Autobiography

Cati Preciado

The ordinary, everyday world, and learning to live in it: that is the heroic, the extraordinary. Being "normal", having flaws, not being exceptional is the most difficult path of transformation for a personality filled with paraphernalia to be the favored child or the most charming little one in the house.

Autobiography

The Melody of the Heart By Fernando Ramos

Birth, Childhood

I was born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1968; I am 51 years old today. However, I still have a youthful face and a very acceptable physical constitution. It is said that the Self-Preservation 2 is a childlike character, and the truth is that I live with a certain feeling of eternal youth, never quite reaching adulthood. Responsibility is very difficult for me.

In childbirth, my mother says that she had to undergo an emergency cesarean because, according to the doctor, there wasn’t enough dilation of the uterus for a normal birth. She was also urged to undergo the surgery because I was already showing signs of exhaustion, and my life was beginning to be at risk.

I have a clear bodily memory of the moment of my birth. I recognized similarities between what I experienced in a rebirth therapy session in water, with holotropic breathing, in 2003, and my mother's account. I clearly identified a feeling of abandonment coming from the origin, an impersonal feeling that became a key element in my entire personal process of change.

Just as my mother recounts her labor, my rebirth had a slow development. When the whole group around me had completed the experience, and their respective catharses were calming down, I was just beginning to get tired of breathing and deeply doubted that anything remarkable would happen to me. People had already begun to leave the pool when the experience finally began to gain strength for me, with tingling and tetany.

In the cathartic climax, I was overwhelmed by a compulsive cry and deep sadness. The person accompanying me in the experience told me that I kept whispering: "I don’t want to." I submerged even further and felt transported to a place of pain and resentment. My crying was a lament for the imposition of a forced birth: I was being forced to submit to the logic of material things, to the conditions of this "valley of tears" that is the world.

It was an essentially emotional experience, but I understood what happened. To be born meant returning to a field where the prevailing law is suffering and pain; and more than that: birth was something imposed against my will, despite all my resistance.

The experience allowed me to recognize an emotional matrix formed by the belief that birth is an unjust obligation. I felt intimately victimized by a sadistic God who thought it was better to take me from the place of peace and harmony where I was. And I could see how this primal sense of injustice has reverberated throughout my life in the form of rebellion and sadness, despite the appearance of being a good child, with my joy and my "good behavior."

The next ten years after my rebirth were spent trying to assimilate this basic understanding. The feeling of having been abandoned by God was a recurring theme in almost all my therapeutic work. And finally, during an ayahuasca session (which, in Brazil, is

part of our culture and is commonly considered a sacrament), I had another impactful experience that added a new element.

The psychedelic trip brought me the vision of a prenatal moment when my consciousness had not yet entered into connection with this body. I now understood that being born was my decision, that I accepted it willingly, that consciously I left the place where I was, and from which I believed I had been expelled as a result of the inflation of my ego. I realized that I had lived my personal story as the myth of the expulsion from paradise.

Finally recognizing that my arrival in this world was the result of a choice made by me, with the prerogative of free will, and not an arbitrary act of the Universe, paved the way for a redefinition of my story from a place less victimized and more responsible. This new perspective has brought me much health, as it allowed me to stop justifying all my frustrations with this sense of victimhood, blaming my discomforts on circumstances or other people.

My Family

My parents knew how to play the role expected of a respectable middle-class Brazilian family. My father was the provider, managing the family business and assets, while my mother, a housewife, took care of the daily life of the family.

My father was forty years old when he married my mother, who was eighteen. A twenty-two-year age difference is not insignificant. The fact that they belonged to different generations has been the source of many conflicts and frustrations, which have become more pronounced over time, as my father reached old age much earlier than my mother, and that was not easy for either of them.

I often heard my mother lamenting her decision to marry an older man, who had already lived many stories, suffered from addictions, and was often absent. She complained about wasting her youth and beauty with a man who didn’t value her and who limited her. She hinted that the only thing that kept her there, in that sacrifice, was us, her children. I was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to endure that life any longer and would abandon us.

I am the youngest of three siblings, with a considerable age difference between us. I am eight years younger than the middle sibling, and fifteen years younger than the eldest. When I was born, my parents had already been married for seventeen years, which means I arrived into a system with many stories lived before my arrival, with alliances and rivalries already well defined. I was a late child, welcomed as the baby of the family. In fact, "Baby" was my nickname for many years: that’s what they called me at home.

My mother was thirty-five when she brought me into the world. Her Polish ancestry gave her a European physical stereotype, blonde with light eyes, which made her extremely attractive, as it’s an exotic type in a country with so many racial mixtures. She has always been a very beautiful woman, not only for her appearance but also because of the impression her remarkable energy and vitality left. She likes to say that she has been restless and independent since she was a child. An ambitious woman, at seventeen, she left the small farm where she lived with her farmer parents to continue her studies in the state capital.

Blessed with a great imagination, every morning she would tell us about the dreams she had during the night, and I was always impressed by the great number of details she could retain. She thought some of these dreams were prophetic and could intuitively influence her choices and guide her. This attitude of trust in the world of dreams seemed like a magical gift she had received, which I always admired and tried to imitate.

However, my mother felt overwhelmed by responsibility and undervalued, and she never stopped expressing it to us with a lot of emotional energy. She was bothered by how much the family demanded of her and complained about the little time she had for herself. She had a demanding, exaggerated, and capricious side and could throw tantrums over trivial things, like when she cried inconsolably in a gift shop because the wrapping on a gift she bought for a friend was done poorly.

She was also a loving mother who made us feel her care in many ways, like when she would tell us stories or prepare my bed with my favorite blankets. This tendency toward excessive maternal care could sometimes take on a theatrical tone, at times when she would hug me, kiss me, and shower me with affection with a certain affectation, almost to show the public how good a mother she was.

When she felt frustrated or confronted, she would get terribly angry and could become aggressively attacking towards whoever stood in her way. If I broke a glass or dropped a plate, she might respond with invalidating phrases like: "You never get it right," or "You can’t do anything right."

I incorporated her compulsive emotionality into my character as a dimension of her unhappiness and suffering, and I felt that what I could do out of loyalty was suffer with her. Like my mother, I was an emotionally unstable child, sensitive to criticism and a crybaby. However, I didn’t have her strength.

I also tried to correspond to what I thought she expected from me: to be her dear little boy and not cause her the slightest problem. I wanted to be her source of joy and affection amid all the disgust she was living through. In return, I expected her to love me, care for me, and protect me from her anger.

The terms of this alliance with my mother were that I would be protected and always close to her, receive special treatment over my other siblings, respond with sweetness to her, and suffer in her place. My mother still describes me today as a very sweet and loving child. In this way, I learned to negotiate with love. Today, I can clearly see the effects of this contract with my mother; for example, how I can impersonate a soft and smiling demeanor if I am interested in gaining someone’s approval.

My father was born at the beginning of the 20th century, specifically in 1911, in a typical Brazilian family with mixed heritage over many generations. In my father's lineage, as far as I know, there are Portuguese whites and former black slaves, among other mixtures. The eldest of seven siblings, he said that he had to take on many responsibilities and roles from a very young age.

In my childhood, I remember him as an old, tired man. In my earliest memories, he was already over sixty years old and was very weakened by excessive tobacco use. Although he was affectionate and never violent, he wasn’t interested in my things. He clearly had run out of energy to respond to the needs of a child. I don’t remember him reading a book with me, or playing soccer, or taking me to a school party, or to the park. I didn’t feel intimidated in his presence, but there was no intimacy either. He admirably played the role of provider, and I got used to approaching him when I needed something concrete, like money.

On the other hand, I admired his social image as a respectable and intellectual lawyer. He became a lawyer in 1937, which granted him the title of "doctor," no small feat in a Brazil that was mostly agrarian and illiterate. There was great admiration and appreciation in the family for the status this title conferred.

It was common for people to think my father was actually my grandfather. I hated that; I felt very embarrassed and envied the other kids because they had young fathers. The habit of smoking brought him a constant cough and chronic fatigue. He spent many hours of the day lying down and with little energy. His cigarettes aggravated my asthma, which I had from the ages of three to eight.

As he grew older and more tired and neglected, it became noticeable, and my mother’s resentment increased, and I didn’t spare him any criticism. It didn’t seem to bother her much to devalue him in front of the children. Today, I am clear that my mother and the alliance I formed with her influenced the image I built of my father throughout my life. When she complained and blamed my father for her unhappiness, I absorbed that resentment as if it were mine.

As a result of this dynamic, I began my adult life with a completely contaminated image of my father, tainted by my mother’s pain and systematic invalidations. I’ve tried to exorcise

those inherited wounds to rebuild an image of my father with the admiration he deserves, and I try to let my direct experience with him guide me.

I lived with my father until I was twenty, and for him, love was expressed through provision, and he demonstrated his talent to make sure there was food, clothing, education, and comfort. However, he didn’t seem to understand well how to relate affectionately to the family beyond these parameters. In reality, he was more like a grandfather than a father.

My older brother, who was already a young adult, was the one who contributed most to introducing me to the world from a masculine perspective. He took an interest in my games, created projects with me, and took me to soccer matches to watch my club’s games. To be honest, I found him a thousand times more interesting than my father.

My middle brother was very much like my mother in terms of emotionality. Temperamental and irritable, he didn’t hide his jealousy and often treated me very aggressively, so the relationship was much more difficult with him.

The image of my origin family is completed by a cousin, the son of one of my father’s brothers, who was taken in by my family. He was the same age as my older brother and came to our house long before I was born.

Family relationships were tumultuous. I believe my arrival signified a renewed hope to ease the conflicts, a promise of peace. Not long ago, one of my brothers literally told me that he believed I came into the family as an angel, with the mission to calm the atmosphere at home and reconcile people. At first, this idea seemed absurd to me, but over time I saw that it was a very accurate description of the role I played out of conformity and systemic correspondence to what was expected of me: to be the joy of the house. My mother describes me, in my childhood, as a very docile child who didn’t cause her trouble.

One of my earliest memories gives another important clue about the formation of my character. I vaguely remember a scene when, as a baby in my crib, I witnessed an argument between my parents. I didn’t understand the reasons, but I felt a heavy emotional atmosphere and believed it was up to me to restore their harmony.

I recently realized that this scene illustrates a crazy and fantastical idea formed at a very young age, where I came to believe I could pacify family conflicts. Something like a conciliator with extraordinary gifts. It is difficult to set limits between memory and projection in this case, but it is very possible that there really was an expectation for me to play the role of savior or reconciler, due to the alliance with my mother and the family divisions that had been dragging on.

The crib scene evokes feelings of anguish, helplessness, and fear of abandonment. What could a child do to reconcile a divided and conflicted family? The mere idea that it was

possible to do something, and that this task would depend on me, already provides a strong hint about how my ego as a Self-Preservation 2 formed: my reaction to the scene expresses an assertion of my pride.

I had the feeling that sweetness and affection could be contagious, and that the family could be healed through this emanation of mine. Here is a clear expression of my egocentric "generosity," which, as a good Self-Preservation 2, I kept rather camouflaged and disguised, as I lived it through an imaginary and fanciful plot, without the need to do anything concrete or take any clear initiative, as the other two subtypes do.

Pregnancy, Childhood

If we look back, I think my pregnancy was unplanned, and I also suspect that my birth marked the beginning of the end of my parents' sexual life. I have no confirmation of this, but the fact is that, as I grew and the crib became smaller, I began sleeping with my parents in their bed. Soon my father was displaced and began sharing a room with my middle brother.

For the first ten years of my life, I slept every night with my mother in her bed, symbolically commanding the place of my father. This break in the emotional hierarchy was fundamental in the formation of my character and had consequences for the entire family system.

The official justification for this arrangement was that my father had a deafening snore, which made the experience of sleeping in the same room as him a nightmare, and the only person able to tolerate that noise was my middle brother. There was also the fear that if I were placed in the same room as my middle brother, I would be at constant risk of being assaulted, due to the jealousy he showed me. However, I suppose that my mother simply liked being close to her youngest son, her newborn, and knew that he would be her last baby. Perhaps my father didn’t enjoy being close to me as much, as all signs point to him no longer being attracted to the idea of being a father.

And I, delighted to have my mother all to myself, to enjoy her affection exclusively. I liked having her physically close so I could lean on her lap or hug her. I clearly remember how I intertwined my feet with hers to warm them.

The replacement of my father by me as a source of warmth and affection may have caused a feeling of rejection from him. His bond with my siblings was clearly more intimate and affectionate. Initially, I believed this was due to the phase of his life when I was born, the fact that he was more tired and no longer had the energy to attend to me. However, today I understand that part of his coldness was caused by the resentment from the triangle I formed with my mother and father, where I rivaled with him and took his place.

Honestly, I don’t remember any abuse. However, I’m not sure how the confusion between maternal love and eroticism operated within me. As I grew older, I realized that something wasn’t right about sleeping in my mother’s bed for so many years. When I turned seven, I heard my friends at school talking about how nice their rooms and single beds were, and I realized my situation was not common.

I didn’t like people knowing I was still sleeping with my mother because I felt their judgment. I felt ashamed, and I kept it a secret, convinced that I shouldn’t reveal the truth. I only got my own bed when my cousin moved out of the house to get married, and I began sharing a room with my older brother when I was around ten.

The extended time of this symbiosis with my mother solidified the stigma of being the little child in the family, which severely hindered my affirmation process as I grew. For a long time, my mother continued calling me "Baby" in front of people, even though I made it very clear, both in words and gestures, how badly it made me feel. When I expressed my discomfort, my mother manipulated me by making me feel guilty: she would tell me I was an ungrateful child. This prevented me from openly rebelling.

The family got used to seeing me as the baby, and exerted great pressure to consolidate me in that place. I felt that growing up required much more effort for me than for my friends because my family, and especially my mother, simply didn’t seem to want me to grow.

The Secret Family

My mother was my father’s second wife. His first marriage, from which a son was born, was the result of an arrangement between families, which didn’t work out. It was only when my father passed away in 1988 and his will was read that I discovered he had another family.

No one had told me until then! So, at twenty years old, I was faced with this enormous surprise. I found it unbelievable that something so important had never been mentioned by anyone, that it had been hidden from me. My siblings confessed they already knew, and that it wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t important.

The subject was a huge taboo in the family. From that moment on, everyone showed impatience and reluctance to answer my questions about my father's first family. My mother told me that my half-brother had serious psychological problems and that my father used to visit him during his childhood, but gradually stopped until he lost contact with him completely. The official version was that the child had a psychotic breakdown when introduced to the first child of his father's new family and, from that moment, refused to see him again. My siblings' version was that they never felt obligated to meet this crazy half-brother; it was a matter that only concerned my father.

I didn’t feel well knowing that there was a half-brother I had been forbidden to meet, and even more so because I realized my other siblings didn’t share my feeling. When I understood a little more about the dynamics of family systems, I focused on this issue, which became an important topic in my therapeutic work. After attending a SAT course in 2010, I decided I would look for this half-brother to acknowledge him and bring him into my system. I was terrified of the possible consequences. I had many nightmares and anxiety attacks before I gathered the courage to find his number and call him.

When I finally gathered the courage and he picked up the phone, I took my time to introduce myself. He seemed surprised and very anxious. He told me that he wasn’t interested in any contact with "that branch" of the family, made excuses, and hung up.

After that disappointment, I still sent him a letter that I don’t know if he ever read. I told him that I deeply regretted not having had the opportunity to get to know each other, and that I completely respected his decision to keep his distance. And little by little, I began to forget about the matter... until recently when I found out he died in 2016.

Today, I still wonder what effects, direct or indirect, this could have had on the system, given that this half-brother was removed from the family. Or even, what effects this fact could have on our descendants, mine and my siblings'. This lost brother felt the abandonment of the father we had in common much more strongly than any of us three. I feel that his absence from our system affected all of us in different ways, in the form of guilt in my father, and through anger in my mother.

Childhood and School

My childhood was free of any type of responsibility. My family lived on a tight budget, but the agreement between my parents was that we were exempt from any obligations other than purely educational ones. I believe this decision had the secondary effect of orienting me towards comfort, as I was spared even simple tasks like making the bed or organizing my toys: my mother or the housemaid took care of them.

In a SAT course in 2005, a therapist on the team told me that my life "should have been harder," implying that my problems stemmed from my lack of tolerance for setbacks due to being so protected and pampered.

I grew up in an urban environment at a time when the city was not as terrifying a threat to personal safety as most Latin American cities are today. There was freedom to explore the streets and squares around my house, and to build my own social network based on my affinities. As a child, I remember walking long distances in random directions, driven only by curiosity. I wandered along the train tracks, climbed rooftops, entered tunnels, attended

mass at different churches, climbed rocks... Exploring the city's layout was a fascinating game.

I played a lot by myself. I was interested in the small animals in the earth, which I discovered when burying objects, imagining them as paleontological treasures. I could also swim in the sea for four or five hours straight, imagining encounters with fantastic marine beings. I got used to all of this from a very young age, they used to call me a dreamer and say I was "in the moon." Often, my attention was immersed in an ocean of images and sensations, from which I interacted with the concrete world. This world of images and sensations can be a wonderful channel for creativity, but it can also be a refuge for neurotic fantasies. And I experienced both.

Despite the freedom in which I grew up, I felt a strong need to be seen and admired. Between the ages of nine and ten, I had an experience that illustrates the intensity with which I felt this lack. I remember going to a friend's house and seeing a carved wooden sculpture. It was a human figure, and I found it incredibly beautiful. I really wanted to be able to do something like that and wondered if I could be admired if I achieved it. I even made some attempts with a piece of wood and a sharp knife, but soon realized I couldn’t get close to that result.

I then imagined that I could steal the sculpture and put my signature on it to present it as mine. One day, when no one was home, I jumped over the wall and stole it. As I had planned, I painted my name over the real author’s signature, which had been carved in low relief.

I chose the best moment to present "my masterpiece," giving it as a gift to a friend of my brother’s. Everyone present was surprised and wanted to know more details about how or when I had done it, and I began to make up explanations. At one point, I realized that my brother and his friend were pointing at the real signature, carved underneath mine, and I understood from their expressions that my fraud had been discovered.

I felt an avalanche of terrible feelings: shame for being caught, remorse for stealing, and immense astonishment when I realized all the risk I had taken and the energy I mobilized to create that farce, whose reward, in case everything went well, would have been the admiration of others.

I remember another similar incident at the same time in my life when I stole a classmate’s sticker album at school. But the meaning was much stronger this time; remembering it still causes me great remorse. What drove me in this case wasn’t the desire for admiration and recognition; it was simple envy. I wanted my classmate's album because it was more complete than mine. I was able to sustain the lie, even witnessing the sadness it caused the other child. I knew I had done something horrible, but I couldn’t find a way to back down

without exposing myself. I lived the effects of guilt and remember thinking I had to fix or repair it.

Early Life and Family

Back then, I had a certain inclination toward minor crimes. I used to steal chocolates at the market, and take some bills from my mother's purse and my father's wallet. I felt the adrenaline rush and enjoyed testing my ability to avoid getting caught. Fortunately, this ended after the incident with the sticker album.

I was a mediocre student until I was thirteen or fourteen, when I failed and had to repeat a grade. It was a severe fall, as in my family and environment, the stigma of being "not very intelligent" was attached to repeaters. I had to hear from both my father and mother that I did nothing but study and should do better. I felt at the bottom and realized something needed to change within me, and that change had to involve revising my attitudes. From that moment on, I retreated into an internal space under a lot of pressure and lived my adolescence with the certainty that if I couldn't change, I would end up worse than bad.

The following year, I adopted a less irreverent and more apollonian behavior. I began waking up earlier to better organize my homework, reduced my free time outside the house to review lessons, chose a seat in class away from the loudest students, tried not to get into trouble easily, etc. Changing classes also helped, because with my new friends, it became easier to adapt to a new place, one that was more responsible.

In just two years, I experienced a transformation that took me from being one of the worst in the class to one of the best students. The change was so extraordinary that it felt like a revolution in my self-image. I started feeling smarter and more attractive, and even girls began to show more interest in me.

At sixteen, I had my first girlfriend. She was a beauty from my school. With her, I felt at my level, worthy, capable. In a short time, I went from being the "ugly duckling and somewhat dumb" to being one of the standout students and dating the most beautiful girl in school. I got to experience an unprecedented ego inflation.

Our relationship lasted about a year and a half, and its ending was, initially, a mutual decision. It was very hard because, despite my pride, which didn’t allow me to admit the truth, I was still very much in love with her. Deep down, I was hoping she would give in and come back to me. But that didn’t happen.

A few months later, I received a severe blow when I found out that she had started dating an older guy, someone with his own car and who also played guitar. A rival who seemed

unbeatable... I was in shock when, shortly after, I learned that she was pregnant. But the final blow came when, ironically, she moved in with her partner and their newborn child right across from my house.

I began to see her with her new family several times a week. This made my self-image collapse, I lost my internal references, and I became mentally and emotionally disorganized. The experience of this abandonment caused my first major existential crisis. I realized that it was necessary to do more than correct some habits and attitudes. I had to be different, and I didn’t even know where to start.

At first, my impulse was to try to eliminate the feeling of fragility and abandonment through denial. I started drinking alcohol, competed with friends over who could seduce more girls, and experimented with other excesses as an expression of my rebellious and immature condition. This gave me an awareness of how the shock caused by frustration or failure leads to a fall in my sense of personal value; it's common for me to notice the beginning of this downward cycle through symptoms of depression and apathy. It’s as if I suddenly feel drained.

From this denial, a victimized, melancholic state emerges, which then turns into anger and resentment. In its most extreme expressions, frustration can take the form of histrionic demands and quickly evolve into rage, with a loss of control and much aggression.

These reactions of mine can be compared to childish tantrums, and I experience them as a very strong emotional agitation. It’s like a false or theatrical action, driven by a set of disordered but intense sensations and feelings.

The curious thing about this state is that I can clearly perceive how the wave grows: it "feeds" on vital energy, which concentrates almost entirely on preparing for the explosion. I feel the strength of its flow; it’s very tempting to let myself be taken by it; hence, the resistance is minimal. I feel pleasure as an artificial sense of empowerment is created. Once I reach the saturation point, I can no longer resist the effects of the wave, and everything explodes like a bomb.

However, this energy dissipates quickly, and the imposition of my will through force can no longer be sustained, resulting in an exhaustion of my power as quickly as its inflation. Soon, the euphoria gives way to depression, which is fueled by the guilt of excessively displaying my rage.

Depending on the intensity of the episode, it can take me days to regain my personal balance, as I end up completely drained. I have experienced this same falling script countless times throughout my life. The only thing that varied was the frequency and intensity of each blow. Fortunately, it decreased as I began to understand its mechanism,

which helped me slow down its development. Today, I can recognize the importance of this first girlfriend in my life and the pain caused by her abandonment as the catalyst for many transformations that led me to realize how destructive this falling script was.

One of the consequences of that experience was the complete reconfiguration of my relationships with women. My models were my middle brother and my cousin, who used to harass their girlfriends in an aggressive tone and manipulate them to make them feel guilty. I started applying these same techniques with my girlfriend, and for a while, I believed I could force her to give in to my will by making her believe she was always responsible for our arguments.

Fortunately for me, she was less fragile and submissive than my brothers' girlfriends; and when she left me, she allowed me to understand that this was a pattern I shouldn’t copy. I realized I had artificially integrated toxic behavior into my love life, a behavior that wasn’t originally mine but which I adopted through the example of the male figures in my family.

Work

Work, career, and professional fulfillment are pending topics. This is an aspect of my life that I struggle with; I see my difficulty, as a Self-Preservation 2, in becoming an adult.

I have an education that allows me to work in a very broad professional field, involving architecture, design, and visual arts. I have a master's and a doctorate, which enable me to work in research and higher education. I consider my repertoire of skills a precious inheritance from my parents’ efforts to give us freedom to experiment and choose our paths. My financial situation also allows me, although with some limitations, freedom of movement.

However, several psychological factors operate together in a way that makes it difficult for all these good conditions to result in economic and personal satisfaction. A dear psychotherapist who often attends the SAT program told me, after consulting on my professional dilemmas, that my problem is that I don’t trust my ability. When I asked him how to overcome it, he suggested I revere the memory of my father.

I didn’t understand very well how my father’s work practice was, as there was nothing very visible or routine about what he did. He was an independent professional, and his office was in a room of our house, near the street. He could spend long periods at home, and sometimes he disappeared on business trips. There were times when he was paid very well for a service, and then he was happy to distribute gifts among his children and fill the pantry, and there were times of scarcity when he strictly controlled the money coming in. He preferred freedom and autonomy, despite his irregular income, over a limiting routine

with the security of a fixed salary. When times demanded savings, the atmosphere at home became more austere, and my mother would tell us to ask for money only for essentials.

I remember, from a very early age, how concerned I was about whether I would ever be able to support myself or even support a family. I worried about the world of adults and their responsibilities, as I didn’t seem to believe I could develop the skills to face the challenges I saw around me.

Recently, another therapist who knows my story suggested that my professional difficulties are also a result of the alliance I made with my mother to never grow up, to always be her "Baby." The logic behind this would be that if I don’t achieve anything, I’ll never have to be an adult; and by not being an adult, I’ll always be dependent and never leave my mom. It makes a lot of sense, and it evokes the image that I still need to symbolically cut the umbilical cord.

I recognize in myself a self-sabotage that limits the development of many of my projects, which I abandon when they are about to be completed, presented, or sold. In fact, it’s as if I’ve spoiled the legitimate right to feel satisfied and nourished by the outcome of my work, because of the shame of feeling like some kind of beggar for recognition. Once again, pride!

A friend of mine, partly a therapist and a bit of a witch, recently visited my house and was surprised at the casual way I explained my work. She recognized this devaluation as an expression of my self-sabotage and suggested that I perform a simple act of psychomagic: I should place all the paintings and pictures I had scattered messily on the floor and corners on the walls of my house. Although this task seems simple, I still haven’t been able to complete it.

The boundaries between my sense of personal worth and the external recognition of my work are blurry. This confusion paralyzes me in terms of action and achievement, as I internally feel that any rejection of something I’ve done is a rejection of me. This crazy idea follows the script that I won’t be loved if I can’t offer something worthy of admiration. It also contributes to reinforcing my hedonism, which leads me to have many interests at once. This expansive impulse to look in different directions makes developing activities that require long and disciplined dedication a nightmare.

I perceive all this as a cognitive dysfunction that harms my concrete action in the world, linked to my difficulties with organization. I feel a confusion that makes it hard to organize my priorities. It’s like I’m surrounded by tasks on all sides. Everywhere I look, I see something demanding my attention, and I don’t even know where to start. This undisciplined and exhaustive mental tangle drains my energy without me managing to change anything.

As a typical E2, I feel uncomfortable with routines and bureaucracy, which I see as threats to my sacred freedom, so it’s not easy for me to integrate discipline into my work. As therapeutic guidance for these issues in my professional life, I feel that activities with well-designed methodologies work for me, ones that allow me to organize my goals and meet deadlines and tasks.

Since there is no danger of me turning my need for organization into a compulsion, developing a practical sense for planning can bring visible results in the short and medium term, as developing a practical sense and operating at the level of the concrete world is, in itself, a healing experience for my neurosis.

Wounds and Scars

In my family, there was a toxic sense of humor, specialized in identifying someone's weaknesses and ridiculing them. The person who was the target of criticism didn’t necessarily have to be present. We could talk badly about someone during lunch, for example. The comments were biased with contempt and devaluation, and they seemed to be completed when one would laugh about them, in a typical bullying dynamic.

The episodes of moral abuse I was exposed to are not fully healed wounds, and from time to time, they still provoke reactions in me. The disguise of humor makes the aggression less noticeable; however, it hurt my self-esteem more deeply than any physical aggression. I can remember the anger I felt. I couldn’t understand the cause or the motivation for those humiliations, which seemed totally gratuitous to me. I didn’t know what to do to set boundaries or express how much they hurt me, as my depression and sadness were treated in my family environment as softness and laziness.

I have the extreme sensitivity of a Self-Preservation 2 that makes me susceptible to being hurt by the slightest comment. My parents didn’t seem to realize the effects those mockeries had on me. Recently, I told my mother that the memories of these abuses still hurt me, and she was genuinely surprised. In reality, I’m not entirely sure she cared about what I told her or believed me.

I remember a scene, in the presence of some cousins and friends, where my siblings decided to have fun at my expense, telling everyone how late I was in quitting the bottle or how a childhood friend used to trick me into giving her money for ice cream. My siblings would mock me every time they found an opportunity to ridicule me in public. It was clear that they realized how much they were hurting me and how humiliated I felt by the laughter of others. And I hated them for it.

I spent much of my life not understanding the gratuitousness of these aggressions. Today, I understand that they may have been expressions of resentment due to our mother’s preference for me. A way to tell me that my seduction strategy and my maternal alliance did not go unnoticed.

My mother had a different style, but she didn’t spare me from public exposure. I remember one day when I came home, and she was talking to two neighbors on the street. I approached to greet the group, and suddenly my mother started saying, “Look how big he is! But to me, he’s still a baby... My baby.” I felt deeply embarrassed and asked her not to do it again, but it was useless. My discomfort wasn’t validated. I can understand that her intention wasn’t to humiliate me deliberately, but she wasn’t willing to release me easily from the eternal child role that we had implicitly agreed upon in my early childhood.

When our family was in a social setting or in the presence of others, I lived under the tension and expectation that soon the embarrassing “loving theater” of my mother or the harassment from my siblings would unfold. It was like living in the bipolarity of being pampered and humiliated for it.

In the long run, these systematic moral abuses caused a strong feeling of ineptitude in me, as the narrative consistently went in the direction of showing how inept, cowardly, stupid, and weak I was, and all of that made me feel deeply ridiculous. I lived each of these episodes as a castration, and I felt I had to apply counterpressure to my mother’s attachment in order to have space to grow. The effort also occurred inside me as conflict and insecurity, due to what growing up might mean and the possibility of losing that privileged place I had with my mother and, by extension, within my family, despite the price I paid.

Even today, despite having looked at it many times, I still feel great reactivity when I find myself in a situation where I am exposed in the center of attention. In negative situations, it takes the form of counterphobia that can quickly evolve into resentment or explosive anger of disproportionate dimensions.

Fortunately, I can perceive that, over time, these types of reactions have spaced out and are less intense, surely as a result of my therapy process. I’ve learned to more accurately recognize some triggers, so it’s no longer as easy to fall into the trap.

For example, I’ve seen how I became a master at replicating all that toxicity with humor, but under the effect of a transmission belt that turned me from the abused into the abuser and made me occasionally occupy that same role, from chronic resentment that ultimately inspired rejection from many people.

As long as I couldn’t fall into it, while this cycle between the feeling of being abused and the attitude of the abuser was a blind compulsion, I lived under a strong feeling of inadequacy and isolation. Some friends that I still maintain today remember me as an aggressive child, even within the household, although my mother and the adults in general would have described me as that “sweet and affectionate child.” In fact, between ten and fourteen years old, I got tangled in fights, blows, and complaints from school because my indiscipline was frequent and caused many problems. All echoes outside the house of the neurosis I lived with my family.

In some way, at home, they got used to coercing me through threats, although only my middle brother would usually cross the boundaries of physical aggression. At the beginning of adulthood, at eighteen, my body began to change quickly through sports, and just in time, I became very strong.

When I matched everyone in size and strength and could confront them physically, I established a new boundary in my dealings with the adults in the house. I began communicating with each one of them differently, making it clear that from that moment on, threats would no longer have any effect on me, as there was no longer the fear I had felt before, and that every humiliation I received would result in retaliation. I only exchanged a few blows with my middle brother, just long enough for him to understand that his advantage in physical strength no longer existed.

This affirmation phase, which lasted until I was twenty, redefined all my relationships. But it also coincided with crucial family events, such as my father’s death. Just before he died, at seventy-seven years old, my father no longer hid the discomfort that existed between us. During his last year of life, his treatment of me was dry, superficial, and impatient. I lived his death with much ambiguity and confusion. I felt a strange guilt for not having had a closer, more intimate relationship with him, subconsciously admitting my shared responsibility for the weakness of our bond. I was also very angry at his inability to approach me, as he was the father and I was the son.

That same year, I was admitted to a university in another city, and I began disconnecting from my family of origin. My middle brother also left home to live with his girlfriend in another state. The oldest continued to live with my mother and took my father’s place as the head of the family property.

Arrival at Adulthood

Thus, at twenty years old, coinciding with my father’s death, I arrived in the world of adulthood, which I experienced as if I were the cause of a fragmentation in the family for

having grown up and tried to disidentify with them. Although, honestly, I didn’t feel bad about it. In a way, I believed that the strength of the bonds was sufficient for my relationships with family members to be redefined, but this was never confirmed.

From then on, I realized that throughout my life, I had created an image of myself as a cohesive force that prevented the family system from imploding. I discerned the origin of my ego as a result of this identification with the “being so special” role in the home, almost like a Child Jesus. It is difficult for me to identify how much the structuring of my personality was a response to what was expected of me and how much it arose from my own inclinations.

It’s curious how, even today, I feel responsible for mediating between family members. Perhaps this idea is an echo of my childish egocentrism, which still fantasizes about a pacified family thanks to my good offices, my magnetism, the one who gives, offers stability, and serves a higher cause of love and unity. But this can also mean, in a healthier and more mature version of my character, the possibility of taking responsibility for what I’ve been able to see in the family’s madness, including my own, this time without privileges or fantasies about special gifts, in a position to collaborate so that we can end this journey in a better situation than when we started.

From twenty to twenty-five, during my time as a university student, I experienced unprecedented freedom in a semi-independent setting. I still enjoyed family funds to support myself and study, and had the autonomy and freedom to move in whatever way I wanted.

I was more interested in living with other young people my age than in studying. I had become a protected student who attended many parties and gatherings with friends. I had my favorite teachers, whom I befriended. They were always the most alternative, philosophical, and abstract. One of these teachers, whom I liked to talk to, was also a master of an ayahuasca religion, and he invited me to participate in a session.

At the time, I was twenty-two years old and very interested in experiencing altered states of consciousness in a protected environment. I was born in 1968, a year of great turmoil from countercultural movements worldwide, and it’s possible that this event provided me with some kind of memory of that moment in my way of being in the world.

When I finally drank ayahuasca for the first time in a União do Vegetal session, it was as if I had the proof I lacked about the existence of spirit. The clarity of understanding and the beauty of the visions put me on the track of a deeper and more subtle layer of existence, which I certainly wanted to visit and explore. The tea brought me symbols, memories, feelings, sensations, expansion, and understanding, but also discomfort and suffering. I

believed I had found the path, and I was fully immersed in that culture and the people involved for several years.

Little by little, I adapted to the profile of the followers of the ayahuasca religion. I was looking for a more apollonian sense—disciplined and dedicated—because I felt these virtues were missing in me. I assumed my life needed more order, and that meant adopting new postures and habits, and that religion seemed like the ideal environment to learn how to be that way.

I was a regular at the União do Vegetal for about fifteen years. I experienced many joys there. I learned the basics about experiences with power plants, the energetic formation of the systemic field, and resources for maintaining balance during the habitual storm of its effects on the mind and body. However, I realized that my chances for development within that group were losing strength as I became neurotically rigid when I allowed an artificial sense of order to overlay my more spontaneous impulses. Over time, I became interested in other ways to experience the effect of the tea, in other contexts and groups, and gradually disconnected from that group.

It was during an ayahuasca ritual in 1994 that I met Ana Paula, and in 1996, at the age of twenty-eight, we got married. We’ve been together for 24 years, and in some ways, we are the opposite of what our parents were to each other. Ana Paula is a woman with an absolutely gentle and constant emotion, exactly the opposite of what my mother was. On the other hand, the warmth and spontaneity she admired in me contrast with the emotional coldness and control of her father.

She seems immune to my emotional contamination and does not echo my excesses when they finally manifest. This fosters my development as it stops the inflation of my ego and deactivates all its justification. From the beginning, I felt it would be a difficult task to be together, but it was a great opportunity to learn to control my excessive emotional expressions. Also, from my teenage girlfriend, I had already learned that healthy women, sooner or later, lose interest in abusive men.

Our sense of humor and spontaneity tune us in and bring us closer. It also brings us closer to the fact that we have always been together in the search for transformation. This made us companions on the path even before we were husband and wife. I believe we were also attracted to each other’s neurotic needs. For my part, the search for a woman who could replace my mother in caregiving and maintaining privileges. For her, perhaps to justify the imposture of superiority from those who offer care. Today I understand that, since always, the challenge imposed on me for marriage to be something more than a gathering of our two insanities was to be able to abandon my place of dependency, towards greater autonomy and self-sufficiency. In other words, I could grow and present myself to her as a man, no longer as a child.

I never had doubts that my path to growth was to marry and have children. I understand that this is not necessary for everyone, but I imagine that it would have been a much less fulfilling life if I had spent it alone. Parenthood displaced my perspective on the condition of having to prioritize the needs of others over my own, something that had never been a natural condition for me. It became necessary to live with the contradiction of having to care for someone instead of being cared for, and confront what was in me—selfishness, comfort, inertia, and narcissism. I firmly dedicated myself to the challenge of sharing all the tasks of caring for the children, and this formed an intimate bond with them at a level I had not experienced with my father.

We have three children, ages nineteen, fifteen, and twelve. They are different from each other, and we know that each one will have many problems to resolve throughout their lives, but I am very happy that certain neurotic patterns from my family of origin have not reached them; and I believe I didn’t transmit them, not only because I recognized them (at the expense of many therapy hours) before they could contaminate the relationships between my children and me. Unlike my family of origin, in our house, there are no theatrical fights, loud arguments, or any type of aggression. None of my children have ever received a slap.

As a Key Clause in Our Marriage Contract

Ana Paula and I agreed that being together should always be a conscious choice. At various times, we have felt open to renewing our vows and reviewing the terms of our agreements as a couple. There is no control over each other, nor jealousy that leads us to alter our behavior. Most of the friends we have are mutual, but we also give each other the freedom to have our own circles of relationships. We find it important to create contexts where our married condition does not hinder our individual development, but rather enhances our experiences.

After completing my doctorate in 2008, I dedicated myself to teaching and researching in the fields of Architecture and Design. It was a brilliant and intense phase that lasted twelve years, during which I discovered a vocation. I felt motivated to study like never before, to structure my classes and courses, and to present the content specifically for young people between eighteen and twenty-two years old. I felt the beneficial effects of this immersion in my intellectual and logical capacities.

In some classes, I was able to open up to less orthodox approaches than the standards of formal education, proposing dynamic methods similar to Gestalt therapy to the students. In this context, I felt a bit like a therapist because my proposal was to offer more than just the simple function of transmitting content; I worked towards building a field of unity and trust

where classes could flow smoothly. During the classes, I tried to encourage them to share their processes and difficulties. I got to know better the potential of compassionate love, which is so strong in the Self-Preservation 2 subtype. I genuinely cared about the students and liked getting to know them closely. It was a phase in which I felt strongly empathetic, with a great openness where I could share the best of myself.

Some of my ego traps tend to arise from the bipolar oscillation in my relationship with authority. Thus, seeing myself in the position of academic authority, I felt motivated to renounce this role, trying to be more egalitarian with the new reality of being in a more advanced stage. But this posture had adverse effects on the recognition of authority roles, partly because I insisted on being the kind of teacher who was "friends with the students." I felt some difficulty sticking to the functional boundaries of being a responsible teacher, partly due to my objection to any hierarchical submission. And when I realized this, I often found myself in resentful and authoritarian attitudes in class, especially when dysfunctions occurred related to the need to assert my authority.

This phase of enthusiasm for teaching also reached its peak and consequent decline. It happened in a course where I felt that I was losing interest in dedicating myself professionally to teaching as if I had already absorbed all the learning I could extract from that situation.

What’s Left to Work On

In its neurotic version, a proud Self-Preservation 2 type feels very vulnerable to the challenges of the adult world, which demands self-assertion and responsibility. It doesn’t fully trust that its abilities are sufficient to protect itself and act in the world. If it feels confused by the complexity of situations, it seeks the proximity of people who provide support for its insecurity.

The seductive strategy we develop as proud, supposedly love-generators, is one of seduction in exchange for affection, appealing to people’s maternal and paternal instincts, making them feel obligated to cradle or take us in. In this sense, egocentric generosity doesn’t involve offering something concrete as a seduction strategy. Instead, we use a soft voice, a sweet tone, a smile, and a relaxed gesture, offering little more than warmth, but it’s enough to make it attractive and weave fantasies related to personal importance and egocentrism.

Perhaps the worst effect of this dysfunction of love is the impossibility of experiencing the enjoyment of true achievements in an integral way, as satisfaction always seems

contaminated by distrust of manipulation and the desire for recognition, displacing perception and leading it into a space where false humility and lack meet.

Leaving that place involves, first of all, feeling dissatisfied with the humiliating condition of behaving like an incapable person without actually being one. It’s important to create a sense of persistence in one’s goals and to learn to free oneself from the self-critical messages that arise as soon as something goes wrong. By persistence, I mean the development of a more consistent sense of regularity.

It is fundamental to accept that there is a legitimate joy in being happy with the results of our own achievements, even if we secretly realize how much we desire that these serve as a means for the world to recognize us. The ego generally wants to appropriate our best results by smearing them with feelings of shame and complexes. It’s a trap to prevent self-realization, so we stay faithful to the commitment of not growing.

The urgent desire for freedom of the proud cannot be sustained through insubordination. Although anger moves a lot of energy, causing an illusion of strength, rebellion tends to function more like a limiting imprisonment.

From a broader perspective, I feel that the epicenter of this neurosis is the denial of life, and all these effects appear as radiations due to its non-acceptance. How can one live profitably if there is an express commitment to denial, operating through non-self-realization? Could non-self-realization be an act of childish rebellion against the arbitrariness of life?

My goal is to trust the phrase “thy will be done,” from the Lord’s Prayer, as it represents, for me, a thankful rest in the certainty that life expects nothing from us except that we be, not that we do. Adherence and surrender to this mandate, as Claudio Naranjo said, are sufficient for everything else to come to us as a result.

And Some Transformations

The therapeutic process has opened me up to insights that, over time, have formed a cloud of memories, understandings, and images that gain clarity and meaning as I manage to make connections between them.

I was able to understand how a gestalt can take many years to complete, in its cycle between identifying a delicate problem and balancing it with a counterpoint. It doesn’t seem possible to alter the memory of a trauma or pain, but it seems quite possible for its attributes to be reformulated based on new experiences.

An example of this in my personal experience is the notion that my birth was an arbitrariness of life despite my will, which is later completed with the understanding that, despite validating my painful experiences, I recognize myself as completely responsible for the conditions of my birth, once I see them as motivated by my own choice.

But even more important is becoming aware of the process that has taken me from a state of resentment, where my vitality was lying down, to another where I admit and accept suffering, and take responsibility for how I manage it.

Undoubtedly, my personal process has led me to recognize that pain has a role in the maturation process, and for that reason, it should not be rejected with disgust and curses. This pain has brought me greater depth and has been raw material for the blossoming of important qualities, such as empathy and sensitivity. Accepted pain contains a sobriety that distances us from frivolous superficiality. It creates a greater mass before life and an existential center of gravity. It’s not about wanting or seeking pain, as pain understood and accepted has nothing to do with masochistic suffering. On the contrary, it becomes a powerful force of attraction and a condition for awareness.

Once, I heard the response of a therapist to the question of how he overcame a traumatic experience that almost took his life. He said that the very space the accident opened for the experience of pain was the same space from which love arrived.

On the path of life, I realized that transformation operates through continuity and doesn’t skip stages. I understood that the heart can create beautiful melodies interpreted through love and pain. And I came to recognize that I like people, and that accepting pain can become a path of evolution.