We live in a world that was not made for us
We have learned to think that something is wrong with us when life does not run smoothly. When we struggle. Or when we watch others overtake us. Or when our inner world seems more intense and wilder than other people's.
But at the same time you also know that you are not defective. That it is not a disorder or an illness that makes you the way you are. You are simply different. But how? And can a person even become happy like this? Find love? Be healthy? Be fulfilled at work?
The journey to ourselves
The world out there does not invite us to get to know ourselves. I know that from experience. I too grew up with expectations from outside, with an idea of what is normal and what is not. I was identified as highly gifted in childhood, but the neurodivergences were overlooked — or rather waved away. As weaknesses of character, flaws, faults. Only because I felt and thought differently.
Things that were self-evident and easy for other children turned out to be a great challenge for me: dealing with other children at school, the enormous depth of my own feelings and emotions, or simply the impulsiveness that positively pushes you toward the wrong decisions.
The hardest part of a situation like that is the aloneness: the feeling that nobody really understands you — not your own parents, not your friends, your teachers, your colleagues, not even yourself. Being overwhelmed was read as laziness, and the needs of your own nervous system as self-importance. The attempts to be normal failed, even though they kept raising hope for a few weeks at a time.
What began back then at school continued seamlessly into adult life — only the consequences grew harsher. After an eight-hour working day that colleagues found "completely normal", I would lie exhausted on the couch in an existential crisis, wondering how other people could still do sport or see friends afterwards. Relationships broke down over difficulties in communicating, because I could not express what I really felt or why I behaved differently than expected. My career stalled, because I could not understand the political game in offices and teams, let alone play it. My body rebelled more and more: panic attacks, existential crises, a nervous system under permanent stress. The less I was able to achieve, the greater the stress became. I knew: it could not go on like this.
So, as happens to many neurodivergent people, at some point my fate threatened to slip out of my control. But I did not want to be someone people later say this about: "He had such great potential, and look what became of him!"
That sentence echoed in me, because I saw what it really means to fail as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world. Not just missed chances and unfulfilled dreams — but years of a life lost in a fight against yourself. Relationships that can never unfold their depth, because you don't know how to let the mask fall. A body of health that crumbles piece by piece under the weight of constant over-functioning. And worst of all: the creeping forgetting of who you actually are. After years of masking and adapting, what often remains is an empty shell that functions but does not live. I could see it when I looked into other people's eyes: many lost their glow over time — that glow children still have so strongly. I wanted to keep the glow in my eyes.
The moment it clicked
It all began with a vague feeling: something in me knew that I was merely different, not wrong. I no longer wanted to spend my life chasing a normality that was neither desirable nor realistic for me. So I studied psychology, philosophy and musicology.
Psychotherapy was very sobering. What we learned there was not the healthy variety of human experience and how to work with it, but what is ill and what is healthy. We were trained to look for the problem only ever in the person themselves or in their immediate family, rather than in the world around them.
I recognized that the outside world is arranged so that the people who are wired differently have the hardest time of it — and understood that what is needed is a journey to ourselves, rather than diagnoses, labels and therapies, if we are to be genuinely fulfilled. So I set out. Once for myself — but also for you. Because from the very beginning my goal was to help others as well. Above all those who had it far harder than I did.
That journey was very long and endlessly arduous. Because almost nothing out there is genuinely built around the needs of neurodivergent people. I tried out every technique I could find and studied every book I could get my hands on. The philosophy degree may have helped me even more than the psychology one; my career as a clinical psychologist moved into the background. I became a body psychotherapist and increasingly began to look at the person as a whole. Those years mattered — years in which, through meditation, dance and movement, I studied different ways of making contact with one's own nervous system.
Over time it became ever clearer to me that we humans are all different. Which is why we cannot learn from a book how to live and what to do. A diagnosis does not really show us who we are either; it only categorizes our symptoms. We have to write our own manual and understand how to operate this machine we are sitting in, if we are to be genuinely fulfilled.
At some point, after years of trying, researching and searching, there was one great moment where it clicked: I understood who I am, what the unchangeable core is, and everything my brain had been doing beforehand to reject, change or "optimize" that core. An enormous weight fell from my shoulders and a peace spread through me. I will never forget the feeling of the pressure falling away — the pressure of having to be someone.
From that moment on I could use all of my energy to build bridges to the outside world, instead of being flattened by it. I could tell when I was able to push and when I needed breaks, without being ashamed of it. I could positively see why and when we misunderstand each other, and what our potentials and limits are. This radical self-acceptance is a peaceful stillness and emptiness that I can draw energy from at any time and come to rest in. I came to call this way of moving through life zensitively, because it joins sensitivity with the peaceful, quiet emptiness of Zen (a Buddhist school of meditation).
The last problem
I researched the scientific foundations of this experience, worked out which principles underlie my path — and founded Zensitively as a psychological institute with the goal of helping other people. It spread like wildfire. Before long it was not only people directly affected who were interested, but psychologists and coaches too: at last there was an approach that works. I call it the Eigenraum Approach, because it works with the person's own inner space — their lived experience — rather than with perspectives from outside. It is not a therapeutic method, and there is no diagnosis, dogma or personal worldview of mine behind it. It is meant to help people find an unmediated, direct relationship to themselves and to shape their lives out of that contact.
After all those years there was still one challenge left to master. The approach helped, that was clear, but it was only available to a small group of people: those I had time for and who could afford to work with me. Walking that path cost many thousands of euros — a sum that a change like this is more than worth, but that not everyone can afford. And my time was limited besides. So I developed an online course that walks you through the Eigenraum Approach step by step, at your own pace, and with which you write your own manual. So that everyone really does get the chance to find, at last, the fulfillment they deserve.
