At 32 I left Buenos Aires for Barcelona.
I told myself it was for a fresh start. The truth was simpler than that: I was unhappy, I couldn’t explain why, and I had decided the problem was the place I was standing in. Change the place, change the feeling.
It took about a year to understand what had actually happened. The feeling had come with me. It had its own passport.
What followed was harder than I expected. The loneliness. The comparing myself to everyone. The sense of not being enough, and the strange tiredness of a life that looks good from the outside and feels like it is happening to someone else. I started therapy because I had run out of other ideas.
The distance was not the beginning of the story
The distance I put between myself and my country was not the beginning of the story. It was the end of one.
Something in my family had been moving away from something long before I was born. I inherited the movement and mistook it for my own idea.
That is not a metaphor. When you actually map it, who left, who stayed, who was never spoken of again, who spent years waiting for someone to come back, the shape of it is usually clearer than anyone expects. Most people who move find out they were not the first.
Who this is for
I have spent the last ten years working with people who left. Some chose it. Some were sent. Some followed someone else’s job and are still working out what that cost them.
All of them arrived somewhere new and found that the geography had changed and the weight had not.
You might recognise some of this:
- You built a life here and still feel like you are visiting.
- Every call home sets you back for days.
- You feel guilty for having a good life.
- You have been about to move back for years.
- You did the talking therapy, you understand your patterns, and you keep repeating them anyway.
How I work
I am a Gestalt therapist and family constellations facilitator. I work in English and Spanish, in person in Barcelona and online.
Gestalt works with what is happening now, in the body, in the room. Family constellations works with what came before you and still has a say. Together they reach material that talking about it tends to circle without touching.
No spirituality required. No past lives. What we do is concrete: we look at your family, we map it, and we see what you have been carrying that was never yours.
What becomes possible
You can belong here. It does not require betraying there.
But it does require knowing what you were carrying when you got on the plane.
Not ready to book anything?
I am putting together a short course for people who left: how to map your family’s history of movement and work out what you were carrying when you moved. Leave your email and I will let you know when it opens. That is the only thing I will use it for.