Diederik Wolsak

Diederik Wolsak is founder and program director of the Choose Again Society in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is also an international workshop leader, public speaker, and relationship counselor with years of experience in group facilitation based on the work of the Choose Again Society.

The Choose Again Society offers a holistic approach to mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation and well-being through Attitudinal Healing, applied Transpersonal Psychology, and universal wisdom teachings.

Committed to a journey of inner peace since 1942, he spent the first three years of his life in Japanese concentration camps. Many of his core beliefs, he says, were developed then. At age 8, he was sent to a foster home in Holland. By the time he rejoined his parents and brothers two years later, he was, by his own admission, filled with self-hatred and fear of the world around him. These inner struggles led to prolonged alcohol and drug abuse, which ultimately served as valuable teachers for him.

“What we teach is that if you discover the underlying thought system behind a symptom then you can correct the belief that chose the evidence,” Wolsak once told an interviewer. “Having corrected the belief, the symptom, almost always, disappears. With pure behaviour modification, the symptom is eliminated but the belief remains unchanged and will demand evidence in another form in order to sustain itself."

The Choose Again Society also operates a residential Healing Center in Costa Rica, where Diederick Wolsak and his colleagues work with students and teachers from all over North America addressing a wide range of symptoms, from depression to chronic anxiety to drug and alcohol abuse.