What if the thing
you've been looking for
isn't more therapy?

There is a memory I return to sometimes, not because it was dramatic, but because it exposed something I couldn’t explain at the time.

We were on holiday in the mountains. A beautiful hotel. A private spa. The kind of place where life feels curated: warm sauna, bubbling whirlpool, sparkling wine, fresh fruit, a view of snow-covered peaks that looks almost fake. My twins were being cared for. My husband was beside me. The world had gone quiet in that luxurious way people pay a lot of money for — the promise of ease.

And I remember lying there thinking: this is the moment I’m supposed to feel happy. But I didn’t. Not even a little.

What I felt instead was a heaviness that didn’t match the scene. A dark cloud, not in the poetic way, but in the clinical way — a dull atmosphere that followed me everywhere, even into places that should have felt like paradise. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t having a breakdown. I was functioning. I was smiling when I needed to. I was doing life. I just couldn’t feel life.

Because the outside looked so good, I made the only conclusion that seemed logical: I must be ungrateful. I must be broken. I must be a fraud.

That internal voice didn’t come from nowhere. My childhood had trained it into me. I grew up in Romania, in a German-speaking community, in a home where love didn’t feel safe. My mother was depressed. She could be violent. The worst part wasn’t even the hitting — it was the terror of never knowing when the next criticism, the next outburst, the next blow would come. When she died by suicide when I was sixteen, it shattered me, and in a strange way it also felt like a doorway out of a prison. It was freedom, and it was loss, and it imprinted something in me that I would only understand much later: that suffering can become a normal climate, and “functioning” can become a survival strategy.

I did what many driven people do: I built a life that looked like proof I was okay.

I worked hard. I became successful professionally. I moved to Germany because it felt like home in a way Romania never had. I had my twins at 32 and for a while I was a single parent. Anyone who has cared for two babies at once knows that you don’t “get tired.” You live in an altered state of exhaustion. You stop sleeping properly. Your body starts operating on stress hormones. And because I needed to keep everything afloat, I kept pushing.

I worked a demanding job, I freelanced on the side, I moved multiple times with small children, I barely slept for years — three hours, four hours, sometimes less. And when the children finally slept, I couldn’t anymore. Insomnia had become my baseline. My immune system was a mess. I was sick constantly. I didn’t call it burnout because I didn’t even have the concept for it back then. I just called it responsibility. Ambition.

From the outside, it looked like competence. Inside, it looked like panic disguised as productivity.

Then there was a cancer scare. It turned out not to be malignant, but the fear itself cracked something open. It was as if my system finally said: enough. And I slid into depression — not the movie version, but the quieter kind: the one where you keep showing up while slowly disappearing.

At home, things got harder. My marriage suffered. My husband didn’t understand what was happening — partly because I couldn’t explain it myself, and partly because the way conflict sounded in his voice woke up the little traumatised child inside me. In arguments, I wasn’t an adult anymore. I was sixteen. I was nine. I was five. I couldn’t find words. I could only defend myself with emotion, which made things worse. The fights got louder. The children got caught in it. And I watched myself becoming the kind of mother I never wanted to be: impatient, overwhelmed, unavailable, harsh.

One evening, driving home from work, a thought entered my mind that stopped me cold: what if I just don’t turn at the next bend?

That thought terrified me — not only because it was there, but because it arrived with a calm logic that made it feel possible. And then it disappeared for exactly one reason: I knew what my mother left behind. I knew the damage that kind of choice creates in the people who have to live afterward. I could not do that to my sons.

So I stayed. But that created a particular kind of hell: I cannot live, and I will not die.

I started searching for help in the ways people are taught to search: therapy, treatments, techniques, fixes. I went to a therapist; after two sessions he suggested inpatient treatment. For a moment, I felt relief — the idea of three weeks away from everything sounded like oxygen. I came home and told my husband, expecting support. What I got was: “And who will take care of the children?” And then we never spoke about it again. That was a quiet kind of heartbreak. Not because he was a villain — he wasn’t. He was a good man. But in that moment I realised something painful: even inside marriage, you can be alone.

I took sick leave. I began to meditate. I started learning about depression, trauma, nervous systems. I changed my diet. I began doing the slow, unglamorous work of stabilising myself. I started sleeping again after years of insomnia — and then something happened that still feels surreal when I describe it: after years of depression, it lifted suddenly from one day to the next.

Beauty came back. The ability to sense meaning returned. And along with that came grief: grief for the years I had lost, grief for the damage done, grief for the marriage, grief for the mother I never had, grief for the children’s childhood I had partially missed while I was physically present but internally gone.

Around that time I discovered hypnotherapy and later plant medicine. And I want to be very precise here: psychedelics were not the miracle. They were not a shortcut. They were a catalyst — but only because I had done the stabilisation first.

This is one of the biggest misunderstandings in the public conversation right now. People talk about psychedelic-assisted therapy as if it’s simply taking psychedelics with nicer music. Or they treat it like the new miracle cure. That framing is dangerous. Because insight does not transform you when your system is depleted. You can have the most profound realisation of your life and still wake up two days later living the same pattern, because your nervous system does not have the capacity to hold the change.

The question that could have saved me years was simple: Is your body capable of integrating anything right now?

This is why I built Vine of the Soul Retreats. Not as ceremonies, but as a structured therapeutic container: preparation before, safety during, integration woven through, and follow-up after. Because the medicine is not the map. The map is what helps people keep what they found.

— Bianca, Founder & Lead Facilitator