Starts in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I know… a Latina from Thailand. I’m what they call a “third-country kid.” My dad’s career had us globetrotting to a different country every 3-4 years. Me, resilient? In spades! I basically shape-shifted into the cultures I lived in, all along feeling like an outsider. Whether here or there, I knew the duality of how to quickly become popular and successful, as well as the deep loneliness of still feeling invisible. Alas, this two-faced defense mechanism was hard to let go.
Do you recognize this feeling? That “where do I truly belong?” shadow. The “I’ll do anything to be loved and then not love myself” conundrum. If you’ve ever shopped around for your identity, you get it.
Volume 1 – the story I inherited – gave rise to all the seeds for Dynamic R-Evolution: my BFF’s were my journal and my voracious reading; my fuel source was my desperate longing to be loved; my charming, parentified maturity masked my shame-filled need for protection; my night talks with my guardian angel pre-paved my spiritual journey; my crush on Bruce Lee ignited my urge for colorful, collaborative prowess; my embarrassed chubbiness was the invitation to engage my body; and my 10-feet-deep-buried-into-my-unconscious trauma made me a passionate seeker of all things healing.
This was all unconscious, by the way. At the time, I didn’t even know I had trauma, I just thought I was “nervous”. Psychedelic psychotherapy would gently reveal all the details of it decades later. I’m not alone in sensing the evasive blind spot trauma disguises as toxicity, addictions, desperation, and overachievement. There’s a wave of people right now massively discovering and shedding their trauma all over the planet.
Like for many of us, my Volume 1 was one big ancestral stew — a “sancocho”— of abandonment fears, chaos patterns, separation anxiety, C-PTSD, all mixed in with play, learnings, love, care, and connections. “Más que un sancocho, un merengue.”
Volume 1 was my unconscious, inherited life.