Why I do what I do — and why that makes a difference for you

It was a perfect day.

Private spa, four-star hotel, snow-covered mountains outside the window. The sauna at exactly the right temperature, the whirlpool bubbling, the champagne ice-cold. Fresh fruit. My husband beside me — this charismatic, humorous, loyal man I loved. Our children were well looked after. We had deliberately given ourselves this day.

That was the moment when I had everything.

And I felt... nothing. Not indifference. Not sadness. Simply nothing. As if moving through thick honey. Every gesture perceived, every image is beautiful, but just in theory. But none of it reaches you, you don't feel it. You are present and at the same time miles away. I remember the exact thought: “I should be happy right now. It doesn’t get any better than this.” And in that exact moment I knew: something is fundamentally wrong.

That is called high-functioning depression.

I didn’t have the term back then. I only knew I had to be ungrateful. Broken. A failure who couldn’t even enjoy a perfect day.

How you can deliver for twenty years — and slowly stop existing

I come from Romania, from a German-speaking community. My childhood taught me early: security is something you earn. Mistakes have consequences. Weakness gets exploited.

Those are not bad lessons for a corporate career. For over twenty years I worked in enterprise IT — SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics. Supply chain, logistics, global rollouts. I spoke the language of quarterly reports and boardroom presentations. I knew the rhythm of transatlantic flights and project launches in new countries. I was project lead at a global IT corporation — at times a single parent with twins I had moved across borders as toddlers, while running a freelance business on the side and surviving for years on less than four hours of sleep per night.

High performers know how to keep delivering when everything is too much. That is not strength — that is training. And any training without recovery eventually creates damage that no further delivery can compensate for.

My body eventually pulled the handbrake. First the suspicion of cancer — thankfully false — then insomnia, then burnout, then depression. The grotesque part: from the outside everything still looked perfect. I functioned. I delivered. I smiled in the meetings.

But inside I was moving through honey.

The most expensive thing I ever paid for — and what it really cost me

What followed were years of searching. Conventional therapy. Hypnotherapy. Neurofeedback. Bodywork. Retreats. Meditation, yoga, lab tests, nutritional changes, supplements, courses, coaches. Over €38,000 in direct costs — plus eighteen months of being unable to work. Plus a marriage that broke apart. Plus five years in which I was physically present for my children but only half there.

Some of the methods helped. None of them held.

Not because they were bad. But because I was searching without a clear guide. Method after method, each tool in its own silo, none in the right sequence, none connected to what lay underneath. High-functioning depression is not an isolated symptom you simply treat. It is the end of a long chain of dysregulation, old patterns, and a nervous system that has learned to live in permanent alert mode. Anyone who only works on the symptom without understanding the chain stays in the loop.

What finally got me out was a deliberately sequenced combination: RTT and hypnotherapy that go straight into the subconscious — not to endlessly analyse what happened, but to change the neural patterns that keep it alive. Bodywork that stabilises the nervous system first, before any deeper work even makes sense. Nutritional overhaul and targeted supplementation, because burnout in high performers is massively physiological and lives in the body. And for me personally — plant-medicine work that gave me access to myself at an intensity no other method had ever achieved.

The depression did not fade slowly. It stopped — abruptly — once the nervous system and the body had been consistently stabilised. Then came what no one had prepared me for: the pain afterwards. The grief over lost time. The shame. The feeling of waking up from a long dream and seeing how much had broken around me while I was away.

That too belongs to healing. And even for that you need a precise guide.

What puts me in a different category

I am not telling this story to create sympathy. I am telling it because it explains why I can offer you something most therapists and coaches cannot.

I know the world you come from — from the inside. I speak the language of project kick-offs and annual performance reviews. I know exactly what it feels like to be on the third flight of the week and no longer know whether you are exhausted or whether this has simply become the new normal. I know the specific intelligence of people who have learned to turn pain into productivity — and I know their specific blind spot: that this strategy eventually flips and you rarely notice it in time.

I am an RTT therapist and certified hypnotherapist. I also hold coaching and biohacking certifications because I am convinced that sustainable mental health without a stable physiological foundation is built on sand. From my own journey and the work with over 800 people I have developed a clearly sequenced protocol — Stabilize, Illuminate, Embody — that does not start with the symptoms but with the causes, and in the only order that actually works.

That is the difference between someone who knows methods — and someone who knows why which method works at which moment.

Viktor Frankl was right: a “why” can carry you far. But meaning alone does not heal a dysregulated nervous system. Insight alone does not change an unconscious pattern. And willpower — however much of it you bring — is no substitute for a sequence that actually functions.

You already know something is not right. You have the why. What you need is the way.



I know it.

If you want to find out what that means for you concretely — I am here.