ABOUT Uya
For functioning people who sense something keeps running underneath.
UseYourAddiction (UYA) started from a simple observation: compulsive behaviour touches far more lives than we admit - not only in the extreme or clinical cases, but in quieter, functional ways. People who are holding their lives together, performing, presenting well, while something underneath keeps running and quietly shaping everything.
The conventional models -diagnostic categories, standardised protocols, the language of disease and permanent struggle - have their place. But they leave that group without a way in. They ask a functioning person to wear an identity that doesn't fit, and so they lose them.
UYA exists for that group - relational coaching for compulsive behaviour, for intelligent functioning people who sense something keeps running underneath.
Not to replace clinical frameworks, but to offer what they don't: a way of understanding compulsive behaviour that starts from your actual experience, and treats the pattern not as a disease to be managed but as a signal worth reading.
The premise is that sustainable change doesn't come from permanent vigilance. It comes from understanding what's actually driving the pattern - and that you are capable of it.
The insight UYA is built on
Most approaches treat the behaviour as the problem and go to war with it. Stop it, manage it, white-knuckle it, count the days.
What I found is pretty much the opposite.
The pattern isn't the problem. It's the signal.
The compulsiveness of the habit comes from energy with nowhere to go — somewhere your life is out of alignment, and that pressure has to discharge, with the behaviour as the nearest available outlet.
For high-functioning people this hides almost perfectly, because the very things that make you successful - the drive, the intelligence, the capacity to hold it all together - are also what let the pattern run undetected, and even pass for assets. "I just have a lot of energy. I need this to come down. It makes sense." That's exactly why no one questions it, including you.
The misalignment it's pointing at can be external: work that drains you, a relationship that doesn't fit, the things you fill your days with. Or it can be internal and harder to see: a self-image you're maintaining, a version of you your parents wanted, the way you relate to money, a life you've convinced yourself you should want while something underneath quietly disagrees.
Usually it's more than one of these at once. But you don't have to find all of them, and you don't have to fix anything. The pattern is already showing you where to look — and as you start moving a little more in line with what you actually feel and value, that's enough for things to begin shifting.
Which means the way out isn't to attack the behaviour. It's to free the energy. When the underlying conditions change and that energy finds somewhere real to move, the compulsion quietly loses its grip - often without ever being targeted directly. You don't white-knuckle your way out. The behaviour stops being necessary.
That's the whole of it: not freedom from the behaviour through force, but freedom from the conditions that made the behaviour necessary.
I spent a significant part of my life inside compulsive patterns.
Not in a way that was obvious from the outside - life was functioning, the career was progressing, the external goals were being met. But underneath, something was running that I couldn't think my way out of.
The person behind it
I tried, seriously, for years. Willpower. Three rounds of therapy. Medication. Insight. All of it relevant. None of it enough - because the same mind that built the pattern can't think its way free of it, and understanding a thing is not the same as moving it.
What finally shifted wasn't a technique. It was a change of attention: from fighting the pattern to getting genuinely curious about what was underneath it. I stopped working on the behaviour and started changing the actual conditions of my life - internally and externally. It wasn't dramatic and it wasn't linear. But as the pressure underneath eased, the patterns loosened on their own. At some point I realised I was on the other side of something I'd spent years inside.
I'm Dutch, based in Chile. My background is in industrial design engineering (MSc, TUDelft) and business (MBA, INSEAD). I'm a certified professional recovery coach and certified master life coach, with further field and academic study in how compulsive patterns form and change. The credentials matter because they shaped how I think and work - and because the people I work with tend to operate at that level. I understand the high-functioning, high-pressure context from the inside: the international career, the performance expectations, the outward success that coexists with something that doesn't quite fit.
The book was meant to come first. The coaching followed almost despite myself - I'd resisted it because it felt like the obvious thing to do. But sitting with someone in the middle of something I recognised from the inside, and watching it move, was unlike anything else I'd done. Clear enough that I stopped questioning it.
I have two children. For me, that sharpens what this work is for. Because the patterns we carry don't stay contained to us - they move through relationships, through families, through the people closest to us. So helping someone work through their own pattern is never only about them. People who find genuine freedom become different in how they show up for everyone around them, and that compounds outward in ways that matter far beyond the individual.
That's why I do this.
How this work is done
What coaching for compulsive patterns actually looks like - and what makes it different from standard approaches.
The starting point is always your experience. What's actually happening, as precisely as you can see it. The content here exists to help you see it more clearly before any conversation begins. The coaching takes that clarity into the territory that's hard to navigate alone: where the same mind that created the pattern is trying to understand it, and where a second perspective from outside your system is the difference between insight that just accumulates and insight that actually moves something.
It's collaborative, non-judgmental, and oriented entirely toward your understanding rather than a fixed outcome. No predetermined destination - just an increasingly honest relationship with what's really driving the pattern, and the freedom that becomes available once that's understood rather than only managed.
If you want to understand more first, the foundation pieces are the clearest place to start.
If you'd rather find your own way in, the moments are where most people begin.
If you're ready to explore what working together might look like, the first session is where that starts.
