About me
The woman I was trying to hold on to
For years, I thought the hardest part of moving to another country would be starting over. I was wrong. I had already started over once.
What I had not understood was how different it feels to start over when so many of the things that once made you feel capable, independent and like yourself no longer work in the same way.
When I moved to the Netherlands, I suddenly needed help buying a train ticket. Okay, maybe not quite. But I did need help with the doctor, the supermarket, phone calls, paperwork and pretty much anything that involved Dutch. The woman who had always figured things out suddenly could not even explain what she wanted.
That was when I realised something I had not understood before. You can change your country, your career, your relationship, your circumstances and even build the life you once dreamed about, while still carrying old rules and ways of responding into it.
That is where my story really begins.
The life I built
I come from Fortaleza, in the northeast of Brazil, and for a long time I was a woman looking for her purpose.
I built a career in Human Resources, later found my way into entrepreneurship and eventually created an online bakery that became known within the Brazilian community in the Netherlands. I tried different paths, always looking for something that felt meaningful.
For years, I thought finding my purpose meant finding the right career. I would eventually discover it in a completely different way: by trying to understand myself.
The year that changed everything
In 2019, I moved to the Netherlands for love. There were many things I genuinely loved about being here: the tulips, the safety, the bikes, the snow that appears approximately once every geological era, and streets I wasn't afraid to walk down at night.
But appreciating a country is not the same as feeling at home in it. Culture shock was real for me too. I missed Brazil, my language, my people and the ease of knowing how life worked. I sometimes had to rehearse a sentence before saying it out loud. A trip to the doctor could require preparation. A phone call about a wrong order could become a group project. Little by little, one person became my language, my paperwork and much of my social world.
There was loneliness too. And somewhere in all of that, I stopped recognising myself. The problem was that the woman I kept comparing myself to was the Rebeca I had been in Brazil. But I was no longer living her life, and I was no longer exactly her either.
Moving countries had not created everything I was struggling with. It had added challenges of its own, while also exposing old rules and ways of responding that I had carried with me. I was trying to build a new life while still measuring myself against an old version of who I had been.
I had to understand who I was becoming, what still belonged to me, what no longer did, and what I actually wanted from the life I was building.
What I was carrying
My early years were not easy.
I grew up with different forms of abuse. I knew that some things were wrong, but when the environment around you makes them feel normal, you don't always leave with a clear explanation. You leave with feelings, reactions and ways of seeing yourself that can follow you for years.
I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did, so I searched for answers. I worked with psychologists, tried different forms of therapy, took medication and turned to courses and books. Some of it helped, and I learned a great deal about myself. But I still felt there was something I could understand intellectually without knowing how to change emotionally.
I became very good at explaining myself. I also became very good at hiding what I was struggling with. People could look at my life and think I was doing well while, privately, I was still trying to understand why certain things had such a strong hold on me.
I knew a lot about myself. I just didn't yet know how to change what kept repeating.
What finally changed
Then I found TRG.
In my first session, we worked with one memory I had carried for years. By the end of the session, I could still remember exactly what had happened, but I could think about it without experiencing the same pain. I still remember how strange that felt.
That experience changed the direction of my search. For years, I had concentrated on understanding myself. From then on, I became interested in what could happen when we worked with the emotional reactions connected to those experiences, rather than only trying to understand them.
And life, of course, did not stop while I figured any of this out. I was learning Dutch, raising a child and running my bakery at the same time.
But somewhere in that process, something else became clear. I realised how much I cared about helping other people understand and work through what they were carrying too.
I know what it is like to be the woman everyone thinks is doing well while privately struggling with something nobody can see. I also know what it is like to begin experiencing your own life differently.
Eventually, I decided to close my bakery while it was still growing, because by then I knew what I wanted to do with everything I had learned.
I found my purpose
Understanding yourself matters. But you can know exactly why you react the way you do and still find yourself having the same reaction. What helps then is someone who knows how to work with what is still giving that reaction its emotional weight.
I know that place because I have been there.
That lived experience is part of what I bring to this work, alongside my professional training. I am a Master TRG Therapist, the highest therapist level awarded by CITRG, and have completed five advanced training programmes in the method. What began as a search to understand myself eventually became the work I chose to dedicate myself to.
My interest in the mind, behaviour and emotional patterns began more than ten years ago, first because I wanted to understand my own experience, and later because I couldn't stop learning.
My work has structure. There is a reason for what we do, and you will always know where we are in the process and what we are working towards. Because I have been through the process myself, I also understand what it feels like to sit on the other side of the screen. You don't have to make your story smaller to make it easier to tell me.
I work with women living abroad, whether they moved for love, family, opportunity or a new beginning. Some love the life they have built. Some struggle with the life they are living. Many feel somewhere in between. What they often have in common is the sense that somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling fully like themselves.
You can come exactly as you are. In English or Portuguese. Online, from wherever you are.
My goal isn't simply for you to feel better during our session. I want the work to follow you into the life you actually live: into the way you respond, speak to your child, love your partner, set boundaries, make decisions and experience yourself.
Because when something changes in you, it rarely stops with you.