About us
“Protecting and respecting life’s processes is at the
centre of our work.”
TransParents is a platform for parents and professionals who care passionately about creating a culture of deep connection when dealing with children. Our shared interest is orienting how we are with children around a respect of life’s processes. As such, we want to support parents in their personal growth, encourage exchange between parents and contribute to a fundamental change in society. Our approach is attachment-based, trauma-informed and built on self-awareness. Since 2014, we have been offering talks, workshops, online courses and a one-year training programme.
Our sources of inspiration
The work of TransParents is strongly based on NARM®, a resource-oriented, psychodynamically-informed model of developmental trauma developed by Dr. Laurence Heller.
TransParents Team
Teresa Heidegger
Teresa Heidegger is an educationalist, sociologist and certified trainer in nonviolent communication. Her interest has always been the political question of how transformation in society can take place. After years of grappling with this topic, she came to the conclusion that sustainable societal change needs to be rooted in radical love of every individual to him- or herself.
In 2008, she founded gewaltfrei glücklich, a “platform to increase our revolutionary potential and self-empowerment”. Since then, she has been working with individuals who are interested in self-exploration and awareness development. The focus of her work is how we can stop using a subtle form of violence out of emotional immaturity. Violence against ourselves and against others, especially our children and the earth. She coaches individuals and teams, who are ready to realise such a paradigm shift and to contribute to outer transformation.
After giving birth to her son in 2011, she began extending the focus of this inner change of consciousness to being a parent and to people with children. Together with Kirsten Timmer, she founded and developed the training institute TransParents for parents and educationalists in 2015.
“For me, conscious parenting requires that we grow up inside, which means being able to differentiate when we act out of unintegrated aspects of ourselves and when we are truly in the here and now. Only when we as parents lovingly begin to turn to the parts in ourselves which have brought us pain and fear as children, will we be able to give our children true safety and security, rather than being ruled by our automatic reaction patterns over and over again. No one enacts (subtle) violence against their child out of a lack of love, but only ever out of the inability to endure (old) pain. This is something we must learn. As parents and as a whole culture.”
Kirsten Timmer
Kirsten Timmer is lic.phil psychologist and psychotherapist with her own practice. She is trained in developmental trauma NARM®, the NeuroAffective Relational Model by Dr. Laurence Heller. She is founder of the Arco School www.arco-schule.ch, a place of cultural change for natural learning and parenting. Since 2007, she has been a student of Thomas Hübl, a contemporary spiritual teacher and mystic. As part of his international online courses she works as a mentor on topics such as “Conscious Healing”, collective trauma and much more. Kirsten Timmer is a speaker on topics around parenthood, deep change of consciousness beginning in ourselves, and healing in relation to ourselves and to our children. She is the mother of a grown-up son.
“Together with TransParents and all the many people following this call, I want to bring a greater movement into the world. Many are called to join and to remember why they came here. We want to be there for one another, courageously take life into our hands and activate our co-creative power on the planet. We know that the transformation for a healthy life of our children's souls and emotions begins in us.”
Our Team
Our team is doing great work and it’s a lot of fun feeling that together we can achieve a lot. There are more and more people who, after the one-year programme or other experiences with TransParents, decide to join with TransParents and make their own contribution to this cultural change.
Some of them accompany our trainings as assistants or are mentors in the online-training. Others offer Basic Courses and coachings. Some of the team are connected beyond the trainings, supporting one another in conscious parenthood and in their work with children and parents.
Tanja Ziehm
Organisation and Assistant in the One-Year Programme
Raphaela Heitmann
Organisation Online Training / COO
Miriam Gass
Assistant in the One-Year Programme, Coachings for Parents
Anna Joseph
Leadership Basic Training and Assistant
Jens Bode
Leadership Basic Training and Assistant
Carla Tradt
Strategic Support and Organisational Development
Michael Anderau
Lead on Basic Training and Assistant
Susanne Drothler
Assistant in the One-Year Programme
Susanne Willkommen
Leadership Basic Training and Assistance
Christin Scholz
Assistance in the One-Year Programme
Jacoba Willeboordse
Assistance in the One-Year Programme
* Founder TransParents
TransParents was founded in 2008 by Anjet Sekkat and Gaby Stalter. Even then, there was a vision of establishing a new culture of deep connectedness in relation to children. Initially, however, it was more about research and awareness around these topics than it was about seminars and trainings. In 2012, Kirsten Timmer joined the team and enriched this vision with her practical knowledge arising from her work at Arco School as well as the research work of Rebeca and Mauricio Wild. In 2015, Teresa Heidegger (coming from a background in nonviolent communication) joined the team. From that time on, Kirsten and Teresa have worked to align the work of TransParents specifically towards contributing to social change. They began developing trainings for parents and educationalists. The first training started in autumn 2015.
Since then, the work of TransParents has more and more evolved and deepened, especially incorporating the contributions of Gordon Neufeld and Laurence Heller. Anjet Sekkat and Gaby Stalter, who still feel connected to TransParents, have shifted their focus to other areas of work and, since 2016, are no longer active at TransParents. We thank them for their inspiration and the impulse underpinning our work today.
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