Therapy for people who've already figured it out — and still can't change it.

You can understand exactly why you react the way you do, trace it back to where it started, explain it clearly to someone else — and still find yourself doing it again next week.

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50 minutes, no commitment beyond it

Rotem Hess

Licensed Psychotherapist

Attachment & Trauma
Stress & Resilience
ADHD
Relationships & Identity

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Why Patterns Repeat

Many people are surprised to discover that 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.

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

The most meaningful journey isn't out there, and you don't have to walk it alone.

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You've read the books. Possibly done years of therapy.

You know what your patterns are, where they come from, and what they cost you.

And in the moment it matters — a conversation that goes wrong, a deadline, a criticism, someone pulling away — none of that knowledge is available to you. Something older takes over, and you watch it happen.

Afterwards you understand it perfectly. Again.

The gap between what you know and what you do has stopped feeling like a puzzle and started feeling like evidence of something wrong with you.

It isn't. The gap is not a failure of insight, willpower or intelligence — it's a sign that the understanding never reached the part of you that actually runs the response.

Insight lives in one system. Reaction lives in another.

Therapy that only works with the first will keep producing clarity without change.

That gap is what I work on.

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How I work

Regulate → Integrate → Consolidate

Physiology first, so the deeper work has something steady to land on.

1

Regulate

We start with your nervous system, not your history. Using HeartMath coherence training and HRV feedback, you learn to recognise when you've shifted into activation or shutdown — and to shift back, deliberately, under real conditions. This is measurable, and it's practical before it's insightful.

2

Integrate

Once there's stability to work from, we process the experiences still generating the reaction — with EMDR or Lifespan Integration. This is the part that closes the gap between what you understand and what your body does.

3

Consolidate

Then we make sense of it. What the pattern was protecting, what it cost, what changes now — in relationships, decisions and how you hold yourself. This is where change becomes durable rather than temporary.

Where people usually start

Door one

When insight hasn't been enough

You've done the work. You understand yourself well. It hasn't translated into living differently.

Door two

Adult ADHD

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

Door three

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 four

High-functioning complex trauma

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

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.

More about me →

Verified

Austrian Ministry of Health register
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. Fifty minutes, by video. You say what's going on, we work out where the difficulty is actually sitting, and I tell you honestly whether I think I can help.

You leave with that map whether or not you continue.

Book a first session

Sessions are 50 minutes — see fees.

We all know people with whom it is best not to share anything that matters to us. If we have experienced something exciting, and if we tell it to those people, it will seem almost dull. If we have a secret, we will keep it safe from those people, safe inside us, untold. But, if you are lucky, you know one person with whom it is the other way around. If you tell that person something exciting, it becomes more exciting. A great story will expand, you will find yourself telling it in more detail, finding the richness of all the elements, more than when you only thought about it alone. Whatever matters to you, you save it until you can tell it to that person.

- Eugene Gendlin