Ethics of the Body vs. Ethics of the System: What Happens When a Therapist Grows Up

Yesterday I read a text by my colleague Morena in which she emphasized that ethics in unregulated trainings has to be a public topic.

I agree with most of what she wrote, but I also want to underline that ethics depends a great deal on the observer's perspective and position.

In my own work, I have made wrong judgments and ethical mistakes that I am not proud of.

At the same time, there were moments when I acted in ways that would be condemned by the ethics of one system, while in another system the exact same action would be considered highly ethical.

That is why these questions do not have simple answers. In the end, ethical questions always reach deep into the body, into its wisdom and its truth.

The text touched me personally and took me back to 2005, to a time when I was a young mother searching for a way to be a better mother to my child, and with that intention I enrolled in the training Morena mentioned, without realizing what I was actually stepping into.

Her text reminded me of the long road I have crossed, from searching for rescue and guidance in systems to finding strength in my own silence and in my own body.

I feel moved to share my story, because I believe someone might feel supported and encouraged to share theirs, just as Morena's text moved me to write mine.

Let us spread love and integration through writing.

The roots that hold us

My story begins long before that training. It begins in the darkness of my grandfather's mine, in the illness and silence of my grandmother, both of them carrying the trauma of war in their bodies, and in the courage of my parents, who believed in love and built a shared home despite the divisions and intolerance surrounding them.

My roots brought yet another war into my life. Another family displacement. Insecurity and the fear of not belonging.

I grew up trying to be "good," "successful," and "strong," without knowing that beneath that mask I carried deep sorrow that was not only mine, but the sorrow of my roots.

Bulimia was my first painful wake-up call. Inside me I carried a sense of inferiority that I hid behind the mask of a healthy athlete, always ready for action and always smiling.

When I decided to take off the mask and ask for help, I chose the conventional professional route, and sadly I ran into an indifferent "popular and much-talked-about" psychiatrist who did not love his work. Antidepressants and vitamin B were not enough, and for the next two years I sank into silence and hit bottom. A person with regulated education and a whole system standing behind him was unethical in a different way, because if he had been ethical, he would have said the truth: I do not love this work and I am not devoted to my clients. Maybe it would be better for me to leave this office and do something else.

Lessons in belonging

Then love appeared in my life. Siniša's sentence, "I can see you're smiling, but your eyes are sad," shattered me, and at the same time lifted me out of the dark and gave me hope. I was seen. I started to feel myself.

That was the moment I reached for the training I mentioned. Through it I received what I had looked for in psychiatry and had not received.

I received a lot of support.

They gave me space for drama, pain, grief, expression, and I sincerely believe they saved my life. I am deeply grateful to all three teachers who guided me.

I loved that community. I loved the sense of belonging. I loved the methods of work, and although they were sometimes brutal, the whole process helped me recognize my mechanisms more easily.

And yes, the exercise with noise that Morena mentioned helped me personally recognize my schizoid escape, because I had no contact with my body at that time, so the shock helped me strongly "leave the body" while also showing me how often that mechanism was present in everyday life.

Through years of working with people I began questioning myself: does it really have to be that brutal? I came to the conclusion that some people like brutality because it moves them, while for others it is simply too much.

Today I work by asking for the person's consent if I am going to use a method that is not gentle, so one part of that person's consciousness has consciously chosen the experience.

In any case, through that training I began loosening my bulimic, critical ego and confronting the traumas woven into my nervous system.

I discovered how powerful the group and the group process can be, and I passionately wanted to create more spaces like that.

Under the umbrella of that training, I began building such a community in Osijek, putting my heart and my whole self into an education I believed in.

At that time, I was not financially dependent on it, because I supported myself through my yoga studio, so the crumbs I got from the teachers were fine with me. My main desire was to create a space for group dynamics and be part of a community.

My story in Osijek was a story of giving. For years I built, gathered generations, filled halls with energy and with people thirsty for growth. At one point, our Osijek group had more participants than the center in Zagreb.

I remember one moment especially well. I invited Tomi, a colleague from my year, to lead a workshop called "Natural Parenting in Osijek." When his ad and effort brought in fifteen people I did not know, a light went on inside me. Such ease of collaboration. My fifteen and his fifteen. Beautiful. Easy.

That was when I finally understood that my Eros was what moved mountains. I was the one moving this education in Osijek.

It did not depend on the institution's stamp, but on the depth of my personal growth and the integrity I carried in front of clients.

That was the moment I started asking for more than crumbs. I asked them not to force our students to go to Zagreb for the third and fourth year. Or if that was truly a condition, then I should come there as their teacher under equal conditions.

The moment I stepped into my own authority and asked for fairer terms, the door slammed shut. They refused.

It was not easy to hear no, but the decision was made. I refused to keep working under the old conditions. I left them with the students from the year already in progress and said I was withdrawing and ending the collaboration.

The punishment for growing up came next

I repeated my old wound with new authorities. I felt shock and disbelief. Overnight I was discredited. I was thrown out of the community and listened to stories about myself that were not true. Anger and passive aggression dragged on for months.

Even though I had completed six years of training, my name disappeared from the list of therapists.

I watched rules being changed on the fly, and that was very hard to digest.

It was not only a betrayal by authority. My faith in everything I was doing, and everything I believed in, was shaken.

It took me a long time to move through that pain and continue believing in process, in the body-oriented approach, and in the maturation of consciousness.

Life brought me to that place to teach me a painful lesson: sometimes the systems we belong to stop supporting us the moment we begin to grow beyond their frame. I survived it once. I would survive it again. And I did. I grew out of that experience into who I am today. I am no longer afraid to spread my wings and stretch frames that are too narrow.

My separation from that former tribe was not an act of aggression. It was an act of survival for my own authenticity.

Today I do not look at it as a fight, but as a necessary step toward freedom.

I recognized the cult inside the structure I had belonged to.

On one side, contact with that community gave me the greatest gift because my wings grew there. On the other side, I experienced deep betrayal and pain because the frame was too narrow and I had no space to spread those beautiful wings.

I learned what kind of parent I want to be, and what my priorities will be when my own children outgrow my frames.

I learned the lesson. I turned my back on the cult and returned once again toward a more conventional structure.

I enrolled in a Gestalt master's program and found myself in a community that was organized in a much healthier way. The rules did not change overnight there, and the community was under scrutiny from various sides, so it felt safer. But at the same time it was more stiff, more rigid, with much more mental energy and much less passion and life spark.

I missed bodywork, expression, and regulation of the nervous system, and by chance during that period of my life I discovered Tantra tools and ISTA in parallel.

I started integrating bodywork into my Gestalt path.

That combination of structure and deep bodywork became my perfect ratio and my resource.

I learned a lot about supervision and supervisory leadership. I learned how therapists can become support and resource for one another, rather than a threat.

Gestalt brought me a lot of maturation and integration, and ISTA brought a different perspective and greater freedom to work with the body through agreed consent.

I managed to heal my wounds inside the Gestalt community, but at the same time I became more and more aware of the shadow energies appearing there too.

The competition hanging in the air between the Würzburg and Maltese Gestalt directions was the first thing I noticed, and when I finished my training, the psychotherapy law in Croatia was just being changed. Dust rose everywhere because the struggle for power had started.

Right when I should have proudly entered the chamber, I was witnessing power games and ego stories that mattered more than real work with people and the profession itself. I heard things my ears should never have had to hear. I witnessed shadow parts of the system hiding behind polished ego and politics.

I quietly turned my back and stepped aside. Not out of anger. Out of peace.

I choose where I want to invest my energy. I want to invest it in becoming conscious of my own shadow and in contact with my clients.

That is the place where I feel fulfilled. Politics was never my thing.

Maybe I made a poor move for myself professionally and in terms of career, but my heart is peaceful and aligned with my soul.

I know what my priorities are. My finances do not depend on my clients, so I can choose how I want to work and with whom.

My door is open to those who are tired of adapting to systems.

Big or small. Alternative or conventional. Corporate or spiritual.

For those who, like me, carry the burdens of their ancestors and are looking for a way to heal them and lay them down on the earth.

My expertise is woven into every hour I spent healing my own pain and into every moment in which I dared to stand alone, aligned with myself.

I no longer seek permission to be who I am.

I am here to help you find the path to your own truth, as gently or as strongly as your body needs at this moment.

Today, with some distance, I am grateful for that no.

That no forced me to look for communities that are not afraid of the strength of the individual, communities that celebrate difference and personal power. Since living the philosophy of 3S, sovereignty, sacredness, and living Eros, I feel the sense of community behind my back even when I am not directly involved in its work.

It taught me I can live my truth even if the price is sticking out beyond the frame. In the end, frames do change over time.

Science is only now discovering some things shamans have been passing down for years.

Who knows in what direction society will move when science brings knowledge that today still feels indigestible and unimaginable to us.

I am honestly curious what ethics will look like then.

Today I choose integrity over label.

Today I live in Osijek, but it feels as if I live in Berlin.

If a tool helps my clients and it does not fit into an official box, I will still use it, with prior agreement and the person's consent, of course.

Because I learned one great truth that no chamber can prescribe:

Contact between two people is a greater medicine than any rule imposed from outside.

Maybe I will not be called what the system says I should be called, but I will be what the client needs:

A human being who sees another human being.

In the end, all stories come down to the same thing.

Look at hospitals. If you end up there, you hope you meet a warm doctor who explains the procedure and a gentle nurse.

Look at schools. You hope your child will have an empathetic teacher who will devote herself to them in a human way.

Look at the people behind service counters. You hope to meet someone accommodating who helps you complete the bureaucracy with as few complications as possible.

Everything comes down to the human approach and to the person inside the system, not to the system itself.

In my case, you woke the Dragon Woman, and she no longer needs permission to fly. She flies because it is her nature.