Chapter 2: The Wound of Worthiness
The Design of Healing Through Story and Reflection
“The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment... Expand the self-image and you expand the area of the possible.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded
Subchapter 1: Express Yourself
I was a fairly obnoxious 16-year-old—skinny, effeminate, obstinate, with an oddly sized head.
Hyper. Always interrupting class, talking back, undermining authority with a smirk or a charm offensive. Or as they call it here in LATAM, labia. In the DR, muela.
In 1989, while Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke were on-screen exploring the transformative power of poetry, self-expression, and non-conformity in Dead Poets Society, I was cleaning classrooms after school and leading prayer at Fairview Jr. Academy, deep in the foothills of the Inland Empire—a sprawling suburban desert two hours outside Los Angeles. (Think Breaking Bad meets Christian middle school.)
Though I had just come back from a year in a Dominican boarding school, I was already sporting a leather biker jacket and a curly mullet that bordered on a Jheri Curl when wet.
Clearly influenced by a steady, forbidden diet of Like a Prayer and Express Yourself on MTV. In hindsight the ’80s were an undeniably queer time.
Subchapter 2: Art Therapy
One quiet gift from my father’s second marriage was a relative who saw me drawing. They gave me The Big Book of Drawing by José María Parramón Vilasaló—and unknowingly gave me a lifeline.
It fed an obsessive focus on drawing and painting, opening up a world where I could finally breathe.
The self-portrait that opens this chapter was born during that time, using techniques from The Big Book of Drawing.
Not gonna lie—After High School, I loved my 9:00 AM Art History class at Pasadena City College. Three hours of slides—vases, frescos, sculptures, ruins—somehow flew by for my hunter brain.
That class left me with a lesson I still carry:
If you want to know a people, study their art.
That’s where the secrets of the past are buried.
Subchapter 3: Eyes That Speak
Recently, I brought this self-portrait—and every 35mm slide of my high school artwork, along with my dad’s 1970s slide collection—back to LATAM with me.
I wanted them scanned. Something told me there was a story waiting to surface, something cathartic, maybe.
When I first looked at that self-portrait again—beyond the mullet and the Frankenstein head proportions—I noticed the pained look in my eyes. A perturbed, silent sadness.
The moment I saw it on the light table I knew I had seen that look before.
It was the same look that came across my father’s face Thanksgiving of 2022, when I pushed too hard for stories about his father.
What I thought would be a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, triggered a full childlike anguished breakdown.
Which I attempted to sooth like a mother soothing a child.
So I dug deeper into my portrait to understand “the look”—by researching how self-portraiture reveals our how we see ourselves.
This led me to a not-so-crazy idea: ask the robots (AI) to analyze the self-portrait I drew at sixteen.
Here’s an edited excerpt from their response.
“This isn’t a neutral or flattering depiction. It’s intense, vulnerable, emotionally raw. You weren’t trying to look good—you were trying to be honest.”
Interpretation of the drawing:
Crown of Scribbles → Overthinking, mental chaos, burdened with too much awareness.
Wide Eyes → Hyper-vigilance, emotional maturity beyond your years, haunted but alert.
Tight Mouth → Holding in sadness, defiant resilience—there’s fight, not surrender.
Oversized Eyes → Deep need to be truly seen and mirrored back as whole and worthy.
Neck & Jaw → Fragile voice, vulnerability around truth, expression, and strength.
The look in my eyes mirrored something older, deeper—a wound not only inherited, but institutionalized.
I knew that the roots would be deeper, further down, down south, in Latin America.
Subchapter 4: The Roots of the Wound
Deep in conversation with a sound healer in Mexico, just days after a shared plant medicine ceremony in his community, we found ourselves speaking about the difficulty of training corporate teams inside companies in Latin America.
He had once worked for a big company, an industrial concern—as a technologist, and building training programs to empower executive teams and the rank and file employees.
These programs meant to help engage employees, to be open to the same innovative ideas that upper management was open to.
But the challenges ran deep.
People waited for orders before acting.
They hesitated to take initiative.
Responsibility was something passed, not held.
And long-term thinking? Rare.
The future stopped at Sunday. At the football game.
He shared that he had disagreed with upper management on the training approach.
He believed that more than “corporate training programs” were needed to get to the deeper root of the problems.
And then of course—as these conversations so often do for me—we landed on “The Wound.” Dun, dun, dunnnnnnn.
The father wound. What I call “The Wound of Latin America.”
We spoke of the many fathers—The stern and emotionally unavailable Mexican father with the home run by the “strong Mexican woman”.
The fathers who left one family to start another.
Those that left out of fear.
Of themselves, of missing out on a freedom they vaguely remembered, but that they actually never had.
Beneath it all, the deeper, silent, often unconscious wound that it’s not polite to speak of: the legacy of conquest, the colonial father who claimed us and then just disappeared.
At the end he left the company. Left corporate, all together. Left tech.
He had his own—extremely challenging journey of healing.
Overcoming a severe injury and trauma, the miracle of finding a healer.
And then becoming a (sound) healer himself. The wounded healer.
But back at Thanksgiving at my dads house in Orlando,
When I asked my father about his father, out of curiosity.
Out of a need to piece the story together.
I didn’t mean to cause any kind of pain.
But it surfaced anyway.
His response really surprised me and gave me a new understanding—not just of trauma, but of how deeply it echoes through time.
It gave me a new perspective on the “Begats” in Genesis—those long genealogies I once skimmed over, now pulsing with meaning.
They’re not just names. They’re lineages of pain, love, patterns… and healing still unfolding.
Back in Mexico, I had a flight to catch. So we wrapped up our long conversation about healing the wound of “The Father” in LATAM.
A tall order, but we agreed: There was a role—no, a calling—for a plant-medicine-based healing movement for men across Latin America.
And not just Latin America.
All the children of broken colonial empires.
The Philippines.
Vietnam.
Haiti.
The Dominican Republic.
Puerto Rico.
Panama.
____________ Ad yours here.
That conversation helped me really understand the role of the “collective wound”—that it wasn’t just me. It helped me understand what I saw and felt as I traveled through LATAM. It helped me see that there was a deeper story here.
But I wanted to know more of my own story. My father’s, my grandfather’s, my great-grandfather’s. I suspected that there might be evidence of this “wound” in those stories.
That meant researching and tracing the steps of my bloodline.
Subchapter 5: The Many Generations in Our DNA
“Epigenetics explains how trauma can be passed down many generations through chemical changes in DNA… resulting in shorter and unhealthier life spans.”
– Banta, Lisa, "The Wounded Inheritance: Epigenetics and the Family Line" (2021).
I’ve been digging deeper into ADHD lately. My middle brother was diagnosed as a kid—our grandmother pulled him off meds. (Honestly? Smart move.) I’m pretty sure our dad has it too, though he denies it. ADHD tends to run in families.
I self-diagnosed in college. (Yes, even in 1995 the internet had quizzes.)
“Do you enjoy risky activities like riding motorcycles, skydiving, or rock climbing?”
Check. Check.
At 48, I paid an ADHD specialist to do run the tests for me. Interviews, exercises, a 24-page report. Diagnosis confirmed. Recommendations? Medication, meditation, CBT—all stuff I was already doing. An expensive confirmation.
Ironically, the diagnosis made things worse.
Before, I managed. I’d built my own tools, systems, and workarounds.
After? It felt like I had a “Disorder.” Like something was wrong with me.
But here’s why I’m sharing this. In my exploration, I discovered that ADHD and Autism—what we now call neurodivergence—often go undiagnosed in Black and Latino children. Instead, their symptoms are more likely to be dismissed as “bad behavior” and met with punishment. That’s a whole other book. But for me, it pointed to something deeper—roots that go beyond diagnosis.
ADHD doesn’t show up in a vacuum. It’s passed down. Wired in.
An echo from the past.
Gabor Maté puts it this way:
“ADHD is not a disease. It’s a response to early stress, a coping mechanism in a world that didn’t know how to meet your needs.”
Some say that’s controversial. I’m not here to debate causes.
I’m here to dig deeper.
My father has shared very little about his father—only that he left when he was seven and later about his humor.
I have one vague memory from when I was five: visiting him once in a small blue beach shack on stilts, the kind common in Puerto Rico.
He was funny, and the house seemed joyful. I remember the smell of tabaco y ron, and a younger woman—una morenita en jean shorts—who I assumed was his new wife.
To learn more, I had to go to Puerto Rico—la isla del encanto—to speak with my father's only surviving brother: Amaury Caballer. My brother and nephew both carry his name.
We talked about many things: the Rosicrucians, the metaphysical nature of Jesus, aliens, the Pleiadians and other fun topics. That one conversation helped me understand myself un pocotón.
Here is where the chisme gets interesting. He aslo told me that there was a woman from Yauco, and a man who came from Spain—last name de Mendoza— who got her pregnant, then se peló back to Spain.
“Luckily a respected member of the community, a man with the last name Caballer, stepped in. He married her and adopted your great-grandfather, Luis. That is how we got the last name.”
My great grandfather Luis would go on to become a journalist.
A voice.
Known for his socialist leanings, anti-imperialist views, and the founding or directing of a bevy of radical publications.
But my great grandfather Luis Caballer wasn’t just a journalist.
He served as Director of El Estandarte, a conservative weekly in 1891,
founded the triweekly La Sombra that same year,
and launched a series of politically charged dailies:
La Pequeña Antilla (1895),
La Estrella Solitaria (1898),
and La Propaganda (1899).
He didn’t just write about the times. He wrote against them. He was one of the first Puerto Rican journalists to be targeted—arrested and jailed under both Spanish colonial and early U.S. rule for daring to speak truth to power.
He was a voice against empire.
Recently at a film screening of the documentary “Cimarronaje en Panamá” at Ciudad Del Saber - during Afropanameñidad month (May) the name De Mendoza came up again.
As I had researched before—but now with a need of fresh colonial chisme—the de Mendoza family was a noble Basque powerhouse, deep in the machinery of colonial management. From Mendoza, Argentina, founded in 1561 under the orders of Viceroy García Hurtado de Mendoza to Álvaro de Mendoza, a key figure in Panama City, who stood at the crossroads of power—mediating with Cimarrón revolutionaries who were working with the famous privateer (Pirate) Sir Francis Drake to attack Panama City. Bringing pirates and free rebel slaves vs empire into the story.
I can’t make this stuff up.
Colonizers begat rebel journalists, pastors (my dad), brujo broadcasters and more. Both empire and the resistance in the bloodline. Ooof, getting a whiff of Star Wars here.
Sooo, you can inherit more than the family name or traits—you may also carry the biochemical echoes of your ancestors’ lives with you. Holy moly.
Thankfully, these “sins of the father” aren’t curse-bound—they’re inked in re-writable and remixable code that with intention and by Design can be made into great gifts.
Subchapter 6: The Design of Healing Integration
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
— Carl Jung
I’ve taken a long, winding road on my journey. And the truth is, there is a long way and a short way.
The “long way” can be considered a luxury. I mean, who has the time?
But from the few who take the journey, most take the long road to heal.
But la neta is that healing is not the best label for it. A better label for it is “integration”—the art of weaving past experiences, emotions, and insights into one’s whole self, transforming pain into wisdom and creating coherence between your mind, your body, and your soul.
Like the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—the quiet beauty in imperfection. Mending broken ceramics with gold—or kintsugi (金継ぎ).
The painful events become the source of our gifts.
Our strengths. Our superpowers.
Our wounds are not the end of our story.
When integrated, they become the raw material for our gifts.
Our strengths. Our superpowers.
So how do we begin to uncover them?
Let’s illustrate how this works—right now.
Grab a pen and paper.
We’re going to map it out.
On a piece of paper draw three columns. Something like this:
Column 1: Defining Moments
This is your origin story. The rupture. The wound.
A loss, an illness, a betrayal. A moment when life changed.
What story and scriptwriting guru Robert McKee calls the “Inciting Incident.”
“The Inciting Incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life. It is the event that sets the story in motion.”
– Robert McKee, Story
In this column, answer:
1. What difficult experiences shaped you and left a lasting impact?
Write down 3-4 key events. The ones that still live in your nervous system.
Column 2: How You Moved Forward
This is where “the adaptation” happens. Where you confront what happened and decide what to do.
2. How did you respond, adapt, or take action in the face of those events?
What choices did you make? What paths did you explore? What got you through?
Column 3: What It Gave You
Pain can be a harsh teacher—but if you look beyond the pain, you can see the gold. The treasure.
Here is where you name the gifts given to you by your wounds.
Ask yourself:
3. What strengths, insights, or abilities did you gain through these experiences?
Did you develop empathy? Creativity? The ability to hold space for others?
Final Step: Synthesis
Look across all three columns. What patterns emerge?
What words, phrases, or truths connect your wounds, your responses, and your gifts?
Pair down your own personal motto or guiding insight.
This is your story. Not as it happened to you—but as it lives in you now.
Here is mine as an example:
The loss forced me to grow up quickly—to tune in to the needs of others and stay deeply connected to my environment.
The absence of guidance became its own kind of gift, giving me the freedom to wander, to create, to become a creative explorer.
That creative path led me into business… and business, in turn, became the doorway to a deeper inner journey.
Now, that journey has come full circle—allowing me to guide others as they step into their own.
The Upload: Honoring Our Fathers
I’ve always bristled when I hear that verse from Exodus:
“Honor your father and your mother…”
One side marked by anger. The other, by loss.
But something shifted for me in Mexico, a few years ago—on a hospital bed, connected to an EKG—during an Ibogaine journey while designing the customer experience for my client, Beond.
You know that scene in Black Panther, when T’Challa is ceremonially buried to become king, and enters the Ancestral Plane? All his ancestors are standing there, waiting and he talks to his dad.
That scene is inspired by a real-life practice—in the Bwiti tradition, rooted in the peoples of Gabon, Africa. In these rites of passage, Bwiti practitioners ingest Iboga, the sacred root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga plant.
Many who undergo the experience describe it as a kind of “life review”—a vivid slideshow of your life, your lineage, your ancestors—unfolding like a PowerPoint or a beautiful Keynote presentation.
And for me, it was just that. One by one, they appeared.
My mother. My grandmother. My great-grandmother.
Each smiling. Each radiating pride, as if I were a newborn.And my heart, in turn, flooded with the deepest, most radiant love I’d ever felt.
So, to close this chapter, I want to honor my father—and the men of his lineage.
Closing Transmission:
To my father, Abraham, thank you for the gift of freedom—the courage to chart my own course on this long and winding journey.
To my grandfather, Luis, for the gift of joy and laughter, and for showing what it means to live as your true self.
To my great-grandfather, Luis, who spoke truth to power and stood tall against empire.
You each did your best.
I thank you.
I forgive you.
And I release you—fully, with love.
Aho.
At the end of my “life review Powerpoint” the medicine showed me my grandmother’s father. My great-grandfather Melitón who was black, and is seldom spoken about.
And like a teaser clip at the end of the credits of a Marvel movie, the medicine said
“And that is where you have to go next!”
Dun, dun, dunnnnnnn.
About The Signal:
Finding Coherence Inside the Collapse
This is a personal and collective journey through identity, transformation, and leadership in chaotic times. Blending memoir, creative leadership, and personal growth, The Signal offers creative leaders, entrepreneurs, and change-makers a compass for navigating uncertainty—building lives and systems rooted in coherence, courage, and connection. Written in community, one chapter at a time with the help of AI.
The objective of this book is to help people gain a deeper sense of clarity, alignment, and personal power—so they can move through the collapse with purpose, co-create meaningful work, and become the architects of a more humane, regenerative future.
Hola, soy José Abraham Caballer.
Soy diseñador, estratega, educador y emprendedor. Con más de 28 años de experiencia, fusiono diseño, negocios y crecimiento personal para ayudar a creativos y organizaciones a prosperar. Soy fundador de The Systm, una comunidad global que co-crea nuevas formas de trabajar, vivir y liderar en un mundo en plena transformación.
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That's deep through the healing path brother, let's carry on :)
Los hijos de Latinoamérica, tan marcados como benditos. Gracias por compartir tu historia -nuestra historia-, Jose.