About
Deep Emotional Work Academy is the training and education arm of Emotion Coaching gemeinnützige Unternehmergesellschaft (gUG), a German nonprofit entity founded in 2015.
The Academy exists to make excellent emotional care more teachable, more responsible, and more accessible. Its work centers on Deep Emotional Work (DEW) by Matthias Behrends, a structured system for emotional stabilization, resource-oriented inner work, selected emotional processing, and integration.
Emotional-work techniques are often taught as isolated tools. The Academy closes the practical gap between knowing a technique and knowing how to select, combine, sequence, pace, and bound it responsibly.
Founder And Lineage
Matthias Behrends is the founder of Deep Emotional Work Academy and founder and Managing Director of Emotion Coaching gUG. His work includes emotional-stabilization education, professional training, and humanitarian and social-sector engagement in multiple international contexts.
Matthias Behrends cites Dr. med. Charlotte Baltrusch (retired) as his teacher, mentor, and a primary source of the practical emotional-work techniques that later informed Deep Emotional Work.
The Academy honors this lineage with gratitude while taking full responsibility for its current structure, terminology, implementation decisions, training standards, and public materials. This acknowledgement does not imply review, approval, endorsement, co-authorship, or responsibility by Dr. Baltrusch for current Academy publications, Deep Emotional Stabilization Groups materials, or local implementations.
Experience Behind The Academy
Academy-relevant work includes trainings and workshops for German municipalities and civil-society organizations, university and medical-education contexts, social-sector teams in Colombia, introductory trainings at Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences in India, work with caregivers and vulnerable-population support contexts, pro bono supervision in Bangladesh, online consultation after the Nepal earthquake, psychological first aid after the 2017 Barcelona mass-casualty event, and open-access emotional-stabilization resources in Ukrainian and Bengali.
This experience is not used as a promise of outcome. It is the background for a practical Academy standard: serious techniques, taught with role clarity, adapted to context, and bounded by professional responsibility.
Who The Academy Serves
The Academy serves two main audiences with one standard of excellence:
- Professional practitioners such as therapists, psychologists, counselors, coaches, wellness professionals, bodyworkers, and other qualified helpers who want a deeper, structured skill set for emotional work within their scope of practice.
- Humanitarian and social-sector professionals such as social workers, nongovernmental-organization staff, crisis responders, caregivers, educators, and community workers who need practical emotional-stabilization tools under real-world constraints.
The application context differs. The quality standard does not.
Current Public Work
The Academy's current public release focus is Deep Emotional Stabilization Groups, a free Creative Commons implementation kit for locally organized emotional-stabilization groups.
The kit shows the Academy standard in public form: practical methods, scripts, consent and privacy boundaries, safeguarding and referral logic, language review, implementation assistance, and field-learning discipline.
Professional Boundary
Deep Emotional Work Academy materials are non-clinical professional education by default. They are not medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, treatment, psychotherapy, cure, or a guaranteed mental-health outcome. Any clinical use, patient-facing application, or integration into institutional standards of practice requires review, adaptation, approval, and supervision by qualified authorities within the receiving institution. Matthias Behrends is not a licensed therapist or psychologist.
Entity
Deep Emotional Work Academy is operated by Emotion Coaching gUG. Legal, privacy, and terms pages are linked in the footer.