Therapy for Highly Sensitive People

Why Patterns Repeat

One of the challenges with changing emotional patterns is that the rational part of your brain that learns new tools gets hijacked by the emotions in a stress reaction. It can be frustrating when you have all the best intentions to make new choices and are continually hijacked by old patterns.

Repeating patterns in life are not a sign of weakness or lack of insight. Often, they are simply the result of earlier experiences that the mind and nervous system have not fully integrated yet. Even when life has changed, parts of us may still react as if we are in an earlier chapter of our story.

This is why you may understand something intellectually - yet still feel the same emotional reactions appearing in relationships, stressful situations, or moments of uncertainty - ending in something that feels like an inescapable loop.

Therapy can help your system gradually recognise that life has moved forward. As this happens, reactions that once felt automatic begin to loosen, and you gain more space to respond from your present, adult self rather than from old patterns.

You knew, as a child, exactly how the adults around you were doing.

You still do it — reading the room, tracking the tone, adjusting before anyone has to ask.

And afterwards you need time that other people don't seem to need. A difficult conversation stays in your body for hours. A full day leaves you unable to speak to anyone. Criticism delivered casually is still with you at 2am.

So you've arranged your life to keep it manageable. You leave early. You decline things. You keep your reactions at a size other people find reasonable, continuously, and nobody has ever seen you doing it.

Somewhere along the way you decided the sensitivity was the flaw.

It isn't. Sensitivity is a trait, not a fault — around one person in five has it. What exhausts you is not the trait itself but thirty years of managing it without ever being shown how.

The goal isn't to feel less. It's to stop paying full price for it.

Depth, empathy and perceptiveness aren't the parts to get rid of. The parts worth working on are the load, the recovery time, and everything a sensitive system absorbed more of along the way.

That's what I work on.

Book a first session

How I work

Regulate → Integrate → Consolidate

We build enough stability to engage with difficult material and keep reviewing the pace together. These areas of work can overlap, depending on what you need.

Regulate

We explore how you notice rising tension, overload or withdrawal, and what helps you stay present. HRV training with HeartMath technology (biofeedback) can support this work where useful.

Integrate

Where appropriate, we use Lifespan Integration or EMDR alongside conversation to work with experiences that continue to affect you. We discuss the focus, pace and how much you feel ready to share.

Consolidate

Then we rebuild how you run yourself. Boundaries, recovery, what you say yes to, and how much of your energy goes into managing everyone else's state rather than your own.

Where people usually start

Door one

Highly sensitive and running on empty

You notice everything, recover slowly, and have organised your whole life around not being overwhelmed.

Door two

Burnout and not being able to switch off

The holiday didn't fix it. Rest doesn't restore you. You're still braced when there's nothing to brace for.

Door three

High-functioning complex trauma

From the outside your life works. Inside you've been on alert for as long as you can remember.

Door four

Adult ADHD

Diagnosed late, or still wondering. High-functioning on the outside, exhausted by the effort it takes.

And if you've already done years of therapy and it hasn't translated into change →

Who you'd be working with

Licensed by the Austrian Ministry of Health since 2020. Over ten years working psychotherapeutically, in private practice and in clinical settings including psychiatric inpatient and outpatient care and rehabilitation.

Psychoanalytically trained: psychodynamic psychotherapy and group analysis (ÖAGG). Alongside EMDR, Lifespan Integration, HeartMath coherence training and neurofeedback.

I'm highly sensitive myself. It's part of why I work in this order, and why I take the overwhelm seriously rather than treating it as something to push through.

More about me →

Verified

Austrian register of psychotherapists · Registration no. 11541. Search for Hess, Rotem.
Psychology Today verified
HeartMath Certified Coach
Rated on Doctify

I work in English, with clients across Europe and beyond. Psychoanalytically trained in Vienna. Working online, worldwide.

Not sure whether this is the right fit?

That's what a first session is for. In fifty minutes, we begin to understand what brings you here, what you've already tried and what you would like to change. We discuss whether working together seems appropriate and what a next step could be.

You do not need to decide about further sessions during that first meeting.