Aris Haegermann
Clinical Psychologist & EMDR Psychotherapist
I specialise in:
About me
I grew up with the idea that if you worked hard enough on yourself, you could think or meditate your way out of almost anything. As a young man I spent time at the Himalayan Institute in the United States, studying mindfulness and what was called holistic health. It was formative. It also had limits I did not yet understand.
Meditation gave me something real: a sense of connection, a capacity to sit with experience rather than immediately flee it. What it did not touch were the older things. The conflicts that kept repeating. The patterns I could observe clearly and still not change. The residue of things that had happened and not been processed.
That gap sent me toward psychotherapy, first as a client, then as a direction. I trained in Gestalt therapy at the Therapeutisches Institut Berlin before I studied psychology formally. Something about the Gestalt approach suited me: its insistence on the present moment, its refusal to treat the person in the room as a collection of problems to be solved. I went on to study psychology at the Universität Bremen, then completed postgraduate training in psychodynamic psychotherapy at the Süddeutsche Akademie. EMDR came later, through EMDRIA Germany, and it filled in something the other approaches left open: a way of working with trauma at the level where it actually lives, below language.
Alongside the clinical training, I worked in anti-violence programs for the Hamburg Youth Court Services during my studies. From 2011 I spent several years in psychosomatic clinics. In 2016 I opened my own practice. Since 2024 I have been working exclusively online, which suits both where my life has taken me and how I prefer to work.
I am a state-licensed psychotherapist in Germany. That licensure is the end point of a long regulated training process: it means the work I do is not coaching or counseling in the general sense, but psychotherapy in the clinical and legal sense.
What draws me to this work is still roughly what drew me to it at the beginning: the question of why people get stuck, and what it actually takes to move. Not the surface answer, not the behavioral fix, but the real one. In my experience that usually requires going somewhere the person has not yet been able to go alone. My job is to make that possible.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
How I Work Therapy with me is depth-oriented. That means we are less interested in managing symptoms than in understanding what produces them. Not because symptoms do not matter, but because they usually point somewhere. The pointing is where the work begins.
Most people arrive with a surface concern and something older underneath. A current crisis, a relationship that keeps breaking in the same place, a feeling that will not lift no matter what they try. My first task is to create enough space that the fuller picture can emerge, without pressure, without rushing toward solutions that paper over what is actually asking for attention. Three approaches, one frame
My work draws on psychodynamic psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, and EMDR. Each brings something the others do not, and in practice they do not sit in separate boxes.
Psychodynamic work is the backbone. It attends to what is unconscious, to the relational patterns that formed early and continue to structure experience without the person's awareness. The question it keeps asking is: what is this really about, and where does it come from?
Gestalt therapy brings the present moment into focus. Rather than reconstructing the past from a distance, it works with what is alive in the room right now, or in this case, in the session. What is happening in the body? What is being avoided? What wants to be said but stays back? Gestalt trusts that the present is always carrying the past, and that working directly with current experience is often the fastest way through.
EMDR I use primarily for trauma. It is a structured approach with a strong evidence base, and when the timing is right it can move things that talking alone does not reach. Trauma lives in the body and in the nervous system before it lives in language. EMDR works at that level. Symptoms as solutions
One thing I find important to say early: symptoms are not the enemy. What looks like a malfunction is usually something the psyche constructed under pressure. An anxiety that kept someone vigilant when vigilance was necessary. A depression that slowed someone down when forward movement felt dangerous. Dissociation that made the unbearable survivable. These responses made sense once. The problem is not that they exist, but that they have outlasted the situation that called them into being. They are running on old information. Understanding this changes the relationship to the symptom. Instead of fighting it, we get curious about it. What is it protecting? What would it need in order to soften? This is usually not a question that can be answered cognitively. It requires something more like contact: the inner conviction or the part of you that is holding the symptom needs to be met, not argued with.
When that contact happens, something usually shifts. Not always quickly, not always dramatically, but in a direction that feels real rather than managed. The body and awareness
My time at the Himalayan Institute in my early twenties left a lasting influence on my work, particularly in how I hold mindfulness and awareness. I do not use these as techniques or as a calm-yourself-down intervention. They are more foundational than that: a basic orientation toward present-moment experience, toward noticing what is actually here rather than what the mind insists is here. Somatic cues matter in sessions. Where something lands in the body, what contracts, what opens, what shifts when something is named accurately. This does not mean sessions are bodywork, but it means we do not ignore the body in favor of the story about the body.
Pace and direction I work at the pace the person in front of me can actually use. Insight that arrives too fast, before the ground is ready, does not hold. There is no protocol that overrides what is actually happening in a given session. You set the direction. That is not a formality. It means the goals we work toward are yours, not mine, and it means I am following something real rather than running a procedure. My job is to create the conditions in which movement becomes possible, and then to accompany what emerges.
Who this tends to suit People who do well in this kind of work are usually willing to be curious about themselves, even when that is uncomfortable. They do not need to come in knowing what they want to explore. But they tend to have some sense that the answer is not purely outside them, that something internal is part of what needs to shift. Experience of violence, including sexual violence, is something I work with regularly and have done for many years, including earlier work in anti-violence programs and psychosomatic clinics. It is not a specialty that sits apart from the rest of my practice. It belongs to the same frame.
All sessions take place online.
