together compassion, honesty, real human connection and structured therapeutic work. Recovery was neither quick nor effortless, but it gave me something more valuable than the life I had been trying so hard to maintain. That was more than twenty years ago. Today I remain free from alcohol and drugs, I rebuilt my relationships, became a father to two daughters, and found the work I now do.
CLAIREN is the practice I wish had existed when I was 28.
Experience & perspective
Personal insight. Clinical expertise.
My experience draws on two decades of personal recovery and more than fifteen years of professional work in psychotherapy and addiction treatment. During that time, I have supported hundreds of individuals and families affected by alcohol and drug dependence, gambling and other behavioural addictions. My work has included clinical practice, developing treatment programmes and leading addiction services.
That gives me two distinct perspectives. My clinical work is grounded in professional training, psychological theory and evidence-based practice. My own recovery gives me a personal understanding of the fear, shame and denial that accompany addiction, and of how hard it is to ask for help when you are still expected to function.
Lived experience does not replace clinical expertise. At CLAIREN, it informs it.
20+ years
In personal recovery
15+ years
Clinical experience
Five clients
Maximum active caseload
One clinician
Assessment through continuing care
How I work
When you contact CLAIREN, you speak directly with me. There is no call centre, no separate admissions team, and no handover to someone unfamiliar with your circumstances.
From the first conversation onwards I try to understand the whole picture; not only the addictive behaviour but the psychological, emotional and relational factors that sustain it, and the realities of the life in which recovery has to take place. Treatment is individualised and drawn from established, evidence-based psychotherapeutic approaches. Where medical, psychiatric or other specialist expertise is needed, I coordinate it as part of the wider plan.
You do not need to wait for a crisis, or for the life you have built to start coming apart, before asking for help.
You do not have to reach breaking point.
A confidential conversation can help you understand what is happening and establish a next step. You will speak directly with me. There is no obligation to proceed, and if I believe CLAIREN is not the right clinical setting for you, I will say so clearly.
Private and confidential · Personally handled by Sander