Expats in Therapy ES

03/12/2025

Read this in Spanish, reading this in English.

(I enjoyed "Good morning monster" quite a bit. An easier read, interesting stories, maybe the therapist at times is a bit too psychoanalytic for my feeling, but I still found it engaging and touching.)

11/11/2025

14/10/2025

Misconceptions about being a therapist, I'll do a funny version later on 🫣

ᴇxᴘᴀᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏ
📍 Madrid
🍃Individual Psychotherapy
🍃Couples Therapy
🍃Gestalt Psychotherapist & Psychology Clinical MSc
Mentor and Trainer at the Dutch Institute for Gestalt Therapy nsg_academy

07/10/2025

From "There are Rivers in the Sky", Elif Şafak

Sometimes it’s tempting to match the harshness of what we see and to become a little sharper.

But maybe It's important to hold a good heart, even at the face of all the ugly. Still protecting yourself by taking distance, after you acknowledge the ugly. Not being naïve, but maybe just staying kind even after you’ve seen it. Sort of choosing peace, even when war would be easier.

04/10/2025

Evening views from the office,
Have a restful, easy, heartwarming weekend, everybody.
💜

22/08/2025

The older you get, the more you realise that time sorts people out for you. Careers shift, health takes its toll, and energy is not endless anymore. What remains essential is not how much you achieved, but who you can call when the day feels heavy, and who shows up when you need company more than advice.

There's something very human in it: to sit at a table with people who know your history, who remember you younger, who will still see you when you are slower, grayer, perhaps more fragile.

The few who matter, those connections; in the end, love is the very structure that holds us together when everything else falls away.

07/08/2025

I don't have enough posts and enough space to talk about how important it is to do the difficult thing:

This year, allow yourself to DISAPPOINT PEOPLE.

ᴇxᴘᴀᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏ
📍 Madrid
🍃Individual Psychotherapy
🍃Couples Therapy
🍃Gestalt Psychotherapist & Psychology Clinical MSc
coDirector and Trainer at the Dutch Institute for Gestalt Therapy nsg_academy

21/07/2025

What is hope? Why is it important to hold on to it? I’d argue that hope is a prison, for as long as you have hope, you can’t set yourself free, it never dies it never ends.

At the same time, its the only thing making us get up and continue, that thing that builds inner strength, the solid feeling in one’s core;

the worse it gets the more the inner trunk builds another layer, makes you think that if you can wake up after that, if you can be human after that,

have breakfast, say hi how are you, look at people in the street and see them, then I guess it’s all possible.

If you can continue to act human in the face of loss, if the numbness can give way to utter sharp pain, and the pain can give way to tiredness and the tiredness can give way to clarity and the clarity to even a tiny moment of normal life, then it’s all possible, then maybe that’s what we mean when we say there’s “hope”.

ᴇxᴘᴀᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏ
📍 Madrid
🍃Individual Psychotherapy
🍃Couples Therapy
🍃Gestalt Psychotherapist & Psychology Clinical MSc
Mentor and Trainer at the Dutch Institute for Gestalt Therapy

07/07/2025

Funny how we learn this from a young age, some of us. If only I think about it real well, if I figure out how to not anger them again next time, if I just try hard enough, then I'll be safe, then maybe next time they won't yell, threaten, give me the silent treatment, emotionally blackmail me. But it never works, and you never stop trying, and eventually you get very very good at knowing, sensing the atmosphere, to scan for danger. And years pass and somehow, you still feel the same fear sometimes, I messed up, I'm sorry. Even though it doesn't belong now, not to your grown up self, not to the situation. But you're not in touch with your anger anymore, that was lost long long ago. So when there's danger, you buckle up and go straight into it: "I'll try hard to make it better". And it only cuts you deeper.

Anger is useful, anger says enough, no more, not my fault, I don't deserve this.

02/07/2025

Our beautiful 4th year group. The first ever International group of the Institute, and my first group as a teacher.

Our closing weekend was full of everything; an appropriate ending to four years of intense work. It was calm, fitting, connecting- all of us together, taking our time to say goodbye and to become colleagues.

Watching them work with each other this weekend, I realized I was admiring them; how they attuned, how they paced and graded, sensing the rhythm and the aesthetics of our work, sensing themselves and the moment, planting and waiting, going back to the ground, returning forward when the small moment was ripe, all with their own different voices. The work that they have learned to Be. I AM SO PROUD, my heart bursts with love for them and our work.

I will miss them all dearly.

Good luck and may you always find love in the small moments.

24/06/2025

The way we speak to ourselves, especially in moments of shame, doubt, or failure, is not accidental. It is shaped by early relationships, by the voices that surrounded us before we had the capacity to question them.

Emotional regulation does not come from nowhere. It is not just a skill we wake up with one day. It is developed through co-regulation. Having someone near us who stays calm when we are not. Who does not punish our distress. Who helps us name what we are feeling instead of shutting it down.

Without that, many people grow up learning to manage emotions through criticism, suppression, or perfectionism. The nervous system adapts to survive, the cost is high.

In therapy, we often start by getting curious about those sounds, once external now internal. Not to blame, but to understand.

ᴇxᴘᴀᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏ
📍 Madrid
🍃Individual Psychotherapy
🍃Couples Therapy
🍃Gestalt Psychotherapist & Psychology Clinical MSc
coDirector and Trainer at the Dutch Institute for Gestalt Therapy nsg_academy

22/06/2025

One of the hardest things about burnout is that it distorts what we believe we’re allowed to want.
When you’re constantly under pressure to achieve, perform, keep it together, it can feel like stopping isn’t an option. Like taking a step back means failing.

And in some ways, it does mean losing something. You might lose the version of yourself that could keep pushing. You might lose approval, you might lose the sense of being able to affect, might feel like you're losing control.

But stopping also gives you a chance to notice what all that pushing has cost. What parts of you have been ignored or stretched too thin.

It’s not weak to want a life that feels more like yours and it's not indulgent to want rest, or peace, or joy.

And you don’t have to wait until you crash to make space for that.

ᴇxᴘᴀᴛꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏ
📍 Madrid
🍃Individual Psychotherapy
🍃Couples Therapy
🍃Gestalt Psychotherapist & Psychology Clinical MSc
coDirector and Trainer at the Dutch Institute for Gestalt Therapy nsg_academy