Reproduced verbatim, this is an essay I wrote for my application to a psychotherapist training programme. I share it here not only because of the importance of normalising the struggles that many of us face in life, but also because I hope that it will give others the courage to do their own deep work. In its own way, this is also a love letter to psychotherapy.
The prompt was: “Please submit a personal biography. This is an important document that we will use to look for evidence of your capacity to reflect honestly, maturely and openly, on your background and life experience and its impact on you. Please write your biography in a way which shows this. This biography is particularly important because training to be a therapist is likely to lead to you reflecting again on issues from you own life and will also require you to develop very high levels of self-awareness. We therefore need to assure ourselves that you are ready to undertake such training.”
If you had asked me five years ago about my childhood, I would have told you that it was happy, largely uneventful, and most notable for an international upbringing. The child of Mexican and American parents, born in Mexico with a few years spent in the US, I grew up in Spain and England from age 4 to 18. I attribute this background to my openness to new experiences and an ease with making friends. At home, my parents’ relationship showed some signs of strain, but it was other families that had real problems. An only child, ever precocious, I seemed to have an instinct for performing well and pleasing my parents.
I was sensitive and creative, but I channeled those aspects of myself into hibernated dreams, eventually emulating my father in an approved career in business. I internalised the belief that success and worthiness meant economic power; fun and enjoyment could come later, if at all. Graduating from one of the most demanding universities in the world, I dedicated myself to success in the workplace at a high cost to my personal life. Looking back at our correspondence, I desperately sought my father’s approval, constantly seeking his counsel and sharing my workplace achievements.
There were signs along the way that this life wasn’t in alignment with who I was. During sabbaticals between jobs, I craved escape from the corporate world, longing for more creative outlets. Unconscious of it as a childhood maladaptation, I silenced a strong intuition of what was right for me and forced myself to keep building on the career that I had. Fifteen years into that career, the company I’d founded was growing and valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. What could possibly be lacking in my life at this pinnacle of outward success?
Relationally, the story could not have been more different. Intimate relationships were the source of deep, often debilitating, anxiety for me. I feared that my partner would eventually discover that I was fundamentally unlovable and abandon me. I longed to escape the shame that frequently flooded me, and the perception that something was intrinsically wrong with me reinforced that feeling in a downward spiral. An intense tightness and pressure in my chest became synonymous with being in a relationship for me.
Attempting to quell these painful feelings, I sought constant reassurance from my partner of their love for me, both in their words and actions. My high level of sensitivity, a beautiful gift in other circumstances, worked against me here: I was on constant alert for the smallest of signs that the relationship might be threatened. I would often be the one to end a relationship, unaware that what I convinced myself was a mistake in my choice of partner was in fact the redirected weight of crushing self-hatred.
As a global pandemic swept the world, I once again found myself powerless to crippling anxiety in a new relationship. I decided that this could not be how everyone else felt in a relationship, and that perhaps the answer lay in my own patterns. I will forever be thankful for two things: having the courage to start looking within myself for answers and finding the therapist that I’ve worked with for five years now. My relationship with her has been the most important and consequential in my life, second only to my parents.
Ask me today, and I’ll tell you that I grew up in a family environment that was frequently tense, emotionally violent, and unpredictable. My sensitivity was honed in these years, attuned to detect the faintest signs of impending emotional turbulence in the adults around me. My first memories of my father are of him being angry and unable to control his feelings. I was terrified of him during my earliest childhood years, and this fear still lingers today in my 40s. My mother never developed an emotional connection with me. I felt like an object around her: a doll to be dressed and fed that would often amuse her with its words and actions. My parents were rarely happy in their relationship, and much of that disappointment was unconsciously displaced into what they expected from me.
My childhood was emotionally lonely. I felt let down by my parents, neither of whom was skilled at handling their own emotions, let alone those of a sensitive child. I developed an internal toughness to handle things without anyone’s help, and I’m still learning to trust the emotional care of someone who loves me. Though my parents each loved me in the ways that they were capable of, I navigated adulthood unaware of the depth of my internal wounding.
To fully accept this new self-history took years of therapeutic work and the repeated courage to keep moving towards painful emotions. I learned that knowing comes far more quickly and easily than integrating. Understanding that my mother was primarily self-interested was difficult, but the first time I had the courage to feel what it was like to lack my mother’s love was tectonic. I vividly remember curling up on the floor after that therapy session, sobbing uncontrollably and on the verge of a panic attack. Our psyche protects us from these wounds for good reason, but the only way to shed their baggage is through encountering, accepting, and integrating the reality they show us.
As my history opened up to me, I felt an urgent need to discover who I was without the guilt, control, and judgement I absorbed from my parents. Telling them that I needed to be released from the expectation of staying in contact was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life. It was an act of choosing myself in a way that went against not only their projected needs but also the strong cultural stigma around family estrangement. Most difficult was the certainty that my relationships with them would never be the same again.
I was shocked by how much lighter I felt in the aftermath of that conversation with my parents. I had been carrying an enormous weight of others’ needs from my earliest years. In the weeks and years that followed, I moved through intense cycles of grief, guilt, rage, and shame as I integrated this reality and learned to start trusting myself again. Steady and unwavering, my therapist accepted every part of myself that emerged, and over time, I began to accept myself too.
The beauty in this transformation of my self-relationship is that it changed the world around me. Being gentler and more accepting of myself was mirrored in how natural it became to feel compassion for others. Some relationships became closer and richer, others became more distant, and wonderful new people entered my life. My relationship with my parents moved to a place where we could relate based on what we were each capable of, not what was forced or required.
My surroundings changed, too. I left the company I founded, which had become a heavy emotional burden, and I allowed myself to return to England after living in California for 20 years—a place that never felt like home. As I continued to follow what felt right for me, possibilities started to open up. What if my sensitivity wasn’t a weakness to hide in cutthroat corporate culture, but was instead a superpower? What if leaning into creativity was a requirement?
An interest in becoming a therapist that had been set aside a decade prior turned into active exploration of a career shift. I started by completing coaching training over the last year, and my intention was to explore whether I enjoyed holding a therapeutic-like space for clients. I found it energising, creative, and powerful but lacking the emotional depth that I believe accompanies fundamental change.
Psychotherapy blossoms in that depth, and it is this type of long-term relationship with clients that feels ideally attuned to my sensitivity, curiosity, and delight in building intimacy with others. Coaching has shown me how uncommon it is to be truly listened to and accepted without someone trying to fix or minimise what we’re feeling. Clients have shared how much it means to feel safe exactly where they are. I also know that my own work is never complete. Though I’ve worked through a major personal transformation over the last five years, I know that the next five years will not only reveal more layers but also reopen old wounds in different ways.
Personal biographies are not static. Our subjective experience is what creates our reality. It’s this knowing, forged through living it, that calls me towards this creative, soulful, and messy work with others. Deep therapy is a profoundly beautiful, often wrenching, journey that offers growth to anyone — and the possibility of fundamental awakening to those with the courage to fully encounter themselves. I trust this quiet faith will be felt in my work with clients, and I look forward to the challenge of supporting them, just as others have supported me.