What if the thing
you've been looking for
isn't more talk 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.

Wir waren im Urlaub in den Bergen. Ein wunderschönes Hotel. Ein privates Spa. Ein Ort, an dem sich das Leben wie kuratiert anfühlt: warme Sauna, sprudelnder Whirlpool, Sekt, frisches Obst, ein Blick auf schneebedeckte Gipfel, der fast unecht wirkt. Meine Zwillinge wurden betreut. Mein Mann war an meiner Seite. Die Welt war still geworden, auf diese luxuriöse Art und Weise, für die Menschen viel Geld bezahlen – das Versprechen der Leichtigkeit.

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.

Weil das Äußere so gut aussah, kam ich zu dem einzigen Schluss, der mir logisch erschien: Ich muss undankbar sein. Ich muss kaputt sein. Ich muss ein Betrüger sein.

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.

Ich tat, was viele ehrgeizige Menschen tun: Ich baute mir ein Leben auf, das den Anschein erweckte, dass es mir gut ging.

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.

Von außen sah es nach Kompetenz aus. Innen sah es nach Panik aus, die als Produktivität getarnt war.

Dann kam die Angst vor Krebs. Es stellte sich heraus, dass es nichts Bösartiges war, aber die Angst selbst hat etwas in mir zerbrochen. Es war, als hätte mein Körper endlich gesagt: Es reicht. Und ich verfiel in eine Depression – nicht wie im Film, sondern eher still: eine, in der man zwar weiterhin präsent ist, aber langsam verschwindet.

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?

Dieser Gedanke erschreckte mich – nicht nur, weil er da war, sondern weil er mit einer ruhigen Logik einherging, die ihn möglich erscheinen ließ. Und dann verschwand er aus genau einem Grund: Ich wusste, was meine Mutter hinterlassen hatte. Ich wusste, welchen Schaden eine solche Entscheidung bei den Menschen anrichtet, die danach weiterleben müssen. Das konnte ich meinen Söhnen nicht antun.

Also blieb ich. Aber das schuf eine ganz besondere Art von Hölle: Ich kann nicht leben, und ich werde nicht sterben.

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.

Ich meldete mich krank. Ich begann zu meditieren. Ich begann, mich über Depressionen, Traumata und das Nervensystem zu informieren. Ich änderte meine Ernährung. Ich begann mit der langsamen, unspektakulären Arbeit, mich selbst zu stabilisieren. Nach Jahren der Schlaflosigkeit begann ich wieder zu schlafen – und dann passierte etwas, das sich immer noch surreal anfühlt, wenn ich es beschreibe: Nach Jahren der Depression verschwand sie plötzlich von einem Tag auf den anderen.

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.

Zu dieser Zeit entdeckte ich die Hypnotherapie und später die Pflanzenmedizin. Und ich möchte hier ganz genau sein: Psychedelika waren kein Wundermittel. Sie waren keine Abkürzung. Sie waren ein Katalysator – aber nur, weil ich mich zuvor stabilisiert hatte.

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 psychedelic-assisted therapy retreat in Europe: 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, Gründerin und leitende Moderatorin