Rosa F. Brissos

Rosa F. Brissos Multipassionate Researcher and Coach.

I was being stung — and I could not feel it.It was a dream.The mechanism was not.Pain is not a damage meter.It is an exp...
31/08/2026

I was being stung — and I could not feel it.

It was a dream.

The mechanism was not.

Pain is not a damage meter.

It is an experience your nervous system constructs from far more than what is happening in the tissue:

Threat.
Context.
Attention.
Expectation.
What your body believes it needs to do next.

Melzack and Wall cracked that door open in 1965.

Sixty years later, the language is more sophisticated, but the principle survived:
nociception is not pain.

And under acute threat, something stranger can happen.

The nervous system can turn the volume down.

Because sometimes the most useful thing is not:

Feel everything.

It is:

Stay still.
Keep breathing.
Get through this first.

There are endogenous pain-inhibiting systems designed for exactly that.

Which means the absence of pain in the moment does not necessarily mean:
Nothing happened.

Sometimes it means:

Feeling it was not the priority yet.

I have done this awake.

In meetings.

In relationships.

Across whole stretches of my life.

Function beautifully.

Stay useful.

Keep moving.

Then, when the situation is over and the body no longer has to prioritise getting through it — something arrives.

Fatigue.

Pain.

Anger.

Grief.

And the bewildering question:
Why is this hitting me now? I was fine when it happened.

Maybe you were not fine.

Maybe you were functional.

Those are not the same thing.

And that distinction has changed the way I understand an enormous amount of my own history.

The full essay is on Substack today — including the number I think far more people should know, and the third word for pain almost nobody has been taught.

Tell me in the comments:
What did you only feel once it was safe enough to feel it? ❤︎

30/08/2026

I’m taking five people to Colombia at the end of January.

And I want to give you the version without the incense around it.

This is not a retreat you simply buy.

And I am not going to promise you transformation.

I have watched too many people be sold an outcome before anyone has even met their nervous system.

What I am offering is quieter—and considerably more serious:

Preparation.
Accompaniment.
Integration.

Three calls before we leave.

Eight days together in Colombia.

Two calls after we return—for the part psychedelic culture is still strangely good at forgetting:

coming home.

I will be a guest on someone else’s land, working alongside my mentor and his family and in a tradition that is not mine.

I am not the authority there.

I will not cosplay one.

My role is different.

To prepare you properly.

To pay attention.

To help hold the relational and therapeutic container around the experience.

And to still be there when the extraordinary part is over and Tuesday morning comes back.

Why only five?

Because I want to know who I am taking.

I want enough capacity to notice when someone goes quiet.

To recognise when “I’m fine” does not quite match the body saying it.

To stay close enough that nobody becomes anonymous inside the group.

Five allows that.

Fifteen would be a different offering.

There is an application.

Then there is a conversation.

And yes, some people will hear no.

That is not exclusivity theatre.

That is what screening is supposed to do.

You should be more suspicious of a psychedelic container that accepts everyone than one willing to lose the sale.

30 January – 7 February 2027.

Five places.

Applications close 15 September 2026.

It is an application, not a checkout.

Nobody takes a place without speaking with me first.

And if something in you leaned forward while reading this — don’t turn that immediately into a sign from the universe.

Get curious.

Then read the details.

Link in bio ❤︎

29/08/2026

Nobody tells you how ordinary the first hour looks.

So people arrive braced.

For excavation.
For catharsis.
For someone to make them relive the worst thing that ever happened to them.

That is not what happens.

You will not be asked to force a memory.

You will not be asked to lie on the floor and breathe until something dramatic appears.

And I will not give you a diagnosis.

I am not qualified to do that, and I have no interest in borrowing authority I have not earned.

What actually happens is much less cinematic.

You tell me about the thing you keep circling.

And while you talk, I pay attention.

To the sentence you rush through.

The joke that arrives exactly when something gets close.

The breath you stop taking.

The place your body tightens while your mouth says:

“It’s fine.”

That is where we get curious.

Not:

What is wrong with you?

But:

What is your system protecting you from having to feel, know, ask for, or admit?

The surprising part is how normal the room still looks.

Two people talking.

No performance.

No breakthrough music swelling in the background.

And then, sometimes, something someone has organised their life around for years gets said plainly for the first time.

Not dragged out.

Not manufactured.

Just finally noticed.

That is usually the moment people were not prepared for.

The First Hour

60 minutes · one-to-one · €35 while I complete my Compassionate Inquiry certification pathway.

The rate changes when I certify.

Comment SESSION or book through the link in my bio. ❤︎

28/08/2026

On Monday I told you what science forgot to measure in women.

Today, the opposite:

One variable they actually checked.

Four times.

The claim is simple:

Oestradiol and progesterone change → CYP3A4 changes → drugs hit differently across your cycle.

Plausible.

Except when researchers measured women, large phase-related changes kept not showing up.

1997: no significant difference.
1998: no phase variation.
1999: no significant difference.
2021: 26 hormone-confirmed cycles. Still no significant phase effect.

Here’s the part wellness tends to skip:
A mechanism can be real and still not matter at the dose your body actually produces.

Oestradiol and progesterone can influence CYP3A4 in liver cells.

But the stronger effects appear at concentrations closer to pregnancy than an ordinary menstrual cycle.

That gap matters.

A receptor is not an outcome.
A cell is not a woman.
Plausibility is not pharmacokinetics.

And the twist?

Researchers have found more consistent CYP3A4 differences between women and men than between different weeks of the female cycle.

So we got sold the fluctuation — and barely discussed the s*x difference.

Small studies. Subtle effects may still exist.

But large, clinically obvious cycle swings in CYP3A4 have been looked for repeatedly and have not shown up consistently.

Less s*xy.

Better science.

Comment SESSION for The First Hour. 60 minutes · one-to-one · €35 ❤︎

For most of my life, I treated my inconsistency as a character flaw.Some weeks I could hold nine things, train hard, sol...
27/08/2026

For most of my life, I treated my inconsistency as a character flaw.

Some weeks I could hold nine things, train hard, solve a problem and have the difficult conversation.

Other weeks I could hold a mug.

Same brain.
Same work.
Same woman.

Allegedly.

So naturally, I developed a very sophisticated theory about what was wrong with me.

The theory was:
Try harder.
Be more disciplined.
Stop being like this.

Which is particularly funny when you remember I have a PhD in medicinal chemistry.

Because it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice something fairly obvious:
I was not observing a personality defect.

I was observing a biological system that changes on a rhythm.

Oestradiol and progesterone are not mood weather.

They are signalling molecules.

They have receptors.

They alter physiology.

And their concentrations do not politely remain constant because you scheduled the same workload every Monday.

My body was running a cyclical endocrine experiment —and I was giving it performance reviews.

That sentence has rearranged something in me.

Because perhaps consistency was never supposed to mean:
produce the same output under different internal conditions.

Perhaps consistency is knowing the system well enough to work with what is actually there.

And no — this does not mean every difficult Tuesday is your hormones.

Sleep matters.
Stress matters.
Nutrition matters.
Illness matters.
Life matters.

That is precisely the point.

Good instrumentation asks what changed before it calls the system defective.

I spent years calling this variation a discipline problem.

Now I get curious about the variable.

Much better science.

Much kinder life.

Tell me: What have you been calling a discipline problem that might actually be data? ❤︎

25/08/2026

We have been giving psychedelics to cycling bodies —and treating the cycle like background noise.

A new review in Molecular Psychiatry just put the problem in one place.

Oestradiol and progesterone can influence:

5-HT2A receptor availability.
Gastric transit and absorption.
Body-water distribution.
CYP enzymes involved in psychedelic metabolism.
And brain networks psychedelics themselves disrupt and reorganise.

In other words:

There are multiple biological reasons to suspect hormonal state matters.

And then comes the sentence that should make everyone in this field slightly uncomfortable:
“Direct human data for psychedelics remain absent.”

Not contradictory.
Not inconclusive.
Absent.

We can describe the mechanism beautifully.

We still cannot tell you, with good human evidence, exactly how a psilocybin experience changes on day 3 versus day 21 of your cycle.

And that distinction matters.

Because this is exactly where wellness loves to commit a small intellectual crime:
plausible mechanism → confident prescription.

So no, I am not going to sell you your “optimal psychedelic week.”

I don’t know it.
Neither does the literature.

What we do know is enough to start asking better questions.

Where are you in your cycle?

Are you using hormonal contraception?

What medications are you taking?

Are you postpartum, perimenopausal, menopausal?

Does your mood, pain, sleep or nervous system reliably change across those states?

That is not feminine fluff around pharmacology.

That is pharmacology.

And until the trials catch up, good practice means refusing to pretend the missing variable does not exist.

The science is not telling us the answer yet.

It is telling us what we forgot to measure.

I take that level of detail seriously in the room.

The First Hour
60 minutes · one-to-one · €35 while I complete my Compassionate Inquiry certification pathway.

Comment SESSION or book through the link in my bio ❤︎

The reason female animals were left out of the research was written down.Too troublesome.Beery & Zucker audited ten fiel...
24/08/2026

The reason female animals were left out of the research was written down.

Too troublesome.

Beery & Zucker audited ten fields of mammalian research.

Male bias appeared in eight.

Neuroscience was the worst: single-s*x studies using male animals outnumbered female-only studies 5.5 to 1.

The justification?

Female mammals were believed to be more variable. Hormonal cycling would complicate the data. Better to exclude the fluctuation than deal with it.

Except — the assumption was “without foundation.”

And when researchers later compared nearly 300 studies, female mice were no more variable than males across behavioural, physiological, morphological and molecular measures. On several traits, males were more variable.

Which is where this stops being a story about laboratory mice.

Because I spent years running the same experiment on myself.

My body changed on a schedule — energy, appetite, strength, cognition, tolerance, need for rest — and instead of asking what the fluctuation was telling me, I treated the fluctuation as the problem.

Science called it confounding variability.

I called it:

Why can’t I just be consistent?

Different vocabulary.

Same verdict.

If the signal moves, distrust the signal.

And perhaps that is the part worth interrogating.

Because variability is not necessarily noise.

Sometimes variability is the data.

A rhythm is not a character flaw because your measurement system was built for a straight line.

And your body was never required to become less complex simply because complexity is inconvenient to study.

Now I want to know:

What have you been calling a character flaw that might actually be a rhythm nobody taught you to read?

Tell me in the comments. ❤︎

Some friends are for the 3 a.m. conversation.Some are for the tax return.Both matter.I have people who can meet me in th...
21/08/2026

Some friends are for the 3 a.m. conversation.

Some are for the tax return.

Both matter.

I have people who can meet me in the deep end — grief, consciousness, attachment, the strange corners of being human — and it is one of the great pleasures of my life.

I have others who cannot go there at all.

I love them just as much.

They are the people I call for the things I am spectacularly bad at:

Taxes.
Bikes.
Ordinary logistics I somehow find harder than the neurochemistry of attachment.

Different people.

Different load ratings.

Same love.

The mistake is not having friends who cannot hold every part of you.

The mistake is taking one person, assigning them every role in your life, and then resenting them for a specification they never claimed to meet.

Your 3 a.m. person may be terrible in an emergency.

Your practical friend may never want to discuss the architecture of your childhood wound.

That does not make either relationship shallow.

It makes it accurately placed.

Maturity is not finding one person who can hold everything.

It is knowing who can hold what — and loving people without constantly testing them against jobs they never applied for.

Stop asking every relationship to carry the same load.

Some are bridges.

Some are anchors.

Some are simply the person who knows how to fix your bike while you explain dopamine to them.

All real.

Tell me which one you are in someone’s life.

I genuinely read every reply ❤︎

I used to ask questions I already knew the answer to.Not because I was curious.Because I was managing the room.I could o...
20/08/2026

I used to ask questions I already knew the answer to.

Not because I was curious.

Because I was managing the room.

I could often see the shape of something quickly — but I had learned that saying it too soon changed the temperature.

Someone would go quiet.

Defensive.

Start performing.

So I slowed down.

Asked the question.

Let them arrive first.

For years, I called that humility.

It wasn’t.

Humility is knowing where your certainty ends.

This was making myself easier to receive.

And the shrinking was not even the expensive part.

The expensive part was the surveillance underneath it:

How much of me can this person tolerate?

How direct can I be?

How intelligent?

How certain?

How alive?

And then becoming 10% smaller half a second before anyone had to ask.

That kind of adaptation can look incredibly socially skilled.

Because it is.

You become excellent at reading the room — and increasingly terrible at noticing the cost of always being the one adjusting to it.

There is still a part of me that asks:

Did I say too much?

Did I talk too much?

Was I too direct?

I know the answer now.

But old adaptations do not disappear simply because you caught them in the act.

They just stop getting the final vote.

And this is the sentence I keep coming back to:

Nobody was ever served by me knowing less so they could feel more comfortable.

There is a difference between humility — and editing yourself into something easier to digest.

Comment SESSION if you want ninety minutes to find out what you have been managing in the room instead of simply being in it ❤︎

19/08/2026

Ask your therapist what happens when they get you wrong.

Not if.

When.

Because they will.

The question is what happens in the next ninety seconds.

Do they get curious?

Can you say, “That didn’t land” without suddenly having to take care of them?

Do they defend the interpretation — or become interested in the fact that they missed you?

That is not a soft skill around therapy.

It is the important part of the work.

A 2018 meta-analysis looked at 11 studies involving 1,314 patients.

Successful rupture repair was moderately associated with better therapy outcomes.

And a new 2026 multilevel meta-analysis found the other half of the story: Across four publications and 301 clients, alliance ruptures themselves were associated with poorer outcomes.

Small evidence base.

Real limitation.

I would rather tell you that than make the science sound s*xier than it is.

But together, the findings ask a very useful question:

What does your therapist do with the moment they stop understanding you?

Because good therapy is not a relationship in which nothing goes wrong.

It is one where the rupture becomes information.

Where disagreement does not cost you the relationship.

Where your no does not create punishment.

Where “you misunderstood me” can become the beginning of something — instead of the moment you learn to disappear again.

So before you ask whether someone is “trauma-informed,” ask:

What happens here when you get it wrong?

Their answer will tell you considerably more.

I put two more questions I would ask before booking anyone — including me — on the blog.

Link in bio.

Comment SESSION if you want the ninety minutes ❤︎

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