Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Who I work with
Therapy for highly sensitive people who function well, notice everything, and are quietly exhausted by what it costs to keep that invisible.
Book a first session50 minutes, no commitment beyond it.
You register the shift in someone's tone three sentences before anyone else notices it. You know when a room has changed. You knew, as a child, exactly how the adults around you were doing.
You need longer to recover from things other people seem to shake off by lunchtime. An argument, a busy day, a piece of criticism delivered casually — it stays in your body for hours.
So you've built a life that manages it. You leave events early, or you don't go. You rehearse conversations. You keep your reactions at a size other people find reasonable, and you do that continuously, and nobody sees you doing it.
And somewhere along the way you concluded that the sensitivity is the flaw — that if you could just be less affected by things, everything else would work.
The sensitivity isn't the problem. The unmanaged load of running it is — and that part is workable.
Around 15–20% of people process sensory and emotional information more deeply than the rest. More is taken in, more is compared against past experience, more is weighed before a response. That depth is where the perceptiveness comes from — and it is also why the system reaches capacity sooner.
It is a trait, not a disorder. There is nothing to cure and nothing wrong with you. But a trait still has running costs, and if nobody ever taught you how to manage yours, you have most likely been paying them in full for decades.
What tends to be true
Most people arrive having spent thirty years managing a nervous system nobody explained to them.
This is the part that usually goes unaddressed, and it is the reason self-help rarely finishes the job.
A sensitive system takes in more of whatever it is exposed to. In a supportive environment that shows up as unusual depth, empathy and perceptiveness. In an environment that was critical, unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, or simply too loud for you, the same depth means the difficult parts registered more fully and stayed longer.
So the sensitivity is not what needs treating. What needs attention is everything the sensitivity absorbed more of — and the strategies you built to survive it. Vigilance. Anticipating other people. Going quiet. Withdrawing before you can be overwhelmed.
Those strategies worked. That's exactly why they're still running, long after the conditions that required them have gone.
Regulate → Integrate → Consolidate. For a sensitive system the order isn't a preference — it's a safety requirement.
We begin with your nervous system rather than your history. Using HeartMath coherence training, the state you're in becomes visible on screen in real time — so you can see the difference between activation, shutdown and settled engagement rather than having to guess. You then learn to shift it deliberately, first in session and then in the situations that actually cost you.
For a sensitive system this stage matters more than it does for most people. Without enough capacity, going into difficult material produces flooding rather than change — which is what has usually happened if a previous therapy left you worse for a fortnight after each session.
With EMDR or Lifespan Integration, we work on the experiences still generating the response — not the account you've built about them. Neither method requires describing distressing events in detail, which matters when the retelling is itself the overwhelming part.
Lifespan Integration in particular suits this work: it moves along the timeline of your life rather than dwelling in single memories, and it is gentler on a system that floods easily.
What the strategies protected, what they cost, and what a life organised around your actual capacity looks like instead of one organised around hiding it. Boundaries, recovery, what you say yes to, and how much of your energy goes into managing other people's states rather than your own.
The goal isn't to become less sensitive. It's to stop paying full price for it.
Not "you'll be transformed." What people in this position usually report:
A difficult conversation costs you an hour instead of the rest of the day.
Situations you used to leave early, or avoid entirely, become survivable — and sometimes worth it.
Less of your attention goes to tracking how everyone else is doing. It's still available. It just stops running by default.
Depth, empathy and perceptiveness read as capacities rather than as things to apologise for.
"Highly sensitive person" comes from research on sensory processing sensitivity, and it describes something real that a great many people recognise immediately in themselves. It is also a contested construct: the questionnaires overlap meaningfully with measures of anxiety and neuroticism, and researchers continue to disagree about where the boundaries sit and how it relates to autism, ADHD and early adversity.
I use the term because it is the one people find themselves through, and because the description is often the first thing that has ever made sense of their experience. I don't treat it as a diagnosis, because it isn't one, and I don't assess for anything.
What I work with is the thing underneath the label — a system that takes in more, reaches capacity sooner, and has been managing that alone for a long time. That is the same work whether or not the term turns out to be the right one for you.
This work asks something of you. It isn't a good fit if you're looking for a technique rather than a process, if you're unwilling to practise between sessions, or if what you want is confirmation that the world should accommodate you rather than a change in what it costs you to be in it.
It's also not appropriate if you're in acute crisis or need urgent psychiatric care. In that situation local in-person support is what you need, and I'll tell you so.
What this asks of you
No. It's a trait describing how deeply a nervous system processes information, present in roughly 15–20% of people. It isn't a diagnosis and there's nothing to cure. What brings people to therapy is usually not the trait itself but its accumulated cost — exhaustion, overwhelm, anxiety, or difficult early experience that a sensitive system absorbed more of.
No. I don't do assessment of any kind. Most people arrive already fairly sure, usually from reading a description that fitted uncomfortably well. Whether the label is exactly right matters far less than what your system is actually doing, which is what we work with.
They overlap but aren't the same. Around 30% of highly sensitive people are extroverted — they want contact and are depleted by the volume of it. Introversion describes where you get your energy; sensitivity describes how much you take in and how deeply you process it.
Possibly, and the traits overlap enough that the question is a reasonable one. I don't assess or diagnose, so I can't answer it — but I also don't need the answer to work with you, because the work is with what your system does rather than with what it's called. If a formal assessment seems useful, I'll say so and point you toward it.
That's the specific reason the sequence starts with regulation rather than with your history. Processing without enough capacity produces flooding rather than change, and a sensitive system reaches that point sooner. We build the capacity first, and we pace the second stage to what you can actually hold.
Yes. It's part of why I work this way and why the sequence is built the way it is. It doesn't mean I'll assume your experience matches mine — but you won't have to explain the basics, and I won't be surprised by them.
Yes — all of it, including EMDR and HeartMath training. For a lot of sensitive people online is actively better: your own space, no commute, no waiting room, and you can settle immediately afterwards instead of walking back into the street.
Tell me what it currently costs you and what you've already tried. I'll tell you honestly whether I think this approach would reach it.
Book a first session50 minutes, no commitment beyond it — see fees.