I Believe everybody has a story, this is mine: I studied Law & Business in a private university in Madrid. My friends and all the people around me knew very well what they wanted to do: most of them became successful lawyers and bankers. I worked in banking for a year and quitted my job. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew one thing for sure: I didnt want to work in a bank. That was not me. I came to London and managed to get a job at Orange as a contractor. I stayed there for 18 months and joined Dailymotion (a start up owned by Orange at that point). After that, I joined Apple and I have been there for almost 5 years now.
At the same time I was working at Orange, I began to read the “ Interpretation of the Dreams”, I was very curious about it and began to attend Psychoanalysis seminars. Since then, I have been training to become a psychoanalyst at the same time I was working and now I am having my patients.
You might think that all this ran very smoothly but… it didn’t. Let me tell you how it actually was: First of all, for me it was difficult to begin from scratch in an industry I didn’t know. The mindset you “develop” in the law/ banking industry is very different form the mindset in a start up or in a creative company such as Apple. Also, coming from a very elitist university most of my friends already had a good job with a good salary. Having to begin from the very bottom, not even a permanent role, made me feel like a looser, I thought: why are they all doing so well? Why am I not? Apart from not being very successful in my professional career… while most of my successful friends were getting married, even having kids, I was single and… my love stories were not the best. I am not the type of girl whose dream is to get married but the truth is that I felt unhappy.
At that point, for me, being different felt very uncomfortable, psychoanalysis helped me think differently and opened my mind. I realised that “being different is ok”. In fact, I realise that I was single but I was happy, it was the idea – prejudice – of being single that was making me unhappy. And I was not a loser, I just was not following the same path the others around me were following. I was building my own one. We all have different paths. Psychoanalysis is like poetry: it opens up possibilities. It helps you build things that are not there before. It helped me build a life that I like when I didn’t even know what I liked: I didn’t know I wanted to become a psychoanalyst and now I already have some patients. When I was happy being single, I met the boyfriend I love and I am building with him the relationship I want. Thanks to psychoanalysis, instead of putting my energy in phantasies, prejudices, anger, fear, judgement, frustration… and waste my time being anxious and pissed off I put my energy in reality and built a life.
If you ask me… why I became a psychoanalyst? Because I want people to have a more free, full, happy life.