Welcome to Jardim Psychoanalysis

My name is Tabata, and I believe in psychoanalysis because I have experienced it myself.

Personal analysis is an essential part of becoming a psychoanalyst. Before accompanying someone else through this deeply personal process, we are expected to experience it ourselves. For me, it became an important part of my own life for years before becoming one of the pillars of my training.

I started my analysis during a period when I felt lost and uncertain about who I was. I initially saw myself as the victim of all the relationships I had. I was always the one suffering, at the same time as I did my best to please. However, as I began to speak, explore and listen to myself more closely, I discovered that there was much more beneath the surface.

I began to understand parts of myself that I had never really questioned before. A person rarely looks back on the way they were brought up, especially coming from a loving family, to observe patterns and the meaning we give things. I came to see how some of the ways I related to other people had been shaped much earlier in my life.

For example, I had learned to associate love with saying yes. Saying no could feel almost like withholding love from someone. Saying no would make me te bad guy. I never explicity learnt this, but I grew up with the idea that anger was something bad, something that should be pushed away rather than understood. Therefore I forever avoided conflicts throughout my relationships. And all of those feelings, meanings, and many others, were “buried” in the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis gave me the opportunity to question these ideas rather than simply continue living according to them. It helped me understand where some of my feelings, reactions and patterns came from, and to recognise that understanding ourselves can create possibilities that were not visible before.

This is a large part of why I believe in psychoanalysis.

I don't believe we need to have ourselves completely figured out before we begin. Sometimes, we only need a place where we can speak freely enough to start discovering what has been there all along.

That is the kind of space I hope to offer at Jardim Psychoanalysis.