Autobiography: The Purpose of Healing To Give Myself To The World

By Muriel Mondy

I was born in 1962, in Toulouse. I’m the younger of two sisters. To understand my story, it’s essential to first talk about my parents, as their influence defines the starting point of my biography.

My father, Serge, was the son of a working-class family. A direct, energetic, imposing man.

My grandfather had a thunderous voice, and in that house, there was more shouting than talking. Tenderness was unknown. My father was never called by his name, and when the children misbehaved, they had to be pointed at to be called. My father and his sister lived however they could, getting by between their father's scoldings and their mother's hysteria, until very young, Serge decided to leave home.

At 18, he met my mother. It was love at first sight. Inseparable, they decided to move in together and settled in a small house. It was just a cabin, with a roof and the essentials to live: happy and poor, but content. From a young age, they resolved their life with work, even if it meant taking on unskilled jobs and sleeping on floors and pallets. The problem was, no one wanted to hire him because he learned too fast and had a complicated genius. He behaved like a boss, which was highly annoying.

When I was born, my father was expecting a boy and raised me as one: he played ball with me, took me skiing, we were always alone because my sister didn’t like outings. I liked feeling that I would be like him. I wanted to be strong and fearless. “The world belongs to the strong,” that was his motto, and he repeated it constantly. He despised the weak and claimed the word impossible didn’t exist in French. So anything was possible, you just had to work hard.

He never hit us, but he used his strength against us. Not out of necessity. He adored my sister, she was the apple of his eye. She had trouble learning to read and write and because my father disrespected my mother, she probably internalized that and thought she was worthless. My father was rude and harsh; they both drank too much, but I didn’t know that.

My mother, Nanou, was the youngest of four siblings. Her mother died when she was two years old and her father abandoned her. From then on, the children lived with their grandparents, who made it their life’s mission to raise their grandchildren. In that post-war era, there was practically nothing; they lived with the bare minimum, and the neighbors helped that large family move forward. Her grandfather worked with coal and her grandmother sewed. My mother never learned to read or write, and from a young age earned a living working in textile factories. Everything she earned went to the family.

My mother was a cheerful and loving woman: an efficient, lively and beautiful person. She made herself respected with her words and actions. She always had a drive to give to others, as if she wanted to compensate for everything she hadn’t received from her parents and now gave to us tenfold. She suffered because she didn’t know how to express herself with us or feel accomplished, although she was proud to have succeeded on her own.

As a child, I often had intense conversations with my mother where she would tell me I was her pride. She, for her part, challenged me and denied it, but I insisted, and my conviction

was so strong that in the end, she stopped resisting. She told me I seemed like an adult when talking about the world.

My sister, Marjorie, is eighteen months older than me. She was a feminine and sensitive girl, fearful and very cautious. When we played, I had to be very careful not to hurt her. We were opposites and complementary. She was the eldest and sometimes acted spoiled or got into trouble; I always defended her. If someone stole her candy or bothered her, she was always there for sweet things, feminine and delicate, and I was the one saving her from trouble.

As little girls, we didn’t enjoy the same games or interests. Besides being older, she matured faster and always preferred girls' games. Sometimes she played with dolls or a tea set, while I preferred pistols or balls. We weren’t interested in each other's toys and left each other alone. I got terribly bored, so I played with boys. My sister worried me; I saw her fragility and felt responsible for everything that happened to her. My mother once told me that, in preschool, the kids took away her candies and even slapped her. The next day, the principal called my mother and told her that I had tried to hit one of the boys who had slapped her. My mother looked at me and said: "You're so strong, my petite, and yet you defended your sister."

Over the years, we became close and shared homes and jobs.

I wasn’t aware of what harm meant; I only knew that if I hit hard, things calmed down. I wanted to be like Dad, and he had made that very clear to me. Once, I saw a man hit a woman in a car. He drove away and I saw him swinging the woman around. When I opened the door, the man asked: "You again? What do you want?" And I said, firm and strong: "You move and I’ll help you." He ran away.

When I got home, my legs were shaking, but the adrenaline kept me standing. I sat on the couch. My belly trembled and my legs were numb. My belly told me the kind of fear I had felt, though at that moment, I didn’t perceive it as fear. It was clear that the knife served me for everything and I always carried it, until I became aware and let it go. I let it go for good when I started entering the world of therapy and personal growth; I was 35. Today, at 63, I’m proud to say that I always carry a pocket knife in my bag.

At eight years old, I remember one episode with great clarity: we had a family lunch with my uncles and cousins at home. Before they arrived, my parents told me that my uncle had hit my aunt. During dinner, he was sitting in front of me, laughing and saying nonsense as if nothing had happened. I couldn't stop thinking about grabbing a knife and killing him, to punish him for what he deserved. My mother saw me and read my mind. She got up from the table and asked me to come help her in the kitchen. When we were alone, she explained that this wasn’t the way to fix things. I followed her lead and tried to convince

her that the best thing was to break up with him, so he wouldn’t bother my aunt or cousins anymore, since I knew he hit them too.

When I look back today, I totally recognize myself. From a young age, I was very determined and defiant, especially when it came to defending the weaker one. In fact, everyone was weaker than me, or at least, I believed I had to defend everyone. I always had to choose a side, because others were evil, and I had to do the dirty work.

As I became more aware of my particularities, my abilities, my superpowers… wow, everyone else seemed so slow, dense, and clumsy. I was the only one who could understand things that others didn’t, interested in things no one else cared about, and I was the only one who knew what really mattered. I felt more human and more connected to everything that surrounded me than the rest of humanity. All other humans seemed insignificant, except for my family and closest friends, because they were like me.

1968 marked a turning point in France. I remember seeing women taking to the main streets on television, awakening the dead with their strength and determination. Arm in arm, shouting for equal rights. Voices demanding sexual freedom, state-funded abortion, and a wave of protest against the military elite and bureaucracy. It was a popular revolt that swept through the whole country.

We lived in Toulouse until I was six years old, precisely until 1968. That year, my parents decided to move north. We went 10 km from the city and started building our house in the countryside. The natural environment was beautiful: moss, trees, flowers, and a small stream running through our plot. After the house was built came the truck era. My parents bought a beautiful white pickup truck and spent entire weekends driving it. My sister and I were in charge of the meals and they set up a small counter for me where I sold sandwiches, sweets, and cheap little toys. I remember how seriously I took those days, even though, without realizing it, I was beginning my working life while still very young.

When I was thirteen, my parents added a caravan to the pickup truck, and during the summer months, we began traveling with the Sud Radio tour. For eleven years, we camped during the summer, each day in a different town, traveling throughout all the cities in the south of France. We all lived together: the stars of the show and a few more people — among them, the assembly crew and us. We were like a family that did everything together. We set up the stage, accommodated the caravans in a circle. A star of the show (Charles Aznavour or Dalida) would arrive, and the magic began with Philippe Castanet, an entertainer and magician who sang and performed, hosted contests, games, and raffles. I remember how three men dressed as swans from Swan Lake delighted the audience in exchange for prizes, like a deep fryer from brand X, etc. I laughed amid the audience’s laughter and applause.

When I remember that time, it seems to me that it was the closest thing to happiness. Sharing the caravan with my parents and my sister, sleeping all together, spending the days in each other's company — it was pure enjoyment for a girl my age. From those tours, I kept wonderful memories. The contact with all kinds of people, and especially with the glamorous artists of the time, made me realize how fragile fame is. Some couldn’t handle the fall and committed suicide. My father explained it with a simple phrase: “The higher you climb, the harder the fall.” At that early age, I learned a lot just by observing.

When my sister and I were around fifteen and sixteen, we worked in markets or weekend fairs. I remember that we fought to defend our space, especially when groups of adults tried to push us out of our designated square. One day, a man came up and tried to kick us out: “Get out of here, brats!” And I shouted, “Poor you!” He looked at me—

Shit, with no compassion — and I made it very clear that it wouldn't go well for him if he kept pushing: “If you try again, I’ll shout louder,” I said. And it was true: no one messed with me in those situations. That respect I gained gave me power. I had developed such confidence and inner strength that my voice was solid, strong, and powerful, just like my father’s. I loved doing all those jobs. I felt powerful, invincible.

At age 23, my parents were divorcing. My mother left the family home. As my father went mad with alcohol and separation, we decided to take turns sleeping at his place to calm him, soothe his nerves and depression. One afternoon, while he was returning from the market, as soon as he arrived and saw me, he suddenly got out of his car (not knowing why I was there) and walked straight toward me with a .22 rifle in his hand, his face full of grief and rage. Quickly, I called my mother and sister, and they rushed to help. He collapsed in my arms, telling me he loved me and that he had lost everything. He started crying like a child and fainted. He had come home intending to kill us. We admitted him to a mental health facility — commonly referred to as “the loony bin.” My mother took a long time to recover emotionally and never really came out of that emotional prison, even after leaving the hospital. My survival instinct and intuition saved the three of us. I never doubted it. I always had the feeling that something higher was protecting me.

I had my first romantic relationships with boys at age 18. I quickly realized that my attraction to girls was much stronger. Fortunately, I never had any problems with my family because of it. I had a beautiful relationship with a garçon manqué (a tomboy) who looked very feminine, sporty, and quite appealing for a life of mischief and chaos. I fell in love easily during that time. I had girlfriends that lasted a few years and I always had lovers and occasional flings. Every night there was a different woman in my bed. It was chaos — I had a lot going on! When I finished working, I went to nightclubs. I drank a lot of alcohol, I liked to dance and hook up... I was young and submerged in the effervescence of the eighties, in the open air, under the arcades or in the clubs. It was a constant sensation of desire and

wild lust! I lived my sexual freedom without judgment. Everything was pleasure, the delight of amour.

At twenty years old, I was with my sister and some friends on the Costa Brava, in Spain. We went to a cove where people were jumping from a rock into the sea. There were a lot of people, and most of all, the boys were jumping from the top of the rock, and some even dove in headfirst. Of course, I wanted to jump too. Right away, I climbed the rock and jumped. As soon as I jumped, the adrenaline rushed through my body, and the sensation was fantastic. I didn’t see the danger, or I saw it, but I didn’t care. I wanted to do it. I wanted to jump. I did it, and just as I was about to hit the water, my arms didn’t make it in time to protect my head. Then, as I landed (a jump of more than twenty meters), I heard a loud crack in my neck and felt terrible pain. My head snapped back violently, and I fainted in the water; I almost died drowning.

My self left me, as if it had exited my body, watching myself fall and sink into the depths of the sea; it was as if I were watching my body with no life left in it. I remember I liked watching myself from the outside… it was that same feeling I had when I nearly died from the intestinal obstruction, so it didn’t surprise me. I felt at peace, I felt nothing — no fear, no pain. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, and suddenly I understood that I was probably dying; I felt my whole body full of that certainty. And I told myself: “It’s not the end, my dear, and I’m coming back, I’m coming back, I’m going to return to the sky. But I want to return to my body.” I felt my legs start to move, and I said: “But I’m not ready to die…”

I had to climb back up the rocks using only my arms and my bleeding nose. At that moment, I understood I had jumped from way too high.

I got out of the water, and from the top of the rocks, I saw my sister waving her arms; she seemed very worried that I hadn’t come back up earlier. She didn’t really understand how I’d managed to climb those rocks. I think no one understood. She told me later that something had stopped her from jumping. I remember her look when she saw me again — she realized that something serious had happened and that I’d taken too long. When she saw my face, her expression changed, and she tried to hug me. I told her I didn’t want to be touched, that I wasn’t okay, that something had hurt me badly inside.

We quickly went to the hospital. After a few hours of waiting, they gave me a shot in the butt to endure the pain and placed a cervical collar on me. The doctor told me I had to rest for several days and do nothing, that I probably had a strong cervical sprain, but nothing serious. A week later, I returned to France, to my home.

Although everything seemed fine, my back hurt in a very localized way, right in the middle of my spine, and I began to notice that my movements were increasingly limited. I went back to waitressing. After twenty minutes, I couldn’t continue or finish my shift. In fact, my

body had collapsed from the pain, and I was paralyzed. The top part of my body was paralyzed; I couldn’t even hold a glass of water.

That was when my healing journey began. Over the years, I visited countless doctors, specialists, rheumatologists, etc. Some suggested placing screws in my neck, without promising that this would actually fix anything.

As a result of the accident, at 23 years old I had an operation on my neck. The doctors told me that placing a plate in the cervical area to relieve the weight on my neck was the best option for me. Even though I was terrified of surgery, I knew other women had gone through worse, so I prepared with meditation and courage. I went in and came out. I had three sessions in the operating room. From one breast all the way to the neck, they opened me up. I remember that when they operated on me a second time with local anaesthesia, while they unblocked the drainage with a vacuum, the pain I felt was unbearable. Without thinking, I grabbed the doctor’s genitals with my hand and told him I couldn’t take that barbarity anymore. He, surprised and stunned, immediately ordered them to stop. All the nurses were watching (some even smiled). He said the surgery would be done the next day under general anaesthesia.

It took me four years to recover. I practiced visualization and daily massage. It was difficult for me to look at myself naked in the mirror; I experienced the surgery as a castration. For a long time, I wanted revenge on that man, to return the pain. I even fantasized about cutting off his genitals so he could feel what I had experienced. That’s why I decided not to have any more surgeries, but instead to move forward with therapy to overcome the trauma.

After about five years of constant searching, I ended up believing that no one could do anything more for me. I couldn’t go back to work. It was impossible to even hold a glass of water. When I drove at night, I had to do it on my knees. I had a special cushion to turn the steering wheel more easily, because turning it with each movement was accompanied by sharp pain. I was always at the limit of what I could bear. Many times, I told myself that if things didn’t improve and I couldn’t find relief, I wouldn’t be able to go on. I thought many times about suicide. I didn’t want anyone to worry about me, but I had found a way to make the pain stop: I would cut my arms and bleed out in total silence. But I also had a great capacity for lying to myself.

At that time, I met Madame Paul Verne, a sophrologist. I stayed with her for two years studying and practicing sophrology and yoga. One day she advised me that what would help me most was to start practicing Zen meditation — and so I did.

Then a friend invited me to a conference by a Tibetan monk who was supposedly going to speak about how to end pain and suffering. The conference was in Toulouse, where I lived, at a congregation near the city. During the talk, it seemed very interesting to me to listen to

his teachings. Almost at the end of his speech, the monk asked the whole room: “Who wants to stop suffering?” He asked us to raise our hand. With difficulty and the help of my friend, I raised mine. The monk looked at me, fixed his eyes on mine, and gave me what I consider my first essential teaching. He said to me: “If you no longer want to suffer... then meditate every day.” That was the true liberation from all suffering. It was a very powerful moment for me. He also said, “Only through meditation will you be able to find the true freedom that all beings seek. The true liberation is feeling that you can go through pain — whether physical or psychological. We can only reach true beauty by living in totality.”

That impacted me deeply, and after the conference I quickly looked for a Zen center to meditate. I found a small Zen dojo where I began to practice regularly. I participated in weekly and weekend intensive sittings. There I met someone who would become my great friend, companion, and sister, Anik. The practice consisted of two forty-minute sessions and five minutes of walking meditation, always facing the wall. For someone like me, impulsive and overflowing with vital energy, everything was an event. Sitting without doing anything for so long was a challenge for me to radically change.

In addition to daily sitting, I also joined temple retreats, where I spent entire days sitting. Sitting in meditation for so long meant I could no longer escape the pain or my own difficulties. Being still, with a straight spine, not moving, not reacting... that was the greatest challenge. Not moving, not escaping, not leaving. Staying there and feeling what was inside me, what hurt me, and not running away with a sudden impulse of action (any form of action). That still movement was the path to the evolution of the heart. I began to feel the silence deeply and understand it like never before. My automatic mechanisms for covering up any discomfort stopped working, and of course, I became aware of all the judgment I carried toward myself and toward others.

At the beginning of the practice, everything seemed like a battle against my own ego, but by accepting my difficulties as they were, I began to better understand my mechanism of action–reaction. That understanding allowed me to enter the practice of silence and stillness. When my body was calm in that stillness, I felt freer and more at peace. My attention gradually amplified. Before, I could feel like a wild horse inside, and I realized that it was my responsibility to tame those impulses.

After all these changes and learnings about myself, I began to feel very different from others and quite sure of myself.

With practice, my intensity, my impulses, and my rebellion began to soften, and I started to find something peaceful within me. I went from seeking strong emotions to seeking tranquility and silence. I also began to notice that by speaking less and listening more, my perception deepened and expanded.

During communal work (samu), I was an assistant in the kitchen, serving food to about forty people in the dining hall. We ate in silence. There was a boy who helped us carry the trays. I found that he worked very badly and very slowly. At the end of the meal, I went to see him and said, without compassion:

“You’re useless! You’re way too slow, and you have no intuition. Besides, you shouldn’t make noise, and you’re always clumsy with the trays. You’re not careful at all! ‘Be silent, damn it!’” I said it with anger and fury. He just stood there, with tears in his eyes. “Well—and you’re also sensitive,” I said ironically.

The truth is that I destroyed him without realizing it. My companion, who witnessed that moment, looked at me with pain, realizing what I had provoked in that boy. I felt very bad, I felt awful and full of shame for having behaved that way. I had no difficulty apologizing right then, but I also didn’t feel at peace doing so. I could see my father in me, and I noticed it. I began to act like him again, full of contempt toward weakness, toward difference, toward difficulties in others. Every time that happened, it was a big lesson for my ego.

Life in the temple and all the rules of practice allowed me to harmonize with others and follow the cosmic order: “to be silent, not to argue, and to practice silence.” Little by little, discipline began to penetrate my character and transform me. I stopped reacting impulsively or making jokes, and I also stopped provoking others. Before, I had felt a certain luxurious pride—it made me feel invincible to see others helpless. My father had taught me that, and I had believed it.

A few years later, in the temple, I felt the need to take shukke tokudo, the novice ordination as a bodhisattva. I shaved my head, received the robe, and took a new name of the future Buddha—my own name—Rakusu, a small patchwork robe. Another test of patience for me: so much precision in that stitching, which took months to complete. The lack of patience made it very difficult, almost impossible. After a few years, I became a Zen nun. My life was then completely united with Zen teachings. The sangha had truly become my family. When I put on the robe for the first time—the kesa and the kolomo—I truly felt that I belonged, not as a disguise but as my true skin. When I put on that robe, I felt whole.

Years later, my experience changed. I saw and felt that the robe could also become a trap for the ego. With it, I could easily return to pretending and suffering again. I didn’t want that.

“I am not a Zen nun…” I told myself as I took off the robe and continued practicing every day, as a woman.

All those years of practice and retreat had allowed me to go a little beyond pain and to understand the difference between pain and suffering.

At 27, I discovered kung fu. It was my friend’s boyfriend who invited me to a demonstration, and instantly I knew that this was for me. Between meditation, physical rehabilitation, and this art, I was able to move again almost normally, though without pain. The following year, I began competing in tournaments and won the French national championship (twice consecutively) and placed second at the world championship in Taiwan.

A few years later, before moving to Barcelona, I had the good fortune to meet an osteopath and physiotherapist who helped me for seventeen years. I went to his clinic thousands of times. This man helped me survive my incapacity, to bear the pain that at times distorted my face. Even so, sincerely, I couldn’t have managed that situation alone.

In 1995, our Zen teacher invited us to Barcelona for a zazen retreat. I fell in love with the city and the idea of opening a dojo there. He didn’t know that. Two months later, my friend Anik and I moved to Barcelona. We settled in the Gràcia neighborhood, in a ground-floor place near Parc Güell. In that first period, I used to go walking in the park after meditation, to “my little gardens.” I needed to feel the earth, smell it, feel the kisses of the wind, the birds. Locals would ask what I was doing in the garden, and I answered: “I’m working in the field, I need it; it’s vital for me.” They laughed when they saw me on all fours, smelling the grass and touching the earth.

In front of the Zen meditation dojo (which was also our home), we set up noticeboards and began getting known. I gave kung fu, massage, and sophrology classes. We quickly became part of the neighborhood and its surroundings. The practitioners of different Zen groups and other local communities allowed us to live with a very modest economy, just enough to pay the rent and buy food — nothing more. We lived those days with the same love and the same desire to live our destiny. For us, this city was more than enough reason to stay and to let life carry us through this adventure.

I have always had difficulties trusting men in general, but with Claudio, I felt an immediate sense of safety. I felt his affection and tenderness; I felt cared for and loved, and I could also share mystical experiences with him. From that day on, I couldn’t stop feeling movement in my body and energy in his presence. Each time I saw him, my love grew stronger. I didn’t understand how it was possible for such profound sensations to arise from my body, how this energy overflowed and vibrated within me. I had never felt anything like it. Claudio guided and accompanied me through moments of disorientation but also toward an immense opening of the heart to infinite love, on the other hand.

Despite my spiritual connection growing stronger and my continuous practice of stretches and martial arts, the physical pain remained very strong and paralyzing. My search for healing went on for twenty years, and when I was nearly forty, Claudio introduced me to Dr. Mario Fiore. I told Claudio that I couldn’t take the pain anymore, that I was on the verge of throwing myself out the window; I had reached the point where I couldn’t take it anymore.

The experience I have now of my accident and that whole process of physical pain is that it toughened me outwardly but also hollowed me out; that was the way I found to stay standing.

Dr. Fiore healed me in three sessions, on consecutive days. The first time, he placed his hands on my neck, and I suddenly burst into tears, releasing a deep sob. That cry was the same cry that had been trapped in me since I fell into the water, the cry that would change my life. I felt immense relief and cried and cried. I say “I began” because I hadn’t cried in months. My entire body wept. My tears flowed out on their own, without any thought or idea, like an open faucet. I felt that crying relieved me of everything I had endured, of all the accumulated tension.

Claudio opened the door to my heart. And with an open heart, after completing the SAT process, I met the person I would marry and with whom I’ve shared my life ever since — for over fifteen years now. I never again wanted to date other women. I even had to turn down some whom I liked, and it wasn’t hard to do... which surprised me! Something had changed radically in me. I enjoy being faithful, being with just her, fully involved in our shared life. I recognized the deep need to find the partner of my life.

Now, at 63 years old, I live with the purpose of sharing what I’ve learned. After years of study, I became a therapist and teacher of the Tibetan vertebral practice, passed down to me by Dr. Fiore (whom I never parted from after meeting him). Both in my clinic and through my therapy, I continue to learn — endlessly.

My mother was sixteen and my father twenty-one when I was conceived. They already had a small daughter and lived in a modest country house, somewhat isolated, where my father raised pigs on a small farm. During the pregnancy, my mother often said that, on several occasions, the Devil appeared to her. Not as a defined figure, but as a shadow that emerged in the room and whispered that I would be his. She would pray desperately, trying to drive that presence away. My aunt also spoke of strange occurrences. She swore she had seen the same shadow and said she had clearly felt a malignant presence moving through the house.

My birth was not ordinary either. My mother’s water broke at 1:30 in the morning on February 2, 1977. On the way to the hospital, the birth began to advance; I was already starting to come out. Everything was happening too fast. However, upon arrival, the doctors decided to intervene. Instead of assisting the birth, they tried to stop it, pushing me back inside the womb to wait—for what they said would be—a more controlled procedure.

At that moment, according to my mother, something changed. She said that I turned around, that I went back in by my own will, as if I had decided not to be born.

My mother panicked. She screamed that I was tearing her apart from the inside and that she wanted to leave immediately. They tied her feet and hands on the delivery table, the midwife came and slapped her so that she would stay still and let them reposition her properly. In the end, they had to use forceps to pull me out. My mother always said that I started crying while still inside her womb.

Between birth and the age of seven, many things happened. I remember myself as a small child, crawling around in the fields; our mother gave us a lot of freedom — perhaps too much. Once we saw a huge snake slithering near the house. We wanted to find it and play with it, until eventually it bit my sister T. My father went mad, screaming and blaming my mother for not taking good care of us.

I remember the dark house. I also remember that after we finished showering, my father would grab me by the skin and lift me up in the air, only to let me drop. It scared me, but since it was the only physical contact I had with him, I tried to smile, hoping he would stay with me longer. I must have been around one year old then. My mother used to say that during my first nights, I growled in my sleep, and that she would sit beside me with a bowl of holy water, sprinkling it softly over me while repeating again and again: “Satan, get out, Satan, get out.”

My parents separated when I was three years old. We were three siblings: T., the eldest; me, the middle one; and S., the youngest. The arguments between them were constant. My mother couldn’t stand the idea of being trapped at home while my father spent all day working on the farm. When they finally separated, they became the first couple in the whole village to do so — which unleashed a flood of gossip, criticism, and condemnation. People talked and pointed fingers. My mother was immediately stigmatized; they called her a “whore.”

She, with a mix of anger and resignation, would reply that maybe she was. She said that since my father couldn’t pay alimony, and she had no money, she had no choice but to sleep with men in order to feed us. From that moment on, our relationship with her became confusing and painful. In my case, I became the center of her expectations. I had to be her ideal man, her comfort, her unconditional loyalty.

She would coerce us into telling her that we loved her more than our father. If we hesitated or didn’t answer as she expected, she would lose control — shouting, crying, and throwing us out of the house as if we were traitors. I remember one night, when I was five years old, my older sister said that she also liked being with Dad. That alone was enough to unleash chaos. Our mother kicked us out, and we spent the night sitting on the stairs, freezing, waiting for her to calm down.

Our mother began corresponding with a man who was in prison and eventually started visiting him. We didn’t like accompanying her; every time we went, before reaching the prison, we had to stop by the man’s mother’s house — a dark, heavy place that made us anxious. There, our mother would lock herself in a room to talk with the woman while we waited outside. Afterwards, they would come out and ask us to let them place small pouches — filled with a white powder we didn’t really understand — inside our socks or underwear. Once inside the prison, our mother would take those pouches from us and hand them to her boyfriend.

I remember that one day we told her we didn’t want to do it anymore, that it made us feel bad, dirty, confused. And she — perhaps for the first time — listened to us. She promised that she would never do it again. And she kept her word.

When the man got out of prison, we lived with him for almost a year — shut up in a new apartment with no furniture, with nothing. An empty space that didn’t feel like a home at all. Our mother would leave with him in the mornings, and we would be left alone in that empty apartment all day, with no food and no one to take care of us. For us, those hours felt endless. The hunger was so intense that we would open the refrigerator again and again, even though we knew there was nothing inside. To calm our stomachs, we would scrape off tiny pieces of ice from the freezer…

We pretended the ice was pasta, meat, or whatever might make us feel less empty. We devoured it while they went off to fuck. When they finally came back, they brought a pizza, already half-eaten. At first, it was something they did in the room with the door half open — my sister saw them and called us over. I didn’t really get what was going on; the man had his pants down and my mother was riding him on the bed. It looked like they were hurting each other, or fighting. I opened the door, and my mother, seeing our faces, told us that nothing was wrong, that she was having a great time (while still riding him). Then I saw them shower together, and the man would be naked even when it was our mother bathing us, and I felt disgusted by that man, who intimidated me.

I felt that my mother was having a great time with him, but to us, that man didn’t seem trustworthy, and we didn’t know how to tell her we were in danger — that we felt abandoned and hungry. Eventually, perhaps becoming aware of what was happening, or at least of the harm she was doing to us, our mother took us to our grandparents’ house. She told us she couldn’t take care of us, though she repeated over and over that she loved us deeply and that we were the most important thing in her life. Then she left. We didn’t see her again for almost a year.

Our maternal grandparents took us in without asking questions, with a warmth that still moves me to this day. They took us to the doctor, and years later they would tell us that at

the time, we were suffering from malnutrition. Despite everything, I remember those months with them with deep affection. They cared for us as if they were our own parents.

My grandmother made us warm meals, tucked us in at bedtime, and when my sisters caught a cold, she rubbed their chests with a menthol ointment whose scent still brings me a strange feeling of comfort today. I never got sick, or at least not like they did, but I longed with all my soul for her to rub that same warm ointment on me — it warmed your chest and back. And she noticed. Without me saying anything, she would come close and ask, “Do you want some too?” I would answer no, that I wasn’t sick. Then she would smile and say, “That’s okay… do you want it anyway?”

What a delight, that warmth on my chest! It was like being hugged from the inside. And when she turned off the lights and left us in bed, I would feel a deep urge to cry. Not from pain, but from a strange mix of comfort and sadness. As if, finally, someone was truly taking care of us. And at the same time, it hurt to realize just how much we had needed that care. They enrolled us in school. The three of us were in the same classroom — more like a daycare — where little by little we began to recover a bit of our childhood.

I didn’t feel completely comfortable there. There was something in me — maybe from all I had lived through — that kept me constantly on alert. I felt I had to protect my sisters from whatever might happen. I loved my sisters deeply. Seeing them happy gave me a joy I didn’t know how to explain, like their laughter held me up from the inside. But sometimes I got angry with them, especially when they hurt themselves out of pure innocence: they tripped, fell, got hurt, and then I was flooded with an irrational fury — not just at them, but even at the ground that had hurt them, as if I could blame the world for not protecting them. It was a strange mix of tenderness and rage that I didn’t know how to handle.

My aunt — my mother’s younger sister, who was a social worker — loved us very much, and with me she had a special sensitivity. She paid me a kind of attention that sometimes made me uncomfortable. She would say that even when I looked at her like I wanted to kill her, I was a very good boy. And that made me even angrier. I didn’t understand why she insisted on seeing goodness where I felt only confusion and rage. But she never stopped saying it. I didn’t like it when people said I was smart, because being smart, to me, meant being vulnerable, manipulable — as if being intelligent was an open door through which the world could enter and hurt me. Many times, I felt a burning inside me, a kind of formless fire I didn’t know how to release. I waited — almost wished — for something to happen that would give me an excuse to explode, so that anger could finally come out. And when it did, my reactions were disproportionate, excessive — as if what hurt me wasn’t just what had just happened, but everything from before. I didn’t usually play with anyone.

One time, unintentionally, I overheard my aunt talking to my grandmother. They said it was a shame that our mother had abandoned us, that she lived in the same town and didn’t

come to see us, that she went out partying every night while we were there. My grandmother, tired of the silence, went to one of the village’s nightclubs to ask my mother to at least come see us from time to time. And she did. She showed up one day, and we got very excited. She said she was working a lot so she could give us the best things in the world, that her absence was for our own good, that everything she did — even if it hurt — was so that we could eventually be well, together, like a happy family.

She asked us to each tell her something we wanted. I asked for a bicycle. A few days later, the bike appeared. She didn’t. But the three of us — T., S., and I — would tell each other it didn’t matter, that mom was doing important things, that she would be back, that all of this had meaning. And somehow, that gave us hope.

One day, without anything in particular happening, I felt good. I relaxed. I started to make some friends at school — the weird ones, the freaks, the ones no one picked first — and, for the first time in a long time, I felt like a child. And then I got sick. I was in bed, burning with fever, and my grandmother, like so many times before, rubbed me with that menthol ointment.

I saw my mother. She had suddenly appeared, wrapped in some kind of incomprehensible urgency. That same night, everything changed. I heard shouting. I opened my eyes and she covered me with a blanket, picked me up in her arms, and carried me to a car where a man was waiting in the driver’s seat. My grandmother was yelling at her not to take us, that I had a fever, that she couldn’t just do things like that. My mother, in a firm voice, replied: “They’re my children and I’ll do whatever I want with them.” And she took us. Just like that. We didn’t see our grandparents again for a long time. When we asked about them, our mother said they were bad, that they wanted to manipulate us, that they were trying to convince us to love them more than her. We never really knew what to think.

The truth is, she took us to the city — to Girona — which, for us, was like another planet, far from everything we knew and understood. There, she enrolled us in school. I was already old enough to be in a regular class, separate from my sisters. But that didn’t comfort me. At recess, I looked for them from afar. I stayed watching them play, not getting close — as if I didn’t want to disturb their joy. It felt like if I got too close, I might stain them. As if something inside me was loaded with a kind of evil that felt very real.

One day, I stayed behind throwing rocks onto the roof of some huge bins in the schoolyard. I didn’t hear the bell that signaled the return to class — or at least that’s what I said. At that moment, nothing seemed more important than trying to get a big stone to land squarely on the lid of the container. A couple of classmates stayed behind with me. Then the teacher came, furious. She brought us inside and punished us. She made us stand at the front of the classroom, facing the blackboard, in front of the other children, as a form of public shame. I didn’t understand the reason for the punishment. I felt invaded. And I was filled with rage.

She would come over every now and then and ask: “Are you sorry yet?” The other two boys said yes almost immediately. I glanced sideways at them, and inside, I judged them as weak. How could they lie so easily? How could they say something they didn’t feel? When it was my turn, I looked her in the eyes and told her no, that I wasn’t sorry for anything. She left me there, like a statue, and went back to teaching the class. Later she came again and asked once more, and again I told her no. In the end, desperate and confused, she said she didn’t care anymore, that I should sit down. I refused and stayed standing, rigid as a rock. I didn’t feel tired. My entire body was tense, and I breathed through my nose like an animal preparing to resist. The class ended. The children left. The teacher told me I could go. I didn’t move. Then she called other teachers. I saw them exchange glances, not knowing what to do. Finally, they turned off the lights and closed the door. They stood there watching me through the window in the door. I stayed there.

Several minutes passed. The door opened and my sisters came in. They approached gently and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t answer. They asked if I was waiting for something. I nodded. Then they said they would wait with me. I was overcome by a strange emotion — something like thawing. I looked at them and felt that painful tenderness, that love that made me fragile. That beautiful innocence that made me suffer. After a while, S. said, “Come on, Gerard, we’re cold and want to go home.” Then I felt something very intense — a different kind of guilt, soft, almost sweet. As if that iron need not to be broken had a limit: not hurting the people you love. I left with my sisters. Happily.

I felt soft, fragile, as if something in me had come loose again. I got sick again. The next morning I couldn’t go to school and stayed home, lying in my mother’s bed. She had to go out, so she asked a friend to come take care of me along with her children. The woman’s name was Lola. She was a disheveled lady, very talkative, with a rough voice from so much smoking. She brought her three children: Isaac, Africa, and Alba — three, two, and one year old, respectively. They were little, so they didn’t go to school yet. I remember being there, half asleep, feverish, while the house filled with children’s voices, the smell of cigarettes, and a strange sensation of abandonment under the guise of care. Everything felt foreign, noisy, blurry.

I was sleeping in my mother’s bed when a strange feeling woke me up. It was as if someone were speaking to me from the other side of the window. I looked, but didn’t see anyone. Still, a voice, soft as a whisper, said to me clearly: “Get out of here.” I thought it was telling me to get up, though I didn’t. I looked again, but there was still nothing outside. Then I turned and saw a thin thread of smoke escaping from a corner. I didn’t know what it was, so I went closer and opened the door. Suddenly everything went dark. A thick, black smoke filled everything, and I couldn’t see a thing. I remembered that the children were in our room. I tried to reach them, feeling my way through the darkness. In the middle of it, I touched a hand and grabbed it tightly — it was Isaac. I tried to reach the room, but I

couldn’t. The smoke was too dense. Then I had to decide. I turned toward the front door, feeling along the hallway walls in the dark, dragging Isaac, who was still unconscious. The door wouldn’t open. Lola had gone out and locked it. I pounded on it hard, desperate.

Then, a strange calm came over me. It was as if my whole body shut down. I let myself fall to the floor. In that instant, the door burst open and the firefighters pulled us out. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I began shouting with all my strength:

“There are two girls inside! There are two girls inside!”

I was naked and freezing. While they tried to revive Isaac, I stood in the doorway of a neighbor’s apartment, trembling, watching the hoses that surrounded the scene, the firefighters moving through the smoke. I just wanted to see the girls come out. But they didn’t.

Then came the guilt. I felt that I should have been stronger, that I should have held on a little longer, that I should have reached the room. I was convinced I could have done it — and I didn’t. Because I felt weak. I thought about running back into the house, finding them myself. Shivering, I silently begged God not to punish them for my fault. If someone had to be punished, it should be me.

They took Alba out first, with a mask on her face. I thought she was dead, but she wasn’t—she was alive. Then, much later, they brought Africa out. She was dead. She had hidden in the closet. Africa was the happiest of all. The most joyful. A ray of sunshine. When her mother arrived, she came screaming. I didn’t know what they told her, but I think she understood—or believed—that I had caused the fire. In reality, it had been Isaac. He had played with his mother’s lighter and set the blankets on fire. Still, she ran at me, out of her mind, and began to hit me. She shouted that I had killed her daughter, that I should have been the one to die. I didn’t defend myself. Deep down, I felt she was right. I was barely six years old.

Our mother started a matchmaking agency—something like what Meetic would be today—in an apartment her father had given her on the condition that she live in the same village as them. They wanted to keep us close, under control. Every afternoon after school, we went to our grandparents’ house for a snack while our mother dedicated herself to her clients, her poetry, and her lovers. At eight we returned home. Sometimes it was already night, and if we didn’t find her, we would go looking for her in the village bars. She’d tell us, “I’ll be right back,” and we waited.

Her lovers came and went as if the house had a revolving door. But one stayed—a young man of about seventeen, who lived with us for a while until we had to tell our mother that,

when she wasn’t there, he behaved inappropriately toward us. She threw him out of the house, but only after one last encounter with him.

After the fire, I began to have terrible nightmares. I would wake up at midnight with my heart pounding and a knot in my throat. I was afraid. Then I would leave my room and walk silently to my mother’s bedroom. I stood by her bed, waiting for her to wake and let me lie beside her, just to feel her warmth and fall asleep again.

One of those nights, without her moving, I slipped into bed on my own. I curled up on one side, seeking comfort, and then I realized we were not alone. Someone else was there. I felt hands I didn’t recognize and froze in fear. I thought there was a monster behind me—old, unfamiliar hands that filled me with disgust and confusion. Yet I also thought that if my mother was calm, then it must somehow be all right. But it wasn’t. I tried to trust her, but I couldn’t.

I don’t remember anything more clearly—only that something inside me changed. From that moment, my sense of self and my understanding of affection and intimacy became deeply distorted. At home, boundaries didn’t really exist: our mother treated the body as something natural, open, without modesty. I began to confuse affection with physical closeness and to imitate what I saw, not knowing what it meant. It became “our secret,” a strange world where what frightened other children made us feel important and grown-up. I was only seven years old.

Our mother flirted with many men but settled with one. He was tall, thin, quiet, and introverted. One day he appeared at her agency looking for a partner. He had been part of Opus Dei and had spent ten years in the service of God. Now he said he wanted to start a family. In three days, they met, liked each other, and we went to live with him. We didn’t particularly like him, but he made our mother happy, and that seemed most important. Each night we prayed for a good father who would love and care for us. I, in particular, always added that he might take me as his trusted son.

The change was abrupt—disorienting. From the first day, they separated me from my sisters and made me sleep in a small, windowless room used for ironing, where a huge bookshelf loomed over my bed. That very night it collapsed on top of me while I slept. No one noticed. I was alone and frightened.

The man who had taken us in was intimidating—very tall, distant, and completely without affection. Everything about him was rules and prohibitions: don’t do this, don’t touch that. He was a gardener, and his garden was full of beautiful trees that invited me to climb them. I did once, and he punished me. I was punished for playing ball, for singing, for dancing, even for accidentally breaking a plate. Any spontaneous gesture was frowned upon. For him, the ideal was that I do nothing but sit quietly and wait. Wait for what, I never knew.

They took us out of school because, they said, there they taught human anatomy—and seeing the human body was sinful. By then, I was deeply confused. My mother had gone from being like a libertine to acting like a nun—and a very harsh one. She would spend her days praying, trying to purify herself and forget her past. We could no longer hug or touch. Talking about anything related to the body was forbidden. It was all sin. We withdrew into the house, stopped going to school, and our childhood was suspended—as if we had been pushed into an inner exile.

Our biological father, upon learning of the situation, came to find us. He wanted at least to make us return to our studies. But they fought back. One night, without warning, they took us away in the dark to a house lost in the mountains. That was where the real hell began. My father had won custody; the court had declared our mother unfit. But he never enforced that right. Fifteen years passed before we saw him again. Our mother became pregnant, and from then on, her character changed drastically. She grew more aggressive by the day. She beat us, punished us with cruelty—especially me. I became her enemy.

There was something in me that resisted being broken, a stubbornness she set out to remove. In moments of greatest conflict my mind would shut down completely: they could beat me, threaten me, shout at me… but I would not back down. She struck me with a brutality that is still hard for me to describe. She broke broom handles across my back, kicked me furiously and screamed, “I want to see you crawl!” But she never succeeded. I always got up again. I would stare her in the eyes, containing my rage, without moving. Then she would drag me by the hair and lock me away without food, giving me only bread and water to “purge the devil” that, according to her, lived in me. I could have ended that confinement if I had only asked for forgiveness. My sisters spoke to me from the other side of the door, pleading that I do it, even if only as a strategy. I cried in silence, with my throat closed. And I did not ask for forgiveness. In my desperation I would strip and crawl under the bed onto the cold floor, trying to give myself a fever, a cold — anything that might move them to feel some pity. That didn’t work either: I never got sick.

Our mother began to give birth again and again, and the older children became her servants. She would give birth and, as soon as she returned from the hospital with the newborn, the care passed automatically to our hands. We were the ones who did everything: bottle-feeding, calming the crying, changing diapers, watching over their sleep. And of course, everything else. We got up at six in the morning to dress the little ones, prepare breakfast, clean the house, and attend to every detail of the day. She, by contrast, didn’t appear until around ten-thirty. Then she would ring her little bell and tell us what she wanted for breakfast. She believed we belonged to her past and that we were something dirty, so she decided that our job was to care for and raise our younger siblings, because they were pure. In total there were sixteen of us. They changed our names and surnames so no one could find us, and we disappeared from the world. We moved from

house to house, to ever more remote places, without electricity or phone. They hung a tag around our necks listing all our chores, and when our mother found us somewhere we shouldn’t be, she punished us harshly. The punishments were relentless: more tasks, endless pages of hand-written “penances,” and, in the worst cases, confinement in a dark room without food.

Around that time, our mother went through a deep crisis and shut herself in her room for nine months. She didn’t come out or let anyone in, and only at night would she briefly emerge in silence to sit and read. She didn’t want to see us or speak to us. She said we had ruined her life. In our confusion we tried to do whatever we could to redeem ourselves, as if we had really committed a sin that needed expiation. Our stepfather slept on the sofa.

After those nine months, when she finally left the room, she told us she had received a revelation and that from then on she had direct contact with Jesus — that she could speak with him. I couldn’t feign interest. From that moment her life became something sacred. She devoted herself to writing those supposed revelations and proclaimed herself a kind of spiritual queen. We were to treat her as such: with reverence, absolute obedience, almost as if we were in the service of a divine figure. To me it all seemed absurd — I don’t know about the others — and I didn’t even try to pretend skepticism.

My sisters and I felt like prisoners. Meat was forbidden — “too expensive,” she said — yet my father ate it every day and we made do by picking through the bones he left, searching for any scrap of taste or substance. Whenever we had the slightest chance, we locked ourselves away and cried over our misfortune. Our mother, increasingly suspicious, wanted us under her control: she was convinced we conspired against her in ways inconceivable to someone who believed herself an exemplary mother, and she punished us with harsh beatings. With my stepfather perpetually absent — holed up in his study surrounded by books and bric-a-brac he neither used nor allowed others to use — I became the protector of my siblings.

He treated me as if I were intellectually deficient, because despite the restrictions I kept climbing trees, running, and jumping in secret. My vitality disgusted him. He claimed God had revealed to my mother that I was possessed by a demon called Zogo. At night he would sprinkle me with holy water and recite exorcisms, just as in my childhood. He said a divine voice dictated the punishments he should impose on me. Soon my mother began to repeat the same thing: “This child is made of stone. Nothing affects him.” Wounded to the core, I took refuge in an urn of numbness, a shell into which nothing could get through. Only dreams managed to pierce it.

Every morning I would go up the mountain to cut firewood. It was the only place where I felt anything like peace. The neighbors of the scattered houses in the area looked at us as if we came from another planet. Because I tended to get close to their lands, they started

calling me Tarzan. Sometimes I would meet someone out looking for mushrooms. If it was an adult, I’d smile kindly. But if it was a boy my age, I’d look at him with fury, as if to say, “This is my territory. Get out.”

Once I did something that made my mother furious while she was pregnant. In a fit she grabbed me by the hair and started dragging me up the stairs. In the middle of the climb she tripped and fell violently to the floor. Immediately she began to complain of intense pains in her abdomen. From the ground, eyes wide with rage and anguish, she shouted at me in a voice I have never been able to forget, blaming me for her fall and crying that now her child would die.

I ran into the woods, desperate. I knelt among the trees and prayed. I begged God to take me instead and let the baby live. I said I was the bad one, that the child wasn’t to blame. But I wasn’t heard. That scene stayed in me like an open wound. Her body twisted on the floor, her accusing look, those words hurled like knives — all of it has pursued me for years.

Many terrible things happened in that supposed sanctuary of holiness. I remember that confinement as a state of permanent emotional vigilance. Each day began with a silent question fixed in my mind: “How is she today?” If she wanted to talk, we talked. If she wanted to laugh, we laughed. Everything revolved around keeping her calm, avoiding her fury. Everything was organized so that she would be well, even if we were coming apart inside. What enraged me most was having to pretend and say yes to everything when everything in me was shouting “No!” And pretending never came easily to me. I didn’t know how to lie with my face or my voice.

Everything was loneliness and darkness, wrapped in a religious “light” that blinded us. We prayed the rosary every single day, with endless invocations, novenas and litanies. My mother felt like a saint. She claimed that one day they would build her a monument for the light that shone from her heart. Sometimes everything calmed for a few hours and we could finally breathe. And then, suddenly, without warning, she would explode and reveal her most hysterical, unhinged side, like a sudden storm that swept away everything in its path. I became an expert at predicting my mother’s attacks. I learned to read the signs, the smallest gestures, the pauses in her breathing. I concluded that she was ill — and that thought, far from distancing me, allowed me to preserve some small remnant of love.

Meanwhile I kept telling myself in silence that I had to be strong. That I had to find a way to get out of there before we all ended up as mad as she was. Sometimes I watched my sisters nod with such absolute submission that it terrified me to think they truly believed her — that they, too, were being lost. And sadly, that’s how it has been with most of my siblings. That’s a pain that doesn’t leave me: not having been able to get them out, not having helped them, not having been strong enough. I never saw my mother cook, make a bed, wash a dish, play, or raise us. I only saw her shout, harm, and demand. But since I

knew no other form of motherhood, I came to the conclusion that having a mother was a kind of torture.

One of my brothers was born with hydrocephalus, among many other problems. The doctors were clear: they recommended my mother terminate the pregnancy. They told her that the child would not survive. But she, after one of her divine revelations, announced that this son would be born to purge the sins of the three eldest. That his pain would cleanse us. That his sacrifice would grant us the “rights” that, according to her, other children had.

When Ricard was born, he spent eleven months in the hospital. Our mother stayed there with him. We didn’t see him that whole time. We were only told that he suffered greatly, which destroyed us. The three of us loved him with a depth no one understood. We cried together for him, for his suffering, for the cruelty of a God who allowed this. During that year our mother forgot about us. We were left alone, running the house and raising the younger ones. My stepfather lived in a different dimension: he bought food and little else. Some of his relatives covered the expenses, watching it all from afar, like people seeing a fire they cannot put out.

At last our mother came home with Ricard. His head was swollen and out of proportion. He couldn’t hold it up. It was grotesque, and at the same time, profoundly sacred. His eyes barely opened and, when they did, his gaze was like a bottomless well. We all cared for him. Three days later he was taken back to the hospital. The valve that regulated his kidneys failed. An infection took him. I couldn’t say goodbye. I couldn’t hold him one last time. I couldn’t thank him for purging my sins, or tell him I was sorry — that I understood why he had come — and that he should never have had to come for this.

The funeral was held far from us. We couldn’t even say goodbye as a family. When our mother returned, we begged her to look at us again, to remember she still had other children who also needed her. But she was on another plane — between mystical ecstasy and a silent rage toward the world that did not recognize the sanctity of what she believed she had just lived. She shut herself away to write the Memoirs of Ricard, putting into that broken child’s mouth words of Christlike revelation and transcendent pains that had never been his. She constructed a grandiose, terrible voice for him, as if Ricard had come into this world only to suffer for us.

I turned into a furious being. I decided that if I couldn’t be better, then I would be worse. Worse than her. Worse than everything. With a stepfather who hid whenever my mother screamed, I — still very young — would hurl myself at her. I grabbed her by the arms, threw her to the floor, and shouted with full conviction that if she ever again brought a chair down on one of my siblings, I would kill her. And it wasn’t an empty threat. In those moments I felt something strange: fear, yes, but also a kind of charge, as if I were finally in my element. I became a wild creature whose world was violence.

Between the ages of 14 and 21, many things happened to me. The parish priest, who saw us attend Mass every Sunday and then vanish, reported us for not sending the children to school. Social workers tried to get in touch with us. And then came another of my mother’s divine revelations: we had to pretend we didn’t exist. We kept the windows shut all day; the children didn’t go out to play; no one spoke to anyone. Only I was allowed out to cut firewood. The authorities kept coming by. They slipped letters under the door — court summonses, notices — but my mother wouldn’t even open them. She said God had assured her nothing would happen to us, that we were the sacred family. I warned them it was a ticking bomb — that if it exploded and anything happened to one of my siblings, they would answer me. My mother then accused me of lacking faith in God’s power. She began to distance herself from me and to draw lines between me and my sisters. She spoke to them in private, told them not to tell me anything about their talks, and insisted I was possessed.

I became full of fury, but I still found relief in the tenderness of my brothers and sisters. They were my anchor. Them, and Tiger — my dog — my only friend: a big, fierce animal that only I could approach. I would crouch by his side, speak softly, and we both calmed. We’d go into the forest, run naked, axe in hand; I climbed trees and leapt through brambles. I ended up covered in scratches but with a calm soul. It was as if I were overcoming something dark inside me. I felt freedom through the wild, the grotesque, the untamed.

One day, returning from cutting wood, I heard screams. I dropped the logs and ran to the house. Three police vans and a dozen officers were taking my siblings away. They chased them as if they were criminals. A. had managed to escape and was running in tears; L. clung to P., trembling; S. was being dragged by the wrists as she cried, watching them take the others. They had smashed the door down and rounded up all the school-age children. The three of us were spared, since we were already over sixteen.

My parents weren’t home; they had gone into town to shop. I lost control. I charged at the vans as they pulled away. They beat me badly. Even so, I slipped free and ran into the forest. I hid among the trees, listening from there to my siblings’ cries. I went back to the house, and S. and L. told me what had happened. We were paralyzed. We didn’t have mobile phones, so we couldn’t call our parents.

“God will fix it,” our mother said — and that was the last straw. I told them they would feel all the pain our siblings were feeling now, that they were supposed to be our parents and take care of us, and that all they had done was ruin us with their madness. They were terrified of me and wouldn’t let me into the house. I went into the forest with my dog and stayed there for several days. I wasn’t afraid. I felt no guilt. For the first time, I didn’t worry about keeping the peace so nothing would break: everything was already broken. What rose up inside me was something new — an energy born in my chest, a raw charge, a brute

force. I felt indestructible. I had assumed my identity. And with it came an immense hunger for freedom, and to find God so I could take revenge on Him.

After a month of negotiations, the authorities forced my mother and her husband to send the children to school. But I was no longer the same. Something in me had hardened, and my family was afraid of me. Even my sisters, who until then had been my refuge, were afraid. Only the littlest ones dared to come near me.

Shortly afterward I was called up for military service. I declared myself a conscientious objector. My mother asked me to say nothing and lock myself at home. I chose the opposite: I went to the Red Cross. The director was very good to me. He knew my story and treated me with dignity, like anyone else. My peers, however, looked at me as if I came from another planet — and in a way, I did. I hadn’t lived what they had; I didn’t know their culture. Things that were ordinary to them — going to the cinema, hearing live music — left me overwhelmed and speechless. There was so much life outside my home… and it was wonderful.

No matter how much my family insisted that only the devil awaited outside, I felt an unstoppable desire to meet him — to confront the world. That was a time of discovery, learning, and an insatiable hunger to understand. I also came face to face with death. He was in a ditch. He had escaped from a psychiatric hospital, had AIDS, and was in critical condition. I don’t know what else afflicted him, but his body was all bone, his skin tore at the slightest touch, and he struggled to breathe. He was one of two brothers; the other had already died of the same cause. He smelled of decay.

When we lifted him into the ambulance, he whispered in my ear: “Leave me. I want to die.” The sirens wailed as we sped along. He repeated, over and over: “I want to die.” It wasn’t a complaint; it was a plea. Jordi, a great colleague, moved from side to side trying to stabilize him. Then the man grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me close: “I’m dying, sir,” he said. And I understood, suddenly, that he wasn’t seeking salvation. He only wanted company on his last journey. I asked Jordi to stop for a moment. I took the man’s hand, looked him in the eyes, and felt a profound, overwhelming peace. I leaned to his ear and whispered, “Your sins are forgiven, brother. Go in peace.” He cried silently. I didn’t let go of his hand until we reached Hospital Josep Trueta. When we arrived, he was no longer breathing.

That experience changed me. It made me see that, despite everything, life was beautiful. I volunteered to help in care homes and unsupported housing. I would get elderly people up, wash and dress them before returning to my post at the Red Cross. One of them couldn’t stand being touched. He was a braggart, and I met him with the same bravado. One day I asked, “Were you so hard on your children that they never came to see you?” He answered with a stark truth: “I didn’t know how to do better.”

I had a particular anger toward my stepfather. I already said he couldn’t stand me running, climbing trees, inventing things, painting or drawing. Once I wanted to build a pool for my siblings. I asked to borrow a wheelbarrow. He refused. He said we already had a plastic pool — which he didn’t even let us use. I grabbed a big basket and carried the soil on my shoulders, trip after trip. When I finished, my siblings could enjoy the pool. Until I left. Then he filled it back in with earth.

One day he told me my dog had run away. Later I found him buried in a ditch. My stepfather had given him rat poison. He admitted it without hesitation: having the dog had been a mistake. I cried with a mute, contained rage.I believed deep down that to escape that house I first had to break the ice. And that’s what happened: when I got my driving license, the first thing I did was go to see my grandparents. And then I looked for my father. I found him. He had become a successful businessman. I went to see him. I presented myself without preamble: “I’m your son.”

He collapsed. His legs trembled. He was moved and couldn’t believe it. I, for my part, felt no great emotion — only a sense that justice had been done.

I finished my stint at the Red Cross, which was an initiatory education for me. I was ready. I believed the only way to help my siblings was to help myself — to break the ice of that cave and get out. I told my stepfather I wanted to go to Barcelona, finish school, study film… and look for the devil. He told me he wouldn’t support me. The most important thing was to maintain “family peace.” He said if I wanted to do that, I would have to leave and never come back. I think that was the only real conversation I ever had with him in my life.

They say that when my mother found out, she exclaimed: “The rotten apples.” What really struck me, though, was a message L. sent me on everyone’s behalf:

“When you’re starving, when everything goes wrong and you see the world is rubbish, you’ll remember how well you lived here. But you won’t be able to come back. So think about it, because if we see you begging in Barcelona, we won’t give you anything. Anyone who rejects the most beautiful thing in this world — having a mother who loves him — doesn’t deserve to live.”

I slept on the streets for two weeks, since it occurred to me to gamble away my savings with the shell-game hustlers. I had relatives I could have contacted, but it didn’t even cross my mind — I wanted to stand on my own feet, to feel life.

I got a job washing dishes in a shabby restaurant. The police caught me perched in a tree on the Ramblas and told me it was forbidden to climb them, which seemed absurd to me. They also took my knife. They said it wasn’t allowed to carry a hand-length machete hanging

from my belt. I told them that if they wanted my knife they’d have to come and take it — that no one would just take it from me. I ended up at the station. They asked if I had anyone to call, and I remembered an aunt on my stepfather’s side. I called, and she came to get me. She invited me to stay at her house for at least a few days.

It was a good time. My aunt was a businesswoman, separated, with three children who lived with their father. She taught me many simple but fundamental things: that even if I was happy it wasn’t appropriate to whistle in a restaurant, that I shouldn’t shout when I spoke, that if I was going to climb trees it was better not to be seen. She took me to buy clothes. With the boots and the leather jacket, I didn’t look so much like a mountaineer anymore. She’d say I was a good kid, just a bit rough.

I started working toward my school-leaving certificate at night and worked during the day as a waiter. I wanted to save up to study film. And I also wanted independence. Even though I was comfortable with my aunt, I always felt in her debt, and that bothered me. I moved into a student flat, found moments to paint, and began studying film directing… There came a time when I couldn’t pay for the student flat and school at the same time, so I went to live in an Opus Dei residence for numeraries. I knew the man who ran it, and seeing my situation—and hoping to steer me back onto the right path—he let me stay on the condition that I take part in all the work's religious activities. There they checked my room every day. They confiscated some porn magazines I had kept next to the Bible. I bought them again that same day. I felt great curiosity about women, and an obsessive energy that focused on my penis.

At that time I was incapable of holding a conversation with anyone. I didn’t understand—nor have I ever understood—football or the offside rule, nor did I understand anything about politics or “normal” things. When I opened my mouth, I talked about Plato, Aristotle, Hans Küng, encyclicals, the apocrypha, Thomas Aquinas, Madame Blavatsky, early Christianity, the Essenes, and a thousand other concepts that were disordered in my head and clamored for order through expression. Too many hours spent in the library, especially at night.

Dinners at the residence were genuine mockeries of me and my questions, which were cutting but also naïve, and sought to understand things like the allegory of the cave or the literal sense of certain Aramaic verses in the New Testament. I remember that, after many admonitions for my obscene ideas about virginity, someone asked me: “Do you ever speak in your own words?” That person was right to ask, because I was incapable of speaking from my own experience and of having a normal conversation about anything that wasn’t transcendental. In short, it hurt not to have learned the concept of enjoying life.

In some ways, that house also resembled the one I had left behind: there was silence, pent-up tension, and implicit rules that were hard to decipher. Yet something was different.

For the first time in a long while, I felt they had a certain fondness for me, even if I didn’t quite know how to reciprocate—especially for the caretaker of the residence, Antonio Balboa, a straight, firm old man with anger close to the surface, whom I came to love very much and whom I called every Christmas until his death.

At film school something similar happened to what happened at the residence: I was the odd one, the wildling. I talked about my life with almost no modesty, and that created in others an uncomfortable mix of fascination and fear. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t laugh easily. Everything in me was life or death, with no middle ground. When I did manage to go out with my classmates, I watched them closely as they chatted about light, almost trivial matters. I was amazed at their ability to link together trivial topics, to laugh for no reason, simply to be. And then I urgently wanted to be alone.

Each term there was a script contest for the short we had to shoot, and for three years I won them all. I defended my texts with an almost unhealthy conviction, as if questioning them were a personal threat. As a director I was just as uncompromising. The light had to be in one precise spot, the camera in another, and there was no room for improvisation. Reluctantly, my classmates ended up conceding I was right. My grades, however, were poor: I rebelled against the mandatory. If the theory book didn’t interest me, I didn’t sit the exam. Instead of studying Syd Field, I wrote scathing critiques that drove the teachers mad, and to understand how to direct actors I preferred to read the DSM-II or The Conference of the Birds, and completely ignore David Mamet and Michael Chekhov.

My first short was about a psychiatric hospital. I volunteered there and demanded my actors do the same. I didn’t want them to act; I wanted them to be there. In another short, about an overturned migrant dinghy, a posh Black actor came, feverish. We ended up swimming together at night. His feet went numb. He yelled at me: “I can’t take it anymore, Gerard.” And I shouted back from the water that he could. He said it had been the worst experience of his career—and his best performance.

I remember that on that shoot I had an assistant director who had blind faith in me. One night, one of the important actors didn’t show up, and that assistant director—who had just come out of a six-month depression—collapsed. They woke me to tell me he had taken pills and was shaking like an amoeba. I went to see him. He was scared. He kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” I hugged him. His heart was pounding. I told him, “Do whatever it takes. Throw up those pills. At eight in the morning I want you on your feet, ready to shoot.” And I left. Half an hour later I saw him running in circles. At eightin the morning he was there, call sheets in hand, giving orders. We only looked at each other once. He nodded. We never spoke about it again until years later. He told me it had been a transformative experience and that I was a son of a b—. I remember it with emotion. We toasted with a few beers.

A year after starting film studies, I got a job at a production company thanks to Mr. Balboa, who, in a way, opened a door for me. The company was called Pasoalto and had a decidedly religious bent. I came in through the front door. In the interview they asked if I knew anything about subliminal advertising. I said yes, though I hadn’t the faintest idea. That very afternoon, already hired, I was in the library trying to figure out what the hell subliminal advertising was.

What began as a white lie turned into an obsession: I immersed myself in semiotics, in the psychology of images, in objective art and that almost alchemical ability to speak directly to the unconscious, from the very first moment. Years later I would end up teaching the subject at the same school where I had studied.

I spent several years at Pasoalto, with a good salary and a certain stability. However, something at film school started to bother me—actors. It seemed to me that everything should revolve around them. Instead of editing shots and then fitting the actor into the scheme, I preferred to do the reverse: let the scene be born from the actor’s movement, from their energy, and only then decide where the camera should go. That wasn’t the norm. The norm was for the actor to adapt to the technical setup, the plan. But to me, that logic killed the character before it could be born.

So I began to study acting and directing actors. I enrolled in another school, the now-defunct AICB, run by a mad Chilean named Luis López. There, alongside Daniela de Vecchi and Bojan Ivic, we learned a method completely new to Barcelona. I had already read about “the Method,” and I was fascinated by that way of building the character from the inside. Lee Strasberg had been a student of Stanislavski, but, as with Jung and Freud, each ended up following his own path. I was struck by the work of Stella Adler, and that’s how I ended up at a grimy school where they practiced what they called “obscene art.” It was a radical change in my life: working with character entered my world fully. I was also passionate about Grotowski and Peter Brook. I even traveled to Italy to pursue a master’s in “poor theatre.” All that universe, those arts, in some way calmed my anxiety—my drive to tame the beast.

Outside of school, I was sick of the Opus people trying to control my life. Their interest in me had turned into an imposition: they wanted me to follow their dogmas, to fit in, to “get back on track.” And I wanted a family, but I didn’t want to renounce the truth. I couldn’t say yes when I thought no; that created huge rows in which they even called me satanic. I left the residence once things cooled down. They no longer wanted me there, or perhaps I was the one who no longer felt comfortable, because they could see they were up against a rock.

I rented a very small flat in Gràcia and plunged into misery. Until then I hadn’t connected with abandonment nor with the loneliness of the beast. The drive of novelty itself had kept

me from confronting my image. Now, in that hovel, I abandoned myself: I left dirty clothes lying around, didn’t eat, wrote obsessively. I spent nights writing atrocious things—novels, stories, characters ever stranger, blacker, darker. I went mad. Christmas came and I had no one to spend it with.

Christmas, by the way, is a very thorny subject for me. Many years ago, when I was with my siblings, my mother, in a fit of “lucidity,” said that God had entrusted her with a sacrifice: “The world is rotten and I am going to destroy it. On December 25 I will destroy the world.” My mother asked God if there was an alternative, and this “fellow” replied that a good option, in terms of sacrifices, was for the entire family to immolate themselves in the living room on the night of the 24th. Perhaps then He would not unleash his wrath on the world. My mother was determined to be a saint, and for the whole preceding month we were overcome with terrible fear. We set up a butane cylinder with a camping stove in the living room, put on white tunics, and performed purging prayers that, according to her, had been dictated by God. It was horrible, because you couldn’t even curse God, who after all was who He was. I spoke with my mother many times to turn her away from all that. It was the first time I told her I thought she was crazy. She gathered us and asked: “Which of you thinks this is madness? Who thinks I’m crazy? Say it now.” Whoever said it would be excluded from the “journey.” No one said anything, except my mother: “You can stay alone in this filthy world; we are going to depart for heaven.” I agreed to immolate myself, because I didn’t want to abandon my siblings.

On Christmas night we sat in a circle around the butane cylinder, wrapped in white tunics. My mother prayed. My sisters cried softly, as if already half dead. I think that’s the image I hate most in my whole life: that mix of fear, faith, and resignation. We prayed the entire rosary, all fifteen bloody mysteries, one after another, as if by repeating memorized prayers we could fool a sadistic God. An hour and a half went by. Only a few minutes remained before “God would put us to the test.” Then my mother went into ecstasy. She said God had spoken to her and that our faith had saved the world. There would be no destruction. There would be no sacrifice. We had passed the test, like Abraham, and the immolation was no longer necessary. There was laughter, tears, songs, hugs. And God handed out gifts. He gave me the gift of healing through my hands. Since that day I have been unable to remain under a roof on Christmas night. Since then I have spent every Christmas alone, on the street. My partners never understood. It took me many years to be able to say it.

So every Christmas I either hide or go out looking for risk, danger, as if I were a god. I can’t leave myself in peace or enjoy the holy night. It isn’t rational. I know I’m dangerous at those times. Or at least I think so. I usually go to the forest or to a park bench to wait for the fury to pass, for the deep sadness to return.

I tried several psychologists. The first listened for only a few minutes and immediately referred me to another professional because, he said, he couldn’t help me. The second was more direct: he recommended I see a psychiatrist. It was always hard for people to believe me. I had to provide proof, photos, anything to make what I told credible. With the third it was different: he didn’t want to hear my story; he preferred to give me a battery of tests. In the end he told me, “You’re Asperger’s.” I left a bit disappointed, but above all very alone. In reality, I just wanted to talk about myself, with someone willing to listen.

For a while I also worked for a company that organized hen parties. I started in the Hidden Camera section, playing grotesque parodies of mountaineers to make the guests laugh. There were several of us comedians, and then came the turn of the strippers. That’s when I decided to try my luck as a stripper: they earned more than double what we did. I didn’t have much idea what I was doing, I was a virgin, and I only knew I had a strong body and a big cock. I went out dressed as a lumberjack or a fireman, stripped, did what was expected of me. I learned to touch myself, to use the band to keep it hard, to move like a whore.

At first I took it as a game. I didn’t link it directly to sex. Some women wrote their numbers on my arm and it didn’t bother me; I laughed, got paid, and went home with the feeling I’d earned good money. But over time something started to change. I felt uncomfortable, exposed, as if they were invading an intimacy I myself didn’t fully understand. A dull discomfort, increasingly present, that sometimes turned into anger. Then I became provocative, almost aggressive, as a form of defense. I ended up quitting.

My first “sexual” experience, so to speak, was with a guy, a university professor. I was having a coffee when we started talking. I had no bloody idea about signals, seduction, or anything. He asked if I wanted to try something, and I said okay. I went to his place and performed oral sex on him, but I didn’t connect it with sex. For me it was just something physically exciting and little more. At one point he said something like that we were having sex, and it surprised me. For me, sex was with a woman; I didn’t see that as sex, but as an experiment. When I left, I began to think that if that was sex, then I had broken my virginity pact, and I got angry at myself for being so naïve. And right after that I got angry with the guy—he wanted to meet again, and I only wanted to smash his face for having deceived me.

At acting school I fell in love with Miriam, a redhead with green eyes who dazzled me from the first moment. At that time I was a virgin, and I bore it with pride: I was convinced my first time had to be with love. Miriam and I became very good friends. I met her one afternoon and that very night, during a casting, we went out for a drink. On impulse I told her that one day she would be my girlfriend. She laughed, with that ironic tone she had, but she didn’t pull away. Our friendship grew; we worked together, and there was a real, tangible connection between us. At the end of that year, just before the end-of-term party, I

made a strange decision: I went to a prostitute. I didn’t do it to lose my virginity but because I wanted to learn to kiss. Jessica—that was her name—laughed when I explained my intentions, but agreed. Curiously, we kept a good friendship afterward. I practiced with her, and then I went to the party. That night I kissed Miriam. And I slept with her. It was a revelatory experience. I loved it. Everything: the skin, the breathing, the contact. It was as if I had done it all my life. I was in my element—delighted, amazed, fascinated. It was my world. And for the first time, I inhabited it completely.

I no longer had contact with my family. I didn’t want to look back. But they found me. They found out where I worked and sent a letter to my boss, warning him it would be advisable to fire me because, according to them, I was an evil person. My boss showed it to me. I suppose he was the one who—perhaps unintentionally—gave them my mobile number, because soon threatening messages began to arrive and I had to change numbers.

Within the production company I was something like the golden boy, “the genius,” as they liked to call me. We worked on big campaigns for brands like Nestlé, Danone and other multinationals, as well as producing educational programs for children. I had a good time. The problem was I didn’t know how to set boundaries: work was my whole life.

For a time I also worked with the Legionaries of Christ in an association called Soñar Despierto (“Dream Awake”). There we served as a bridge between families and children placed in state centers after their parents lost custody. That situation was very sad to me: the children had no chance of being adopted; they only aspired to spend some weekends with “normal families,” something that, honestly, I’m not sure was so beneficial for them. I felt I was devoting my time to trying to repair the “mistake” of having left home and my siblings. Being with those children helped me understand them. I created a project called Reporteros de valores (“Reporters of Values”), where we taught kids to film. We asked them to choose a value—generosity, friendship, perseverance—and to create a short inspired by it. Without realizing it, the kids began to talk about themselves through what they filmed.

At the same time I was offered a job at the Xaloc school in Hospitalet. Every Saturday I was in charge of a group of teenagers with academic and family difficulties. They were rebellious kids, poorly motivated, and considered bad students. I taught them to film, to write scripts, and little by little, through what they created, I entered their lives. What they couldn’t say out loud, they said with the camera.

There was one boy named Rubén. It turned out he liked a girl but didn’t dare approach her. We talked a lot about her until finally he gathered the courage to ask her out. She was a stupid choni who replied that she needed “a real man.” Rubén, devastated, slit his wrists—but like in the movies: horizontally. I went to see him in the hospital. His parents were there. We talked, but we ended up arguing about the sad way they demeaned their

son in everything he did. Shortly afterward the parents spoke with the school and shut down the workshop group. The director told me: “You can’t get so involved with people.”

My sex life also started to go off the rails. What had been something wonderful—a celebration of love and connection—became sordid and mechanical. I became a premature ejaculator. Encounters felt empty, rushed—a parody of what had once been real. Every time I grabbed my penis to enter, I was overcome by a feeling of fear, of disconnection, as if my body and I were no longer the same.

Miriam and I began to drift apart. Although she was still living in the flat—which I continued paying for—I decided to rent a small apartment in Barceloneta. I wasn’t capable of breaking it off completely. I limited myself to waiting. I waited for something indefinite, hard to name: a sign, a change, a magic solution that would fix everything without me having to act.

One day, a few months later, I decided to walk past her work. It was a bad idea. I saw her come out kissing a guy and get into a gray Jaguar with him. Since then I’ve hated that car. I remember walking aimlessly, staggering, as if the ground were moving under my feet. The sadness was so great I couldn’t contain it. I didn’t make it home. I fainted in the middle of the street. I didn’t know how to cry. I didn’t know how to let out everything choking me inside. And I collapsed.

I thought I needed help but didn’t want to go back to a psychologist, so one weekend I tried Ronald Fuchs’s tantra. Everything was new and strange to me. They spoke of love and sex as if they were the same thing. I liked the idea, but I was very blocked.

During the time without Miriam, I had tried to heal my penis by taking part in private orgies or sleeping with women I had just met. All very sad, desolate. I felt unprotected. My penis was no longer the same: now I could only get into sex through anger. Then I charged myself with energy and slept with whatever crossed my path. It was a way of screwing with—or raging against—my own block.

I kept attending Ronald’s workshops, and one day we did a daka/dakini. I happened to be paired with a somewhat older French woman who, at the moment of the ritual, transformed into a goddess. She pulled from the deepest part of me a terrible pain. I felt like I was dying. I began to cry, to shout, to writhe while she caressed me gently and made love to me. From then on I became very good friends with Ronald, and I livened up his courses with my wild, playful energy.

Beyond a few incidents, tantra became the best medicine for my soul. I gave myself completely to that path, to the point of organizing workshops all over Spain for someone I

considered, at that time, a great teacher. I revered him almost devoutly, until one day, looking me in the eyes, he simply said: “Get out and fly.”

I kept exploring. I attended workshops with David Deida, Charles Muir and Daniel Odier, from whom I learned practices such as tandava and various tantra-yoga techniques. Each encounter opened a new level of awareness; the body at last began to speak in a language that had always been there, waiting to be heard. On the professional front, after the failure of ArticFilms, Alex hired me to write television series scripts. It was a job that required discipline: many minutes of script every day. But I was fascinated. I loved isolating myself, plunging into plots, living with the characters, giving them voice, rhythm and depth. During that period I also strengthened my bond with Pau, my script teacher. We had great creative chemistry and ended up partnering as script doctors. Scripts in need of fresh eyes came our way: restructurings, alternative endings, tighter twists, better-triangulated conflicts. We enjoyed the challenge of intervening in other people’s stories and finding, in each one, the best way to make it breathe again.

One morning, on my way to work, I opened the front door and found my mother on the threshold. She stood there, motionless, with a knife in her hand. Through the peephole I could see her perfectly. I didn’t dare go out. I thought they had discovered me, although I didn’t really know how. At 9:30, Alex, my boss, called. But instead of his voice, all I heard was a phrase repeating over and over: “I will kill you.” For three days I couldn’t leave the house. Every time I approached the door, my mother was still there. And every time the phone rang, that same threat was all I heard: “I will kill you.” I didn’t think I was going mad — I was convinced it was real. I felt a visceral, paralyzing fear. Panic lived inside me. At night I was sure someone had broken in. I slept with a knife under my pillow, ready to use it if necessary. I thought it was a man. I saw his shadow cross in front of my bedroom door. Each night I crept out of bed, knife in hand, determined to catch him. But he always managed to disappear. The bastard knew how to slip away. I was convinced that sooner or later I would catch him.

The director of the acting and directing school where I’d studied wanted to hire me as manager. I accepted. The place was chaotic. Lots of money came in, yes, but Luis, the director, spent it all uncontrollably. The debt with Social Security was so high that an embargo date had already been set. Far from discouraging me, the situation motivated me. I bought an already-formed limited company and made a symbolic sale for one euro, transferring ownership from one company to another.

The day the Tax Agency came with the police, I told them that the place was mine now. The inspector looked at me with hatred: he knew perfectly well what I had done. As they wouldn’t leave, I called the police myself. I remember that moment as a triumph over

authority, a kind of personal redemption. Now my house was that dive: a school sunk in absolute economic and structural disorder. I decided to put it back on its feet.

I shared my tantra discoveries with Pau — a veteran of Osho who had been in Pune in the 1970s. One day, rummaging through his vast library (a habit of mine), a book fell into my hands: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. It hit me. What the hell was this? The title alone was enough to astonish me. I began to read and found a dense, symbol-laden text by a certain George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. It wasn’t a novel or a conventional essay: it was a kind of philosophical epic disguised as a fantastic tale in which Beelzebub, far from a purely evil demon, acted like a sage transmitting a critical vision of humanity and the universe to his grandson. It was a merciless critique of the slumbering state in which humans live. Intrigued, I dug further and found Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P. D. Ouspensky, a disciple of Gurdjieff. That book was clearer: it recounted the need for conscious inner work, practical methods and teachings that Gurdjieff passed on to his close circle — talking, essentially, to awaken, and describing universal laws that govern our existence. It wasn’t abstract philosophy: it was a call to transform life itself.

Through those readings I met Óscar, a man wrapped in a certain mystery. He was presented to me as a monk, although today, looking back, I couldn’t say for sure whether he really was. He became my teacher. Óscar spoke to me of the Fourth Way, that path proposed by Gurdjieff which does not require retreating from the world like a fakir, yogi, or cloistered monk, but proposes practical tools for inner work. I told him about my nocturnal terrors, about waking in the middle of daily life and using every experience of that impossibility to sleep — about blocking an attack in the night. Óscar listened calmly and, in his usual serenity, asked me: “Do you want to see your monsters?”

During the Christmas holidays, Óscar proposed an experiment: I would lock myself in a dark room for two weeks. He would come every day, leave food, ask how I was, and then leave. He had spoken to me before of psychosynthesis — a psychological current developed by Roberto Assagioli that not only seeks to heal the wounds of the unconscious but to integrate all parts of the human being — light and shadow — to build a more conscious, creative and free self. He also mentioned Salvador Roquet, one of his teachers, who explored intense processes of inner confrontation to provoke an awakening. I didn’t really know what to expect.

At first I felt peace. The silence, the darkness… Everything seemed calm. But soon the mind began to run wild, like a runaway machine, and I felt the worst fear of all: the fear of going mad. I wanted to get out. It was hell. I lost track of time; I didn’t know if it was day or night, nor how long I had been there. Yes: my ghosts were visiting.

My mother and siblings appeared to blame me, ridicule me, to want to kill me. I didn’t defend myself. I let them beat me, because for a moment something broke: suddenly

everything became light, an immense white, very luminous. I felt a deep peace. I passed through many inner places, crossed many scenes as if traveling through unknown worlds. One night, in a state between sleep and waking, I felt a tiny little man arise in my belly. It was too real. He began to devour me from the inside, tearing me apart — I saw blood — and from within me that figure whispered that I was Christ.

When I came out of that experience, Óscar took me to a remote corner of Montserrat. I dug a hole and lay down inside it. They covered me with earth and left a small tube so I could breathe. I spent the whole night there. Óscar stayed nearby. Sometimes, in the dark, I could hear his chant.

I decided to leave film school. I told my boss I didn’t want to continue, that loyalty was wearing me down, but that I couldn’t go on. It was too many headaches, too much stress, too much chaos. Too many parties, too much alcohol, too many drugs. I no longer wanted to be part of that world. I needed something else. Something quieter. More real. I went back to gardening. I had some cards printed and walked to Sarrià offering my services. Gardens began to come in. With each job I bought new tools and felt more connected. I was back with the plants, talking to them, listening to them. I felt they understood me. It was a way of returning to myself. I remember that for months I mowed the lawn in the garden of a Danone executive, someone I had crossed paths with during my earlier career. He never recognized me, and I didn’t tell him anything. There was something liberating in that anonymity, as if, finally, I could start over.

During film school I had bought a television to fill the nights and stop turning things over in my head, but at some point I literally threw it out the window. From then on I devoted myself to reading, meditating and going to work groups.

Somehow I couldn’t stop, because there was always a sadness in me that sometimes turned into a pleasant happiness: the sadness of solitude. I thought about the beautiful, the lovely things I felt were distant, as if they didn’t belong to me. I lacked what I sought in the courses: the feminine.

Óscar told me it was important to join a Fourth Way work group. I followed his advice and began exploring different spaces. I passed through several groups, some more orthodox, others clearly more liberal, until I finally found a place where I felt a sense of belonging: an orthodox school called La Teca. At first the group’s syncretism unsettled me. I felt like I was entering a sect. But part of me was attracted. I liked it.

The teacher, Giovanni Maria Quinti, struck me well from the beginning. In him I found not only a guide but a true companion. At La Teca I discovered a committed, strange and deeply human work community. I owe them my life. I owe them my heart.

They nicknamed me “the black monk” because I tended to evoke Óscar’s teachings at every turn. And they let me be that way. We all had our quirks. We met to study Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, paste posters, give public talks, meditate and, above all, dance. Gurdjieff’s sacred dances were the center of our practice: to dance and dance without respite. It was a deeply creative, nourishing and transformative stage. There I found my people: conversations that fed the soul, silences that also taught, and an inner work each person carried out in his own way. There was friction, yes. And friction was welcome. No one messed with you, but everyone was a mirror. In that — in rubbing against others and heating up — I was an expert.

With Giovanni I built a solid friendship. He, too, had studied Grotowski, and many of the exercises we did were imbued with theatricality. Each Fourth Way school tends to specialize in a type of practice, and at La Teca the focus was on dances and interpretation. Over time, the school changed. It is no longer the nest of self-observation it was in its beginnings. But perhaps that too is part of the process. According to the Fourth Way, there comes a moment when the student must be kicked in the ass and sent out to live. That’s how it’s designed: not so one stays, but so one wakes up. They also say that to receive this knowledge one must be a good thief — a thief, in the end, because the Fourth Way schools give nothing. Hence the syncretism: faithful to Gurdjieff, the Work is not a caress to the ego but a siege. A taking-down. Although like everything human, sometimes the Work too becomes egoic. And that they taught me as well: doubt. Doubt always. Lose hope. That, they say, is the true beginning of the Work.

The day I arrived at the Namasté center in Valencia I met a woman who fascinated me. She was beautiful. I went up to her and asked her name; she said Marta. I loved her. Although she ignored me at first, she was attracted to my constant search. I told her I wanted to date her, but she said no, again and again. Curiously, that pleased me. Every time I went to Namasté I looked for her. She seemed like an angel to me, sensual and perfect. I enjoyed being near her. She told me she wouldn’t date a guy like me — that I looked like a womanizer (though I wasn’t; I only looked the part) — and I worked to show her who I really was.

When she wasn’t at the workshops, I lost the desire to stay. I lost interest in the day’s subject, especially because almost everything ended in dynamics where we ended up naked and hugging each other. I was already a little tired of so much of the New Age, where modesty seemed synonymous with repression.

Paradoxically, in the end they were all more libertine than I was. I didn’t hook up with anyone… well, with four or five, but they didn’t count: they were practices. Everyone was eager for sex and to break taboos. I felt contempt for them because I was already entering the tantra scene: love, respect, admiration.

I kissed her on the porch under the stars — what a kiss that was! She was nine years older than me and had an eight-year-old daughter, but that didn’t matter to me: I was in love and loved her so much I would have killed a lion for her if she’d asked. No such thing was necessary — just to be loved. I waited a year, and I worked at it like never before. I went slowly, with respect and affection; I gave her space and let her see who I was; I listened.

I had long sought someone to rid me of that dirt I felt on my penis. Master Moksha said that penis and vagina reflect and open the doorway to the heart — a sick heart healed through maithuna. With Marta we weren’t yet a couple, only tantric partners. The sexual healing is performed by a man for a woman and vice versa. We were few, barely four couples. The sexual healing was done in a group, and it was a wonderful experience. I let her see what I kept most locked away and she showed me hers. That’s where we began to be a couple.

Her daughter didn’t like me, and to be honest I didn’t much like her either. She hit me when I kissed her mother and staged scenes to make her feel guilty. The worst was not the child but seeing Marta suffer at every word. In restaurants she choked, not knowing how to react, while I restrained myself, fighting the temptation to intervene.

One day I decided to set limits. I told her firmly not to hit me anymore. I felt trapped in an uncomfortable role, forced to be silent so as not to cause trouble. Then, leaving the cinema, the girl slapped me again after a kiss. I warned her calmly and, after another slap, I reacted instinctively: I gave her a slap. She froze, surprised that someone had set a boundary. She never did it again.

The next day her father came to complain. Marta looked at me with fear, but I felt at peace, as if I had defended my place. Curiously, from then on the girl began to treat me with affection, even with a certain playful flirtation. I always kept my distance. I knew it wasn’t my place to raise her.

That distance also grew between Marta and me. I was only Mom’s boyfriend. I wanted to start a family, but the family was already made. Marta didn’t want more children. She didn’t want a house. She had already lived all that, which for me was still an aspiration. And it didn’t work.

In Valencia, Antonio Pacheco came to give us a course about death and mentioned he was involved in the SAT program. I already knew the Enneagram from my time in the Fourth Way, and Marta and I thought it would be a good way to spend the August holidays. We were always doing personal growth workshops; it was part of our routine. But the SAT turned out to be an uncomfortable, even distressing, experience. At first I placed myself in type Seven, but something didn’t fit. I was too physical, too impulsive. My jokes weren’t “mental,” like a Seven’s.

Then they assigned me E8. It was Suzy Stroke who opened that possibility. I didn’t think it was so instinctive or that my life had been so extreme. The idea filled me with anguish. Everything got worse when I heard the description of the Sexual 8. I felt a deep, visceral shame, as if someone had entered a part of me I had hidden for years. Suzy asked if anyone identified with it. I said nothing, but she approached me, looked me straight in the eye and asked, “You?” It was like confessing a sin. I nodded. From that moment I noticed a change in people’s looks. They watched me differently: with a mix of fear and respect, as if I were a tamed savage, a contained rapist… yet without ever having a real contact with me.

I felt lost. I traveled every weekend to Peñíscola to work there. Then a Catholic group contacted me to create a television channel in Barcelona. With no experience but enthusiasm, I launched into the project, led by an Argentine priest who I never liked.

We set up Sant Josep TV in the basements of a church, broadcasting without a license. Everything went well until I discovered the priest with a minor. I didn’t keep quiet: I reported him to the bishop and took control, relocating the channel with support from the Emaús Association. But the venture went sour. I stopped getting paid, became a mere ornament, and the channel died.

With no income I ended up living in a shelter. An Indian businessman wanted to buy the TV station, but I refused. As a last act I uploaded everything to YouTube and the project sank. When I think back now, I find it hard to understand how Marta put up with me during that time. Deep down, it had all sprung from a desire to send a message to my siblings: I wanted to teach a clean Christian faith. But I was obsessed to the point of illness. I developed pneumonia. Doctors told me I had to be hospitalized: 70% of my lungs were infected. I left the shelter and ended up sleeping on the street until a friend from the Fourth Way school found out and gave me refuge.

I didn’t want anyone to know about my failure, not even Marta. I felt like a broken puppet. I kept asking myself what I was good for, and what my mission in the world was.

Once, at the TV station, an elderly woman named Doña Mercedes came to see us. She was separated and bent by years, yet she had a childlike gaze. Over time I learned that her son, barely eighteen, had hanged himself from the lamp in his room — just when I had visited every morning for six months: I would get her up, bathe her. One day she had gone out to take out the trash for a moment, and I went to see her and combed her hair and read her a passage from the Bible. She didn’t want anyone to cross her threshold; she said she would only let the devil in. So I told her I was the devil. From then on she called me that. One day I brought her a kitten I had found in the street. At first she barely looked at it, but little by little she began to pay attention. She ended up caring for it — and caring for herself.

One day I met a madman. His name was Mahabaju Dasa; he was from Málaga and said he had been a drug dealer: lots of money, no scruples. According to him, he had lost everything until the Hare Krishnas changed his life. He had founded a small association called Kesaba, and I began to frequent it. We would meet to chant mantras and practice Bhakti Yoga, devotional yoga. We sang to Krishna, to Christ, to Love by any of its names. We shared prasāda, the consecrated food, and called each other prabhus: brothers. We were mostly men without a path, outcasts of the system, homeless and uncertain. And yet there we recognized one another. There was warmth, humility, consolation.

In the Fourth Way we had a practice: accompanying terminal patients through their dying. Being with them, visiting, simply remaining until they left the body — one of the most intense experiences of my life. Holding their hand at that final moment, seeing them go — as we all will, sooner or later — and the only thing required was presence. One day Giovanni called me and told me he was going to open a branch in Madrid and wanted me to run the Barcelona one. But I was tired of projects and my own drive, so I said no. Then he told me, “Black monk, your home is inside you.” And I left the school. I left everything behind. I had been a teacher of sacred dances, but I abandoned it and returned to gardening. I wanted to go back to the beginning. I hadn’t found my place, and nothing held me anywhere.

Around then I took a course I probably wouldn’t have otherwise: story-therapy. It was run by Lorenzo Hernández Pallarés, a warm man from Murcia who allowed us to do whatever we wanted without demands. He sat like a grandfather and told us stories — small things that seemed unimportant but left me with a deep mark. That was what I was looking for, I think: not to have to exert myself, not to have to confront or dig, but to let something gentle touch me. To caress the inner child, to speak to the symbolic, magical mind. My heart lit up. I felt like a child — the child I had never been. Lorenzo took to me; he said I was like a tiger cub. The stories returned the lost child to me.

I got involved for a year in a Fourth Way school run by a Mexican, Carlos de la Garza, with influences from John Bennett and Maurice Nicoll. I helped make their website and edited secret manuscripts for initiates. They used symbolic names, power animals and plant rituals. I tried peyote and San Pedro with little effect, but ayahuasca and yagé impacted me. Eventually I left due to disagreements and fatigue with the mantra of “conscious effort and voluntary suffering.” Something in me no longer wanted that path.

By then Marta used to tell me I should be a therapist. She said that what sometimes pushed people away from me — what generated conflict and solitude — could, if channeled well, become a gift. The idea stuck with me for a while until I decided to organize a tantra course. Ten people came… and six left before noon. I was very nervous. I felt I didn’t know enough, that I didn’t want to repeat other people’s theories but to speak from my own

experience. What came out was awkward and messy. The second attempt also failed. The third, even more so.

In parallel I began a kind of café therapy with some Fourth Way colleagues. It was a way of experimenting, exploring: they wanted to try my medicine. I proposed rebirthing sessions. I’d been practicing rebirthing for years and had worked with some patients using only that process. The sessions were at most ten sessions in psychotherapy terms.

Two summers before that I had done a retreat with Leonard Orr and completed a three-year training. I believed deeply in that approach, though I sensed I needed some prior psychotherapy training to know where to take a patient. So I started experimenting with my own guinea pigs. Sessions lasted about two hours; afterward I wrote down impressions and began to build a working framework: top to bottom — first mind, then emotion, then body. I recorded sessions and reviewed them for patterns. Gradually I incorporated elements of the Fourth Way and tantra and things began to flow. To be honest, though, 80% of my guinea pigs left. They said it was too much; one had to go more gently. That drove me crazy. I didn’t know how to wait for them.

Lorenzo told me one day about a peculiar group linked to E. J. Gold’s school — “a group of lunatics,” in their own words. I went to Seville to meet them and ended up going every month. There, amid creative chaos, I began to shape and order my therapeutic processes. That space had just the dose of madness I needed to explore my vocation as a therapist from the Fourth Way perspective. It was then I decided to start a personal therapeutic process, in line with one of the Fourth Way’s fundamental principles: don’t trust yourself. I chose to work with a therapist because the Fourth Way suggests doing what you tend to avoid and observing yourself. Lorenzo recommended Alfonso Castro, a Gestalt and axiology therapist. I didn’t expect much from that relationship, but although our time was brief — he died shortly afterward — it had a decisive impact on my life.

In our first session he gave me the Hartman test. After reading it, he looked me in the eyes, made the sign of the cross, and said: “You are here, son.” That phrase, accompanied by a simple but intentional gesture, moved me deeply. I fought the urge to cry and failed. For the first time in a long while I allowed that emotional overflow. Alfonso accompanied me in silence, stroking my head, repeating the phrase like a mantra: “You are here.” Thanks to him I decided to enroll in Gestalt training. His death soon after only reinforced the value of that brief but significant encounter.

The tantra courses began to work. In Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Murcia — largely thanks to Lorenzo’s support and introductions — I stopped gardening and began to make a living from people’s problems. I had clients in Barcelona too. I felt increasingly better. Finally I earned money and recovered what I had lost. I knew I didn’t want to start another

association, school or company. I only wanted to be humble, to work with my hands, and nothing more.

By then I no longer had ambition. There was a persistent, almost structural sense of failure inside me that I learned to live with with some dignity. It wasn’t an acute sadness but a kind of low-intensity perception of life, as if the colors were always a bit muted — a silent emptiness. And at the same time, surprisingly, I began to receive my first patients.

As I said, I wanted to start a family with Marta, but I didn’t know how to care for children. So I decided to begin with something closer and more manageable: adopt a dog. I heard a bull terrier puppy had been returned to a breeder labeled “stubborn.” I wrote them a letter explaining I wanted to give him a chance and train him as a therapy dog. What I really sought was a friend.

That summer I trained for a month in therapeutic animal-assisted intervention and took Kazán, who was barely six months old. The instructors bluntly said he wouldn't: bull terriers were like sharks — unpredictable. I ignored them. I worked with him daily, with patience, consistency and a determination that surprised even me.

Kazán won everyone’s heart. He was slower than the other dogs and far more stubborn, but he had a special poise. He became an excellent therapy dog. His calm presence generated security in children; they approached him without fear. His unconventional look made him unique and unforgettable.

Curiously, the other dogs didn’t like him much. Kazán was different. His physique unsettled the pack, and he made no effort to fit in. He didn’t care. He was always independently imperturbable.

Since then he has accompanied me in many sessions. He is my co-therapist. He represents my tender side, the part I sometimes find hard to show. He can climb into a patient’s lap and with each caress invite them to loosen up, speak, and drop the armor. He has become a 45-kilo dog with a tank’s body and a teddy-bear soul. Stubborn to the end — yes — but without doubt one of the best companions I’ve had.

After my relationship with Marta ended, I returned to ayahuasca — back to the Great Mother. A taita from Putumayo, whom I had known for years, invited me to participate in a ceremony and take yagé. For a year, every time he came to Spain I organized ceremonies and drank with him. It was an intense period. The old man yagé pushed me to the limit. The doses were violent, deep, raw. I rolled on the floor, repeatedly facing my animality: that ancestral fear of losing control, of hurting someone, of something inside me escaping. That was my true terror: the suspicion that something dark lived in me and that I’d been trying for years to dominate. Until, in one ceremony, I stopped fighting. I freed the beast. I saw

myself naked, gnawing on a log like a lion cub. Then I understood: there was no evil in me, only brute, wild strength — yes — but innocent. I recalled a phrase from Claudio Naranjo in a SAT about E8: “Instinct is innocent.”

I returned to therapy work, albeit with a different disposition. I stayed even when everything in me wanted to flee. In that quiet staying, in that unheroic surrender, I began to think I didn’t want to hurt another woman again. I didn’t want to try and then fail. I decided to be only a therapist. Nothing more. No partner. No sex. No goals. Defeated, yes — but at peace. That acceptance, far from breaking me, sustained me.

I met a woman named Liliana in Enneagram and Fourth Way circles in Murcia. From the beginning we developed a good friendship, although I kept some distance. She had a leadership role in the group, and that, along with my personal decision to live more ascetically, made me avoid affective involvement. I knew she liked me, but I didn’t feel available for anything beyond friendship. Still, we talked often. Over time I began to open up, sharing my sadnesses and contradictions, things I rarely disclosed. A sincere closeness without pretension formed between us, based on listening and emotional intimacy.

Until one day I grew tired of myself — of my control, my resistance, that chronic way of not trusting life — and I decided to let go. Not as a deliberate act but as a surrender. Liliana had long invited me to visit her village and I always refused. That day I said I would no longer contradict the universe or rebel against what life offered. I would stop imposing decisions on my path and simply be docile, let myself be carried. And so I did. I let myself be carried to the shore.

Much of that happened, in large part, thanks to my mother’s death. Her passing marked the end of an inner war I had been waging for years. God — or life, or whatever it is — took her before she could complete what, for so long, had been my unconscious objective: to best her, to prove something, to confront her to the end. But her death left me without an adversary. There was no longer a bone to gnaw. The inner fire that had consumed me was extinguished.

I mourned her. I loved her. And for the first time, from a sincere place, I said to her, “Rest in peace.” And something curious happened: dead, only the good of her remained. As if the rest — the harm, the tension, the resentment — had dissolved into another dimension.

However, it wasn’t a clean or immediate process. The nightmares returned. I dreamed she wasn’t really dead, that she came into my house while I slept and stabbed me. It was an insistent, recurring presence, as if something hadn’t fully closed.

In the midst of that turbulence, Liliana was a true angel. Her attitude was calm, understanding, and contained. But I still didn’t fully trust her. I looked at her warily,

dragging an old paranoia: somewhere in a dark corner of my mind I came to think she might be sent by my mother, placed there to let down my guard.

Liliana’s family welcomed me warmly. She was happy with me, and I — a big lad from the north — was well received in that household of seven siblings and a sister. I was surprised by how much I liked the simple things about the village: its customs, its slow rhythm, the honesty in gestures, the clarity in essentials. I felt, at last, part of something larger and humbler.

I married Liliana. Her brothers, with enthusiasm and affection, organized a bachelor party in a country house. There were no excesses or loss of control. Over time I integrated more into village life. I began to play the lute in the local pilgrimage band — something deeply vital: making music in a group, feeling the rhythm. Singing and playing with them has been surprisingly stimulating. There is something shared, in belonging to a collective expression.

The feeling of being an ordinary man — of not having to stand out or hide, of belonging to everyday life — has given me an inner solidity I didn’t know. An unexpected calm. It’s as if, finally, I’d started to be part of the human race.

David Barba called me the other night. “What times,” he said, remembering the SAT. He told me, “We’re finishing the book on the E8, would you like to write something about the series La Mesías and you?”

La Mesías is a 2023 seven-episode miniseries whose initial plot revolves around a viral video by a Christian pop group of sisters that impacts Enric’s life — a man tormented by a childhood marked by religious fanaticism and the yoke of a mother with messianic delusions.

Enric is me.

Ugh… I don’t know… At first I’m so happy to talk with David — he pulls me out of my bone-filled cave and invites me to do something that, inherently, I find tedious. I told him yes and then procrastinated. It’s always hard for me to connect with the past, because to talk about the past you have to be connected. I kept postponing it, day after day, waiting for the deadline or for David or Leonor to say, “No need, too much time has passed.” I don’t like connecting to my past; it’s always the same, always difficult and always useful. When they say in growth workshops “connect with the inner child!” I think: that place is going through Hades, and traversing the underworld is never pleasant.

Even today I escape my past, trying to forget it, although I know how good it is to reconnect. Gurdjieff spoke of the “self-remembering,” and you cannot remember yourself without remembering EVERYTHING. The Latin recordari — re (again) + cordis (heart) — means more than bringing something to mind; it means passing through the heart again.

So let’s begin. I’ll start from the dream I had last night. I was in the middle of a great war, in a trench. I don’t know why I was there; I had fallen all of a sudden. It was all war and I stood there watching, not knowing what was happening. Probably I was on the other side because soldiers came out of the trench and rushed at me. I didn’t know what was going on but began to defend myself. I had a donkey’s jaw in my hand and started hitting the soldiers who came. I smashed their heads and they kept coming. I didn’t know what was happening, but the urgency and the way the soldiers arrived were so violent that I didn’t have time to tell them “I come in peace, I don’t want to hurt you.” I had the appearance of a savage, like Tarzan — long hair, naked and ragged.

I began to despair; the soldiers were arriving faster and faster, each one seeing me as the enemy. I tried to shout that I wasn’t their enemy, but the noise was deafening. More and more soldiers came and I started to feel frustrated. It was a very specific emotion, a sadness: I couldn’t stop being seen as a threat when I was as innocent as they were. Tears started to fall as I smashed skulls, and I felt so frustrated, so powerless at not being able to stop that senseless frenzy that I threw myself at them, desperate and furious, and began to bite them—tearing pieces from their bellies with my mouth, shaking with emotion. I felt strength and weakness at once, a very strange combination. I’d even say there was love in my actions. The soldiers saw me as so threatening that they redoubled their efforts to bring me down, frightened. I felt a deep connection with them. It was all so bloody, so sad… but I survived the war.

Claudio Naranjo once told me: “When I was little, my aunt’s cat had kittens. She nursed them and, without knowing why, one day the cat pulled one kitten out of the basket and left it outside to die. I didn’t understand such cruelty. I took the kitten and put it back with its mother. The cat pulled it out again, and again I put it back, not understanding such hostility toward a defenseless kitten. It turned out the kitten had an infection and infected the mother’s milk, and they all died.” Claudio looked at me and said: “Instinct is innocent.”

When the war ended, everything was dead, full of corpses, and I kept tearing off pieces, furious and sad, crying. No more soldiers came, but I kept striking and gnawing at the dead. I didn’t want to stop because I didn’t want to look and realize that it was over—that I had survived above all else—and that was a very high price I didn’t know how to carry. Anyone who moaned I finished off with one last bite. How does a survivor feel who has survived at the expense of others’ deaths? I felt indebted. And the gift of survival became a curse. Do you thank God or curse him for making you instinctively superior? I cursed him. And for a long time I put that survival to the test, seeking for God to treat me like a dog—but here I am.

After reading my life story, Claudio said to me: “Your siblings saved your life.” I’ve no idea what he meant. I only thought of an image from my childhood that repeated many times

during that period. When I felt frustrated and desperate, I wanted to scream, but underneath it was a choked sob over a lack of protection—a place to throw up the despair of not being able to go on. In that place I would look at the sky and say to God: “Give me a reason not to destroy the world.” I suppose in my childhood the idea of destroying the world was just an emotional impulse carried by the body. What I really wanted to say was “destroy my world,” throw myself into the vortex of destruction. Perhaps now I would call it revenge: to succumb to the beast my mother said I had inside and yield to the most logical conclusion, judging by the environment I lived in—that I was born to be Enkidu (my mother tried and failed to be Shamhat), to let the frustrations and resentments of my sick family converge in me; that is, to end up succumbing to the reality that, deep down, I am BAD.

That has followed me for so long… I remember in the Amazon jungle, Taita Juan would laugh at me when, deeply afraid, I asked: “What if the devil inside me comes out?” “Easy, pup—if he comes out we’ll tie him to a tree.” The terrible nights always ended with me naked, gnawing on logs or digging a spot to sleep, always naked. Taita Juan would bring me a blanket, laughing, and say: “I’m going to cover your backside; it’s pointing at the altar.” And so it went every night—fighting not to let my wild beast come out and, then, discovering it was only a child—the child who never came out.

The bad thing, according to my mother, was to be a child: I was supposed to be her guard dog; that was my place. I remember she punished me by tying me with a chain and an olive-green collar outside the house, next to my dog—whom they never allowed me to unchain either. “Dogs must be treated like dogs.” And it all made sense: spending the night out there with my dog brother made sense; it was my place, it was a spot. I had been born to be an animal; accepting your place always brings a kind of relative peace. Identity comes after you belong to a territory.

There was no place for a child. I still couldn’t tell you exactly what play is; I don’t know if I’ve ever really played with anyone beyond playing alone. I also couldn’t tell you if I’ve ever been happy. Happiness is for good children, according to my mother—and I wasn’t, according to her. I tried; I tried to be a good child, but there was an unruly beast in me that wouldn’t let me be a hypocrite, and I chained punishment to punishment because I couldn’t say to my mother “I love you.” I couldn’t tell her that. I planned to kill her when I got the chance—her and my stepfather—because that was the most convincing alternative. I couldn’t bear the idea of spending years of my life locked up in that madness.

The series came about in the most fortuitous way. María, a journalist, called me. I was still hiding somewhere, living off the underbelly of psychotherapy. I’d been at the SAT, in India, hiding from the light and stealing from fate the notion that a child unhappy in childhood can never be happy. But I stayed hidden, afraid of being discovered at any moment, singled out and doubted: “You are the crazy woman’s son; ugh… you look like her; you were her favorite;

she won’t be happy until you return and take your place; so you shouldn’t be here; you’re bad.” So I wasn’t that hidden after all.

They found me: “Are you the rebellious son of María Durán de Bellido? We want to make a series about the childhood you had with your mother.” Who on earth wants to make a series about that? But then I understood: they wanted to make a series about some lovely Christian children who, thanks to their mother, preserved their faith in the woods, learning healthy living and good manners—Captain Fantastic-style. I laughed in her face, told her not to call me again and hung up.

For three weeks María tried to contact me until I agreed to speak with the directors, the Javis—emerging talents I didn’t know, because I was in hiding, remember? And hiding also means not looking outward. I didn’t even have a television or know the good things in the world existed. For me it simply didn’t exist—it hadn’t existed in my childhood; it was easier to ignore society than to attend to it.

I smelled their honesty in the first video call: nice, friendly, and seeming ready to listen. “If I speak, it will only be to tell the truth.” “No, our childhood wasn’t like the Von Trapp family’s in The Sound of Music, however hard my mother tried to proclaim that vision, but more like Misery.” They opened their folders, pressed records, and I told them the truth. The first session lasted three hours; I cried remembering; they cried with me. “If you want to stop…” “No, I don’t want to stop. I want to tell you. I want to tell what happened; I want to tell the truth; I want to stop being locked up—still today—hidden. I want to stop being a fascinating animal and be a human survivor.” It is easier to follow destiny than to confront it, and I had spent too long confronting God or ignoring him. It was time to speak of my fragility, the fear I felt, the despair and the nightmares that have stayed with me for years. It was time because that’s how it had to be, because in the end there’s no use hiding: they always find us and we must face the truth. I would face not only my truth but my family, my grandparents, my uncles, my siblings. Yes, my siblings: all that happened. There’s no use in the fantasies our parents put us in: blows are blows; punishments are punishments; love is not locking you up; love is not manipulation; love is not coercion. It’s time the truth be known.

And the truth was known. Childhood and youth were transcribed exactly as I had told them: the scenes, the dialogues, the atmosphere… Whew… it was hard to watch; a mix of longing and disgust.

As for the central adult character, Enric… I don’t quite know why they portrayed him like that. I have my speculations: perhaps they needed a plausible antagonist. Enric as an adult was diametrically opposed to my mother… but that’s not so. I am very similar to my mother in temperament. It bothered me to see him that way: a drunk? I’ve never been. Passive? Never. Laconic? Neither. Still, I can understand it: dressed in black, I’m big and strong, my

gaze is intense, my voice firm, my gestures emphatic… that doesn’t generate compassion. And that’s the great pity of our character: we don’t inspire pity.

And apparently, to be a victim, you have to look like one. It seems my gait wasn’t that of an abuse victim; I looked like an abuser. Being rebellious isn’t a sign of vulnerability, it seems. Therefore, despite everything, whoever doesn’t look vulnerable… isn’t.

And in the end, Sexual 8s believe those concepts and, it seems, to not be a victim you must not look like one. And so we become that—the Bad Ones. “If he lived in a crazy house, he'd be crazy.” “He who was abused ends up abusing.” “He who was mistreated ends up mistreating.”

The series premiered to great success; it was very good. I was afraid to watch it; I didn’t know what to do. Should I watch it?

As with all systems, nothing comes as an accident: it comes to harmonize the place, and everything must be redistributed to make room for the newly arrived paradox—in this case, the manifestation of a raw, determinative reality. I was willing for it not to change my life. I didn’t want gossip or prying looks; I had learned to be in the shadows and I’m good at hiding. So the Javis’ lawyers trained me on how to act when journalists stopped me in the street or came to my house seeking the sensational exclusive: “Were you really locked up for years in the middle of the woods with a madwoman?” I closed my social media and slipped away, but nothing escapes the welcome’s rearrangement.

I remember they held a private screening. I didn’t go; I wanted to stay away from all that. The series was no longer the goal: the goal was to tell the truth. And the truth would come to light. I felt like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, alone before the world.

I began to grow anxious. My mother and I had a pact, a little deal: I wouldn’t expose her lies to the world and she would leave me alone. And I had broken that pact; I had invaded her territory to say, “the king is naked,” and that had bodily consequences. Without a doubt, I WAS THE BAD ONE. My mother had been dead a few years. I don’t know what’s worse: to be inside a body, or to be everywhere unconsciously. I felt I had angered my mother and now her hysterical response would come. And since my mother was now a being that belonged to my unconscious, the punishment could come from anywhere. And I waited for it.

I was no longer hard and strong—now I was tender; I had become a vulnerable man because there was nothing left that could hurt me. The world had never seemed so hostile. But my mother… took me to a very childlike place—too childlike, too fragile. I could no longer draw from the devil; I didn’t have him anymore. Damn it. Now I was at my mother’s mercy, at last.

I began to have panic attacks. I had never felt those things — I had studied them, yes, but to feel them… no, truly not. The nightmares returned, terrifying. My mother entered my house while I slept and pulled out the knife that years earlier I had kept under the pillow in case that moment arrived. It arrived, and I wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t sleep; I was afraid every time the sun went down. An unspeakable panic; I felt outside myself; it wasn’t me. The left side of my body went numb; my body’s memory returned: yes, those were the moments before punishment. Your mother locked you in a dark room, on bread and water, awaiting punishment. That wait could last days until the punishment came. The worst part wasn’t the punishment but the uncertainty—the waiting. Mom was furious and my head went back and forth: What will the punishment be for destroying her legacy?

I stayed shut in my house for days. I hid in my dog’s bed, trying to calm myself with his snoring. I thought: It’s time to be open to vulnerability for real. I caught a plane to see my partner. She received me furious: I’d gone days without telling her anything, without returning her calls. “I need you to hold me.” “I can’t. I want you to leave.” I left, in a rising panic attack: nothing and no one could hold me; there was no place for me; I was the bad one and, as such, had to be punished. At last… my mother was right.

I hid at home. A bona fide therapist putting therapy aside, hiding in his dog’s bed. I was gone. I looked for a dog collar and put it on. It calmed me: “You are a dog.” I kept waiting for days, shut in my house, for my mother’s punishment to arrive.

The series was airing to great success. Each week a new episode came out and people went wild. I disconnected my phone. I waited for the punishment for ruining the world my mother had built; the punishment had to be proportional. I began to think I had to end my agony and decided I would speed up the wait myself. I would punish myself to escape the panic room. What punishment would be proportional to ruining the posthumous memories of a mother who lived for stardom, who sacrificed her world and family to be considered a saint, good, and worthy consort of Christ?

I thought about throwing myself off the balcony. It wasn’t very high and, being as strong as I am, it would barely do anything. I needed to end all this and didn’t know how. My mother was torturing me. Rat poison! That would be the punishment. I prayed to God not to punish me. God and my mother became one family. I begged for a light punishment—but for them to stop torturing me, both God and her. Please, I needed to stop feeling vulnerable.

Terribly vulnerable, at someone’s mercy. It was the end. I could no longer protect myself.

In that agony I managed to record myself on video: “Gerard, everything is going to be okay, you’re not bad, you haven’t done anything bad, easy, don’t—” I guess “don’t punish yourself.” I played the recording on loop. I felt I was going to forget and it would be the end. A large part of me was hijacked by childhood: I was a broken child in an adult’s body. A

tenth of me was the adult who said: This thing that’s happening isn’t real, Gerard. And in that agony I felt at the mercy of the big, cruel authority I had always faced and that now, yes, had made me weak and prostrate. I was just waiting for the sentence, enduring the torture, and I knew it wouldn’t be benevolent. It never had been—just as I, either, wasn’t.

Days passed in that agony while I received supportive emails from my friends and acquaintances, who were seeing on screen the full account of the stories I had told them. I didn’t reply; I couldn’t. I was frozen, trapped in a trauma I couldn’t see, because I was inside it. It was the end.

And one day, after weeks agonizing, unable to cry, afraid, hiding in the most unlikely corners of the house, spending long hours under the bed, squeezed inside the stove or shivering under the kitchen table, naked—there I managed to think: who protects me? I was the protector of my siblings, of my family, of my partners. Where was my father?

I began to beg my father to save me. I didn’t know how to do it; it was like an epiphany: it was the missing puzzle piece and I had never missed it. It was a figure I hadn’t noticed; I didn’t have it and I didn’t miss it. And now—now I needed someone to guard the space while I couldn’t, while I fell into vulnerability.

People talk a lot about tenderness, but little about protection—about the great love there is in protection. That masculine figure—whether exercised by a man or a woman, though most often by a man—understands the subtle difference between protecting and defending, where protection shelters the beloved object and defense is directed toward the attack.

Well, I needed protection.

I looked around: I was the one who protected others; I was the billy goat, and there was no one who could hold me. I thought of my therapist and asked for an appointment. My therapist is the epitome of equanimity, the most humanistic therapist I could come across. For years I hated him until I learned from that good practice. He saw my face distorted; he understood the gravity at once. He leaned forward in his chair as I’d never seen, powerful and protective. He no longer smiled; he took charge and said to me: “You can cry.”

It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. I felt as if a hand were placed on my head and forced me to bow it until I touched the floor. And there—phew—at last, to touch the ground. His hand didn’t move from my head; it pressed hard; I felt it. Some tears began to flow that I didn’t know existed, a desperate child’s cry. It was a frightened, panic-stricken sobbing. From time to time I looked at the computer screen and found my therapist guarding the space, firm as a mast. His body was that of a mountain and his face, the tall cypresses billowing in the fury of the wind at the summit. And I returned to my crying: it was a cry for

help in which I managed to say: “Please, help me. Don’t let me find myself, don’t let me kill myself, protect me from evil.”

It was opening Pandora’s box. After so much therapy… when something of these magnitudes—like THE TRUTH of the secret, which I had seen many times but rarely embodied—comes to light, becomes visible, spaces so hidden that I didn’t even know they existed reconfigure. It was the moment of Truth. We all have those moments in life. It was the moment I had feared for so many years: to face the bleeding wound again and respond with the real wisdom that was needed. It wasn’t about appearances; now semblances didn’t work. The role of the confrontational therapist didn’t work there. Only the Truth—alone before the Truth—not my mother’s, not that of a Sexual 8, but The Truth.

My therapist told me not to be alone, to rely on friends, to call them, and so I did. I have few friends, but they are true ones. I remember two of them had just returned that same weekend from Lluis Fusté’s “To Love” workshop. They were brimming with good love. One took my hand, looked at me, and said: “Show us that place that scares you so much.” Okay, Gerard, it’s the moment of Truth: show them the broken, immense abyss inside you. And I did. I closed my eyes and plunged into the depths, into the gloom, into the deepest darkness. I felt my friend’s hand; I sensed him there, present. “Show them the place you so fear.” And I sank into the subhuman depths. The panic was terrible, a profound desolation, the madness of madness. Inside, there was a child frozen, in shock, completely lost in the deep darkness, without identity, unprotected. It was the moment to see what I had always hidden—even from myself.

As my therapist said: “You are a broken child.” For a time that filled me with vengeance, with furious rebellion: I would rise up against whoever broke me and annihilate him… It doesn’t matter; I would still be a broken child. Do you defend yourself or do you protect yourself, Gerard? I didn’t know how to protect myself; I only knew how to defend myself with a good attack, one after another, with the jawbone of the ass, like Samson.

The child was there, in the depths: naked, dark, crazy, irrelevant, incapable, desolate. He didn’t cry out; there was no one to call. He didn’t hide; there was no one to hide from. He had eaten them all, and in the cave where he remained there were nothing but bones. And now, at last, he let me pass—enter that sacred cave full of dead selves, completely empty, occupied only by the insane darkness and a ragged child tied with a chain and an olive-green dog collar, thin, his back full of scars from the chairs that had broken over me, intact, unhealed, suppurating for so long they were already pustules.

I reached his side, wounded like him, broken like him, unable to help him. And for the first time it was I who asked for lodging in the cave. “I’m lost and afraid.” The child looked at me. I was, for the first time, sinking with him. “We haven’t been dealt very good cards.” There

was no territory to protect myself in except the one where my broken child lived. And there I sat: both broken, both naked, both dead.

Little Mowgli, with long, dirty hair, taught me to be in that place, to return there whenever I wanted: he would be there—the son of god—small, primitive but organized, functional in his brokenness. He bandaged himself every day, again and again, patient, without rest. The wounds would not stop oozing. He seemed the only one who had accepted the cards I kept discarding: that there would be fear, that there would be sadness, that there would be loneliness, that we would have to stitch ourselves together, make more-or-less fitting prostheses—but together, united.

I came up out of the deep pit and there were my two friends, looking at me. I brought myself back with me: fragile, broken and functional, resourceful, imperfect—but me. I cried with my friends, a new kind of crying—I didn’t even know how many forms crying can take—a crying of relief, of harmony. Something was in order and I didn’t know what; I only knew it was androgynous: the crying turned into laughter; my friends cried with me; they laughed; we embraced. I had entered madness and it itself had shown me the way out.

All this while the series and the interviews with Los Javis filled front pages: “What a magnificent script!” “Yes, all invented, yes.” I didn’t care about the baroque decision to hide the truth of the story’s authorship. I had my reward: to recognize my hell, learn to hang my hat in it, walk it and make it comfortable. They had the vainglory of awarding themselves the depiction of a devastating reality.

My friends—my brothers—kept vigil every night by my bed. I was in diapers, not knowing how to carry so much vulnerability. I needed protection. Sitting by my bed, they stood guard; they took turns watching over me until I fell asleep. They bought me a huge cushion to support my back: enough of keeping it against the wall—better something soft, warm, spongy. They brought me a stuffed animal, a river otter that projected little star-lights and “cried” like a child, gently and sweetly, while I fell asleep enveloped by the big pillow. It was a new sensation. I felt the blows on my back, but it was cushioned by the big pillow.

For so long I had been the older brother—now I was learning to be the younger brother.

There I recovered the figure of the father—that figure I had never understood, the figure in whose place my mother had put me. I was Mommy’s little man, and now my father kept watch over me. I was the child, and that was in order and made sense.

I stepped aside and embraced the power of submission—being at the service of something greater, unknowable. Perhaps the only plausible definition of God is Spinoza’s. For him, God does not choose or decide things as if he were a person. Instead, God acts according to his own nature, without being influenced by anything external. That is, what God does is

necessary, but at the same time free because there is nothing outside Him that controls Him.

That figure has come to stay and my life has changed, for I too have had to make room for authority. I suppose rebellion makes less sense when I follow the father. I understood the Jewish concept of “the power of submission”: to be the supporting actor, to be at service, to make life easy, to partner with God instead of confronting Him—God being, in himself, an unfathomable part of oneself.

My moreh, in Hebrew class, recited the words of the prophet Elijah: “The Ten Sefirot manifest each according to its order: an attribute of kindness followed by an attribute of strict justice, and then an attribute of mercy that harmonizes them—and you are the one who governs them.” That is, to be good one must be just, and to be just one must know how to forgive.

My therapist told me that when someone dies, the only thing that goes to heaven and remains there is the good part, and that therefore my mother would be broken by the pain she caused us, now seeing everything from her goodness. (It’s curious how, in those moments, they have to speak to us as children: it’s the only language that reaches—the magical, symbolic thinking of Jung is the vocabulary to speak to the unconscious.) The Jews don’t believe in hell either, so the matter of punishment is a concept tied to the belief that human beings are bad by nature. My therapist told me to light a little candle every day for my mother and allow her to help me: “Tell her to help you resolve the problem she caused; help her feel at peace by restoring the harm done by her inability to manage her suffering.”

At last I was able to watch the series, surrounded by my friends, my comrades—whom I now saw as equals. I cried at passages like the fire, where the depth of reality surpassed the scene. And I felt a new peace, as if the story had finally been told. I looked around: I was no longer alone; I was no longer a child lost in the dark. I was accompanied, protected, held. And I knew, with a soft, quiet certainty, that God had always been with me—in the small gestures, in friendly hands, in shared laughter. I was the one who had taken time to recognize it. And now, at last, I could rest.

Not everything was as pretty as all that. I’ve tried at times to tell the good so as not to be objective and to justify my impulses. I separated a year after marrying: it ended up being a conflictive relationship on both our parts. I was alone for a short time, and then I spent three years with an E8—intense like me and lustful like me. There I didn’t look so excessive, so fantastical, but I kept putting myself in the savior role that weighed on me so much afterward, and I went back into procrastination and sadness when the fireworks passed. Until, after giving myself some time, at last I learned to be alone—to embrace my lack of connection and the feeling of isolation—and there was nothing to “devour.” Then I devoted myself to trying to have a good relationship with myself.

At that point I discovered I was punitive with myself—unable to enjoy the delight of being alive—always overstimulated and apathetic. And I embraced myself instead of embracing others, and I saved myself instead of saving others. I went meekly into hermit solitude like an Enneatype 5, and there I was fine—embracing my depth—until I even turned that embrace intense, so deep it disconnected me from the world: intensity even in my confinement. It was and is a great space for me to learn to “five,” but my therapist told me one day: “You’ve punished your E8 so much you have to recover him; not everything in him was bad.” And again I had to learn balance—whew, what anguish.

I felt happy without “hunting” any woman. Everything was a no to the old ways of relating, and I spent a few years like that. My therapist told me: “It’s very good, Gerard, that you know yourself and open to the spiritual side, that you embrace and care for yourself and pay attention to yourself—but that’s not a place to stay; with that you have to go out into the world.”

The great challenge remains to go out without losing myself—to build bonds without devouring anyone, to be in the world but not belong to it. To take my space without eating the other’s space.

From axe to scalpel: the path of the Sexual 8 therapist (as an epilogue)

The end of innocence.

What makes innocence disappear? Innocence understood as the hand clean of guilt. How can one return to innocence once it’s been lost?

The broken child.

I didn’t remember it well. About fifteen years have passed since I finished Gestalt training. I read what I wrote—as if it were a comic written by someone else. I wrote it during one of my peaks of euphoria, which sooner or later were followed by deep states of apathy. I’ve sailed between those two worlds constantly—only my states of emptiness have been less commented on. I’ve devoted my whole life to not entering that hole, and to manage it I’ve always turned to intensity. What mattered little: the important thing was to keep myself overstimulated. I needed things to do, strong emotions, conflicts, challenges… anything that kept me away from the emptiness I’ve always feared.

Once, in therapy, my therapist told me: “You are a broken child.” I didn’t like it. Something broken cannot stop being broken. It bothered me. It wounded me deeply. And yet, deep down, I knew he was right.

Something broken isn’t repaired; it is carried. I’ve toiled my whole life not to look broken. I’ve even boasted of it. I spoke of my past as if I had been chosen, as if that had made me a better person. But it wasn’t true. I learned to narrate my life as if it were a powerful, intense story—but not a real one. The emotions I put into telling it aren’t genuine; they’re a way to provoke in the other an image of strength, of overcoming—and above all, of intensity.

The illusion of intensity.

But no, my life wasn’t intense. It was tense. That’s one of the great lies we Sexual 8s tell ourselves: the illusion of overcoming.

Even my meditations were intense—overwhelming. Going to therapy without telling exploits, without provoking, simply staying with my true difficulty, was a real challenge. We’re not as intense as we claim. What we are is eloquent. We have a defiant bearing. But the substance is different.

When I began working as a therapist, I wanted things to happen in sessions. I wanted to stir, confront, provoke tears. That was my way of not feeling so broken—of confirming that we all were. I reaffirmed myself in my theory that my work was in the mud, descending into hell to look for brothers. But over time I’ve seen that therapy can’t be built from there. Of course we generate a certain fascination. Bringing out darkness comes easily to us. But is it healthy? Or is it only evidence of our own wound? I’ve romanticized hell. I’ve turned confrontational therapy into a way to make my deficiency desirable to others. But it’s hard for me to be in sessions where nothing happens—where a bond is simply built, where everyday interactions are formed. Perhaps because I’m afraid of the love that generates.

Fear of heaven.

I talk about social hypocrisy because it makes me uncomfortable to imagine the world could be a good place. If that were true, I’d have no place and would again feel… a broken child.

It’s hard for me to accept that the trait for which I’ve been admired—my vehemence, my audacity, my excess—has also been a catastrophe for me. It isn’t strength. It's a lack of self-love disguised as contempt for the “normal.” Even in sensitivity I find a way to generate intensity.

I’ve made my story a source of admiration—for myself. People look for me to solve problems, and when I solve them, they leave. I don’t enjoy the “good moment.” I’ve never wanted to. I pride myself on having crossed hell, but when patients find heaven, I abandon them. They no longer serve me.

Heaven scares me. I feel incapable of inhabiting it. I wouldn’t know how to behave. In hell I am king; in heaven I am a foreigner. An impostor.

Sometimes I think of Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land but did not set foot in it. I identify with him. I gave mysticism to what, in reality, is an error in the perception of my own identity.

Shame and belonging.

Deep down, I feel bad. There’s something wrong with me. It’s an old thought, etched in phrases I heard as a child and ended up believing. I don’t think Sexual 8s are rebellious. We submit to the labels projected onto us. We become what was expected of us in order to belong. Because more than love, we need belonging.

Evil isn’t a state, it’s a place. It’s the place where I feel I belong. And I am faithful to that place. Loyalty to the territory becomes identity. That’s why we’re so territorial. Not out of jealousy, but out of loyalty. We don’t explore new worlds; we just circle the same territory. I used to think the patient came to my territory. Today I understand I’m the one who goes to theirs.

From axe to scalpel.

Before, I started sessions by talking, lecturing. Today I say: “I’m all yours. What do you need?” I no longer try to show my feathers to be admired. Now I let myself be guided, I listen, I feel their territory. I don’t want to leave a mark. I don’t want them to remember me, but their process.

Before I was a hunter. Today I’m hunting. Before I was a woodsman with an axe. Now I am trying to be a surgeon. The less wounding, the better. The less blood, the better the recovery. Less confrontation, more integration.

True change is not a catharsis. It’s a seam. A darn. We have a single garment and it’s not about showing off the tears, but stitching them up. With patience. With attention to detail.

Possession and bond.

When I feel possession, there is anguish inside me. Then I have two options: either get anxious or get angry. What I can’t possess, I reject. I despise it. I try to be admired for something that makes me indispensable. The other—what I don’t control—threatens me. In truth, I don’t trust: I dominate. There is no trust, there is control.

I pretend to be king where no one reigns. To go to the underworld to rule. I have despised goodness for fear of not being up to it. I have become self-sufficient. I need no one. I despise the one who doesn’t need me, and I desire the one who does. And thus, loneliness becomes chronic.

The alternative would be submission, but in that place I become anxious, dependent, frightened. A good child, but sick too. Neither the one who pulled me out of hell nor the one who keeps me locked up is healthy.

Polarities and intensity.

Everything in me is polar. Half son of God, half son of a bitch. Where is the middle? Balance is hard for me. Everything is black or white. I live hardened, always stimulated. I need high doses to feel alive. There is always a residue of anger, a sense of superiority that protects me from the world.

I pretend to be moderate, but I constantly restructure myself. I can fool myself as easily as I fool others. I follow impulses without questioning them. But what moves me? That is the real question.

The anxiety I don’t see.

Doubting makes me anxious. But I’m learning. To take distance. To weigh. To negotiate. To be in a middle point that is always shifting.

I’m afraid of myself. Of my capacity to fascinate, to bewitch. To take the reins and forget myself. And my inner garden still goes untended.

Yes, I used to be a woodsman. Now I am trying to be a surgeon. The therapeutic process is not cutting, it’s darning. It’s not impressive, it’s accompanying. It’s not standing out, it’s going unnoticed so the other can shine.

Pain and joy.

We Sexual 8s fantasize that we are different. That we are peculiar. But inside… inside we are all the same.

A woman, at the Fourth Way school, once told me: “We all suffer the same.” She brought me down a peg. My experiences were eloquent, yes. But pain… pain is universal.

And that has helped me. I’ve listened to thousands of hours of therapy. And in each one, the patient says something to me.

We’re not so different. Different garments. But the same body-pain.

Pain makes us siblings.

And that leads me to a question: Can joy also make us siblings?

That is my challenge. To embrace joy. As something healthy. As something mature. As something conscious.