WONDERERS WANDER: MY JOURNEY to the heart of life
I am a psychologist and a cognitive-behavioral therapist, with a French and an American educational background. I have meaningful research and clinical experience in child psychology, adult psychology, and health psychology
Who am I?
I am a psychologist and a cognitive-behavioral therapist, with a French and an American educational background. I have meaningful research and clinical experience in child psychology, adult psychology, and health psychology. Across these wide areas of intervention, and the various cultures I lived in, the guiding line has always been to compare, contrast, and observe the specifics of each, while growing a richer mind frame of what’s plausible and what’s determined.
A Journey To The Heart of Life.
I started my graduate studies at the American University of Beirut. It was one of the greatest in the region for social sciences and gave a strong emphasis on scientific approaches and scientific methodology as a basis for psychology.
After graduating and completing a few internships in my country, I decided to move to France to become a clinical psychologist specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy. France was known to hold a strong psychoanalytic influence, but I had strong personal attachments to this country and I decided to go ahead anyway.
Little did I know, this “drawback” ended up being an advantage instead. The French market was saturated with traditional psychoanalytical approaches, and there was a rising demand for more pragmatic and innovative approaches. My so-called difference thus became a strength and got me a shot at the greatest hospitals in Paris where I developed both my clinical and research skills during my masters years.
But big city life wasn’t for me, and neither was I ready to settle down. I needed to explore more, discover, and make choices of my own. I spent a few years in French’s rural area, working in the social and medical-social field. After researching Non-Motor Symptoms of Parkinson’s disease at the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris, I found myself in the middle of a rural area working with child protection services, adults with disabilities, inmates, and so on and so forth. This experience shaped my becoming and got me one step closer to where I wanted to be. One step closer to humanity, in all its shapes and wonders.
I also took the time to live, travel, and grow through it all. I lived and learned Italian in Venice, organized a little world tour, met different cultures: this particular last step inspired this project. I met a lot of digital nomads, and nomads of all sorts, I came to understand their passions and their dreams as they were helping me build my own.
I founded this website in 2019, after 5 years of private practice. I had used online therapy many times in the past, and I decided to make it exclusive. I also started giving workshops, group practice analysis, and on-field consultancy interventions. In 2020, I spent an extra year of research at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genova. My aim was to understand social cognition and our relationships to the growing technologies of our world. I saw this as a natural evolution, given where my career was heading and my particular attraction to interdisciplinary fields.
Through it all, I never lost track of one thing: my clinical practice. Just as my life grew and developed, my online career did in parallel. These different life phases were slowly becoming… a journey to the heart of life.
I have recently taken some time off to dedicate myself exclusively to being and exploring/traveling, and have come to meet and observe all kinds of international people along the way. Being a so-called citizen of the world myself, I have been trying to understand what defines us: what unites us, what separates us.
Who am I – to you?
I am your colleague,
your companion,
your fellow human,
your therapist.
What do I do?
I reflect on life’s complexity in today’s society in my blog. I also help face it through online therapy and consults.
I am the observer of my thoughts and yours, dedicated to completing the painting of the richness of human life.
Who is this website dedicated to?
I would say life lovers, curious people with similar interests, and mostly citizens of the world. Let us unite our strengths and become our own web of resources: This blog is dedicated to anyone who wants to know and understand themselves better.
Adaptability Difficulties
Stress
Depression
Management Issues
Anxiety
Relationship Disorders
Why?
When we blur the frontiers of what defines us, when we cross out of the comfort zone, we grow tremendously – we adapt, we conquer, we evolve. Cultural norms have now been blurred, and preconceived roles are being questioned on a regular basis: personal values are our new frontiers, and self-priorities our new becoming.
However, the very capacity to adapt can come to our own detriment in some circumstances (another thing I’m interested in is the duality in everything!)
Where do we draw the line?
Where do we draw the line between mere adaptation – existence- and a wholesome experience of our lives?
How do we make sense of a life that is constantly reinventing itself and build a meaningful life and meaningful relationships, despite the movement?
Even more so: how to make this movement a wave, and how to become an ocean underneath? To acquire peace in a solid, anchor-self…
Where do we draw the line?
After all, as Marcel Proust once said, the only true, real voyage of discovery; consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eye – or a change of perspective .
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is (…) with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”