When I began my journey of self-discovery, I was around 14 years old. Part of my motivation to follow such a path came from the suffocation I felt under the weight of everyone’s expectations around me. I’m not saying everything was difficult or ugly — but the beautiful memories, the ones full of genuine joy, were hidden beneath dense layers of pain, humiliation, shame, contempt, sadness, and loneliness.
I didn’t expect it would take more than 20 years to truly arrive at the core of myself. And no, my story wasn’t among the most tragic ones. I was an apparently normal, happy, well-behaved child who did well in school.
Am călătorit prin multe abordări de teorie spirituală, prin teorie psihologică, psihanalitică, sistemică și transgenerațională, cognitiv-comportamentală, pozitivă. Am fost pasionată de arhetipuri și de categorii de experiență umană. Mi-am dorit, din tot sufletul, să înțeleg. Să înțeleg ce căutăm aici, în lumea asta, de ce lucrurile sunt așa cum sunt, de ce oamenii sunt așa cum sunt. Și mai ales, de ce când intenționam să fac un lucru bun, rezultatul era atât de departe de intenția mea.
I was always among the top of my class during middle and high school. I grasped principles and information quickly, but I can honestly say that some of them I’m only beginning to truly understand now. Just the other day, I was looking with fascination at prime and composite numbers, noticing how magical mathematics becomes when the accumulated information starts to connect. And how life itself becomes more beautiful when things start to connect and make sense.
Looking back, I realize that most of my limitations in understanding and assimilating certain theoretical concepts had their roots not in my IQ, but in the emotional blockages I had developed, especially during childhood. We don’t live in a society that necessarily encourages respect for personal rhythm and learning pace, so I remember with even more affection, respect, and gratitude the teachers, tutors, colleagues, and mentors who truly contributed to my growth. They are people who, perhaps without realizing it, saved small parts of me by offering healthier experiences than those that came before.
Of course, there were also other types of experiences that made me develop a deep reluctance toward certain fields of learning. And there, I had more to work on healing.
Although over time I invested in four different therapies, each lasting between one and three years, the greatest challenge was the period I had to go through alone. One of the therapists I worked with once told me that I didn’t trust therapy. I didn’t feel I had the space to say it then, but the truth is I no longer trusted people — not therapy. I trusted the process, and I still do, but I believe that a healthy process is not necessarily a therapeutic one. From my perspective, a therapist — the therapist as a person — can only take you as far as they have travelled within themselves. And although I learned something from every experience, the endings were just as necessary. What I can say, however, is that after many attempts that failed to various degrees, I have finally learned how to part ways differently.
Beyond what I worked through in therapy, the greatest challenge was to sit alone with my pain. At some point, I noticed that when I tried to communicate my pain, my emotions were often dismissed or denied — which may not seem like such a big problem — but my priority was to process them, no matter how painful that was. So, the last part of the journey back to myself happened in a kind of semi-isolation. I confess that only during those moments did I truly understand, in practice, a great deal of the theoretical knowledge I had gathered through years of study, as well as much of what I had gained from previous therapies.
O parte dificilă din proces a fost să recunosc cât de mult am rănit oameni din jur, care îmi erau dragi, fără să îmi dau seama. Și să îmi amintesc și să permit să doară. Apoi, un alt nivel de durere a fost să recunosc cât am fost de rănită, mai ales de oameni pe care îi iubeam și pentru care aș fi făcut aproape orice. Dincolo de revoltă, a fost extrem de dificil să accept faptul că nu au făcut-o, poate, cu intenție, ci pentru că, la momentul respectiv, atât au putut face. Am înțeles că multe interacțiuni au fost repetiții ale unor dinamici disfuncționale din familie, perpetuate de multe generații. Le-am studiat în detaliu, cât am avut acces, până la generația străbunicilor, ca să înțeleg de ce. De ce durere, de ce respingere, de ce umilire, de ce dispreț. Răspunsurile au fost variate: de la limitările instrumentelor vremurilor la limitările de înțelegere ale formelor de organizare din societate și până la un anumit inevitabil al vieții. Ce am mai descoperit, treptat, este că așa se transmite, de fapt, viața: prin talente (bagaje de experiență procesate și transmise adecvat), dar și traume (bagaje de experiență neprocesată). Și am acceptat, la un moment dat, că pentru a ajunge la ce s-a transmis valoros pe linia mea de familie, am de traversat straturi întregi de durere.
Somehow, ever since I was little, I knew I had to do this. Not as a calling, but because otherwise, I would never live a life I could truly call my own.
Continuing through those layers of pain, perhaps the hardest part was forgiving myself for not knowing how to protect myself from it. Because unconsciously, I was the one who put myself in danger — and I lost a lot each time I did so. And only after I managed to negotiate this essential detail within myself was I able to hold myself and offer myself what I had not received. To move through the pain, loneliness, and despair I had lived at such a young age. And which, inevitably, I relived in the exact same emotional way: alone. Only this time, I wasn’t truly alone. It was me — with myself. Maybe what made the biggest difference was that I finally allowed myself to accept my failures, my mistakes, my losses — and to love myself anyway.
And I believe that only from that point begins to exist a space in which I can start to trust people again. Not completely, not everyone — but some, those who can respect the fact that I have a soul and my own boundaries.
In conclusion, I would mention one aspect — perhaps the most relevant one in such a process: that pain can only be alchemized after it’s accepted as personal, real, and valid, even if it doesn’t relate to something from the present. It seems no one can live our pain for us. We can postpone it or choose to feel it — as our inner resources allow. Only then do the blocked memories return, along with the missing pieces of the life puzzle and the unexpressed talents. Only then does the personal story, in all its wholeness, begin to make sense. Only then do we realize that the blockages were, in fact, redirections — that what we lost was never meant to stay with us beyond a certain time — and that, in essence, we are exactly where we need to be, on our path in life.
Și că tot ce avem nevoie pentru a face următorul pas se află în aici și acum.