“Stop looking for answers start looking for yourself.”
Me.
Hey, my name is Zak Poyo and I'm a somatic psychotherapist with a private practice in Los Angeles. I want to start this off by saying how much I love all of this.
I never started any of this to write a book or be this super attractive rockstar psychotherapist. I started this journey because I needed help. I needed support and I had no one in my life that I could rely on to actually be there for me. I needed to learn how to show up for myself in the midst of a world that did not show up.
Everyone in my family, although well meaning, got lost in their own fragmentation. It was such a saddening and painful thing that happened to me and happens to so many others and so many other families. Oh what is ‘’fragmentation? We will get there.
The thing is that I wanted to break the cycle.
As a lost young man somehow I fell into some pretty incredible psychotherapy circles.
Circles that were remnants of the golden years of psychotherapy. When psychotherapy was in a place of excitement and experimentation. Every therapist had their own theories on why mental health difficulties existed and how to best navigate those difficulties.
There was a sense of healthy competition in the psychotherapy realm.
The power of the field to try and understand what was going on was pretty incredible.
We are in a very different place now with mental health.
In my opinion a lot of larger interests have used the role of a psychotherapist more as a medium to be able to sell their product than to actually be able to understand and heal the difficulties we see.
I have had much experience in school and in the field that
I know most therapists are lacking, they aren't lacking due to their own passion, they are lacking due to the fact they have been commandeered by some interest group or another. Unfortunately this is a lot of the world that we live in today.
Being a psychotherapist is such a weird job. it's the only job where your internal work is your business. The amount of work you* have done inside yourself coretales to your ability to be flexible and successful in room with clients.
The world we live in keeps a lot of psychotherapists in a box which they then take into the room*.
You have to be the leader in every room you go into. Everyone can help you but sometimes you need to teach them hos to
With that being said, just as I am here talking about the difficulties I see in the field of mental health and I want you to not to just trust those outside of yourself to lead you in the right direction.
I also do not want you to just trust me.
The main point of this book is for you to do your own internal work and understand you are the one to be trusted. You do the work, you connect to yourself, you listen to yourself. I will show you how.
In doing that you will know the difference between the BS and the gold that the world tries to present to you.
I was so lucky
I was 20 years old and my best friend's mom happened to be a therapist who taught at this institute in Venice, Ca at the Integrative Body psychotherapy institute.
Integrative Body psychotherapy was this really transformative somatic psychotherapy that was developed by this man named Jack Lee Rosenberg. (insert an illustration?)
The reason i'm writing this book is because i understand how lucky i got, I am not discounting the intense amount of perseverance and intensity I have to move forward but the only way I was able to implement that fire* was because I got lucky and fell into a kind of therapy that was effective and efficient.
I'm writing this book because not everyone is as lucky as I am. Not everyone happens to have a friend when they are young that can connect them with circles of therapists that are secretly changing the world.
I want everyone to have that opportunity. You most likely will never meet me or the circles of therapists that I found myself in. (I would say that one differential about you Zak is thhat you are a psychotherapist and I think you should really lean into that)
But I want you to have that same opportunity. There is nothing special about me as a human. If I can do this you can do this.
Trust me you can do this.
I'm just drawing the map for you to find yourself.
