I'm Gideon Hanekom.
I'm a Specialist Wellness Counsellor (ASCHP) based in Ceres, in the Western Cape of South Africa, working with individuals, couples, and families locally and online around the world. I've been doing this kind of work for over a decade, and thinking about why people do what they do for considerably longer than that.
What I've Come to Believe
How I see this work
A few things I've come to believe, after all of it.
Most relationship problems aren't actually about what they look like.
They're about underlying needs that aren't being met, or aren't being met in the way the person needs them. Once you can see that clearly, things that felt confusing start making sense.
People don't usually need more talking. They need a better map.
What changes a relationship isn't endless processing. It's seeing accurately, naming what's happening, and choosing differently.
The goal isn't for your partner to become more like you.
It's to learn how to love the partner you actually have, well. That's a harder discipline than most people realise, and it's the work that changes things.
Counselling should have a direction.
I don't believe in open-ended sessions that drift on for years. Every conversation should be going somewhere. If we're not moving, we should know why.
My job isn't to tell you what to do.
It's to help you see what you couldn't see on your own, and to give you something practical to take from it.
Outside the work
I've been married for over twenty years. We have two teenage children. We lived in New Zealand from 2008 to 2023, then returned to South Africa and settled in Ceres.
That marriage has been through most of what a long marriage goes through. I won't pretend it's been easy, and I won't pretend I've always got it right. But I've lived in this material, not just studied it, and that shapes how I sit with the couples I work with.
I'm in my late forties. Past the age of trying to impress anyone, hopefully old enough to know what I actually know and what I don't.
If you'd like to know more
For the curious, I've put together a longer document covering my training, the theoretical thinking behind how I work, the Six Needs Framework and where it comes from, and the arc that brought me here.
It's not required reading. The work is the work. But if you'd like to know who's holding the framework before you trust it with your relationship, it's there.
Where to start
If you'd like to see what working with this framework feels like, the simplest place to start is the Six Needs Lens, the free assessment on this site.
Take the Six Needs Lens Assessment
If you'd rather talk first, you can reach me here.