Aimeru exists to give clinicians better tools for the conversations patients struggle to start — relationships, attachment, family systems, and what the phone is doing to the modern pair bond.
The work began as a body of writing: essays, and then two books — The Phone Between Us: The Tensions of Contemporary Intimacy, the framework text, and The Modern Pair Bond: What Phones Are Doing to Bodies, the companion reader written for the people sitting across from you. The Aimeru service builds on that framework: an AI companion for clinical preparation, certification training, a provider directory, and a private peer community.
Dirk built the first version of Aimeru to help his own relationship with his partner, Catherine. Five years in, it only gets better — she says the AI has genuinely helped them understand each other better and grow as a couple. The Phone Between Us, four years in the making, and the framework itself grew out of that work.
Dirk left Psychology and CompLit after two years for Math and CS, then left that two years later to found, in his native Germany, a real-time software company serving BMW, Mercedes, and the Dutch Army. In the US he founded an Internet services company and built data and AI infrastructure for Hollywood studios and Fortune 500 companies; NASA kept servers in his datacenter for eleven years. He later consulted for Apple and Amazon (dhm@apple.com, dhm@amazon.com). A lifelong reader across the clinical, philosophical, and evolutionary literatures, he brings all of it to the framework.
He lives with Catherine in the Bay Area, rides his electric unicycle on the trails she runs, and both swim year-round in the Pacific Ocean. He is a founding member of the China Beach swim club.
The scarcity–abundance axis. The phone is a neutral amplifier — what it does to a bond depends on which pole the life operates from. The work is calibration, not abstinence.
Three levels, in order. Self, dyad, group — each rests on the one beneath. Much of what exhausts couples is fixing at one level what originates at another.
Structural, not moral. Struggling bonds run architectures neither partner authored. The work is converting the architecture, not adjudicating fault.
Naming as method. You cannot work with what has no name. The framework supplies vocabulary for the patterns couples argue around, so conversation reaches the structure instead of the symptom.
Ancestral calibration. Bodies calibrated against conditions that no longer hold, colliding with the device, the feed, and the app.
The framework is built on clinical work that has been developing for decades: the Emotionally Focused Therapy tradition of Sue Johnson; the trauma-and-the-body synthesis of Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine; Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory; Internal Family Systems; the somatic-experiencing literature; and the Hakomi and AEDP traditions. Behind these sits a broader body-centric lineage — Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology, the embodied-cognition research program, the neuroscience of interoception in Damasio, Craig, and Barrett, and the contemplative traditions. The books extend this work into a structural-historical register: what the smartphone era does to bodies calibrated against ancestral conditions.
Dirk is not a clinician — which is precisely why Aimeru is built for clinicians. The framework gives providers structure and language; the clinical judgment stays where it belongs, with you.
Aimeru evolves through provider feedback. Session data and provider notes are anonymized and used to train and improve the AI, with every update focused on what actually helps patient conversations. See our Privacy Policy for details.
hi@aimeru.com · San Mateo, California