I'm Patricio Ruiz Abrín.

I came to therapy as a child, because the school asked for it: the principal made my staying enrolled conditional on going.

The diagnosis was attention deficit and trouble with authority. Looking back, it was also a school that didn't know what to do with a restless kid.

Of course, with my family's history, I would also have had, and have had, things of my own to work through. At that point, you could say I was a little adult who struggled to be in what belonged to that moment and was always trying to stay two steps ahead of what my age called for.

I spent my last two years of primary school in psychoanalysis, with Laura Elena Ferrón, who looked at me and helped me see myself through other lenses. Four months into secondary school the bass player in my band died, and I went back to Laura Elena, this time to face the idea I had of myself, and the first loss of my adolescence. I stayed with her two more years and, when I changed schools for high school, did another period of analysis with my first male psychoanalyst, Jorge Mariné.

I left in my second year of university, and the panic attacks started. That's how I came to body-based therapy, in 2009: eight years with a body psychotherapist, Nina Ortega. I did three years of individual therapy, my first couples sessions, and from 2013 to 2017 group therapy. Watching other people work amazed me so much that I wanted to understand how it worked. In 2015 I began training at Instituto Córpore: the three-year practitioner programme and the postgraduate year. I then studied the Person-Centred Approach, and around then started Gestalt therapy with Rogerio Canto, between 2018 and 2019, and later with my teacher Gabriela Gordoa, between 2020 and 2021.

With the pandemic, the word “trauma” appeared as a category of my own experience. That led me to read Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine and Gabor Maté, and from there to Somatic Experiencing training, between 2022 and 2024, alongside almost four years of my own process with Alejandra Martí. The master's in systemic family therapy came later, guided by my mentor, Mariana Boccuzzi. I wanted to consolidate a clinical practice, and found that the systemic frame is flexible enough to hold everything that came before: from putting the person at the centre to taking the problem out of the person and placing it in their system.

I stayed because what can happen in a session still surprises me, and because accompanying someone through the change they are looking for is the work I want to do.

Approaches I integrate