Bianca Ceruța

I’ve been in Greece for two weeks now and loved every second of it. It’s the first summer in four years that I’m here, and it’s making me nostalgic for my time growing up here. I love everything about this country, even the stuff I used to hate about it.

One would say it’s just the nostalgia.

Nonetheless, I’ve been spending time with my family, taking my mother to post-treatment check ups, cooking, hanging out with Hris before he returned to Romania, doing dumb s**t with my brother, sun bathing and enjoying the sea.

I’ve been resting, deeply and wholeheartedly.

And today, on the last day of summer, I picked back my work with clients by having three sessions. I intentionally made sure to keep this week as light as possible - especially because my body needs time to return to the activation of work, entrepreneurship, studies, etc. I don’t want to overwhelm it - and I also want to make sure I take advantage of this Greek end of August and September.

“But how do I change this pattern?” is one of the most common questions I hear from clients, and one I remember asking my own therapist.

You change it in time, through a repeated, intentional, different response to a familiar situation.

Say a family member keeps minimising your emotions at the dinner table. You let it slide once, twice, three times. It keeps things pleasant for everyone, and the price is yours to pay: you make yourself smaller, the frustration spills into relationships that are actually good, and your nervous system learns that you will not have your own back.

As an adult, you have a choice. You can keep the old response, or you can pause, notice the tendency, and act. Name what they’re doing, ask them to stop, or leave the table.

You have your own back over and over, until that becomes the automatic response.

There’s no magic pill and no aha moment. Just your willingness to sit with the discomfort of doing things differently than what you know.

What’s one pattern you want to change?

Everything in this carousel is why insight alone doesn’t change relationships. You can understand your pattern completely and still watch your body run it in the next hard conversation, because the response lives in your nervous system, and the nervous system updates through experience rather than explanation.

That experience is the actual work, and it can’t be done alone, since a pattern learned in relationship only updates in relationship. If you caught yourself in slide 4, save this, and tell me in the comments which slide felt most familiar.

Slowing down lately has me noticing things about my internal world. Even after 10 years of doing the work, and being a therapist myself, I’m still relearning things about me.

One: very few people actually pay attention to me in public. Scary to admit we’re not that important to strangers, but also, what a freedom to be unseen sometimes.

Another: I’ve been punishing myself for the weight I gained last year. For someone who was always thin, that can feel like failure.

But it wasn’t anyone else judging me. It was me. And I forgot what these 10 years asked of my body:

- An artist diploma in violin performance at 17
- Leaving home for the Netherlands alone at 18
- An abusive relationship with a narcissist 16 years older
- A string of toxic relationships
- Realizing 14 years as a violinist wasn’t my path
- Panic attacks and sleepless nights letting go of a dream that wasn’t mine
- A pandemic
- Illness
- A double major, a student job, 4 years of somatic therapy training, all at once
- Falling in love with Hris
- Moving back to Romania after 15 years
- Building a business
- Getting married
- My mother’s cancer

My body is a warrior. I’ll take care of it, I’ll work toward feeling comfortable in it, but I won’t judge it anymore.

What did your body carry you through?

Save, share, spread the word.

Love more deeply, give more chances, mess up and stop trying to feel and heal so perfectly.

These are some of the beliefs I run my whole practice on and they’re based on my experience working with clients for five years now. Truly, at the end of the day, this is what a healthy nervous system actually means: not one that can feel “calm” all the time but one that can experience every single thing in life without collapsing, without freaking out, without punishing you for every little mistake.

Bottom line is: get out and live your life. Mess up, be anxious, get angry, experience it all and trust that you’ll be fine. That’s all.

Posting at midnight because my days are full of life and love these days and it’s the last thing in my mind to sit down and strategise Instagram or plan any business decision.

Long story short, your mind will convince you you’re the worst person of them all when you finally choose yourself, but it’s a lie. And it’s also a feeling that’ll pass, so don’t take it too seriously.

Or come work with me and I’ll brainwash you into making the best decisions for yourself every aspect of your life wise.

Sending you hugs,
Bianca