By Janaína Mahé, MBACP
Published 18th September 2026
Last night, I dreamt that it was my first day at university.
The dream seemed to last the entire night.
At the beginning, a childhood friend was there with me. We had once been best friends and, when we were young, lived near one another. In the dream, she suggested that we travel to university together.
“One week you can drive, and the next week I’ll drive.”
It was agreed.
Then she disappeared from the dream.
I was left alone, trying to find my classroom.
The university was difficult to navigate. I kept searching for the room, going down staircases and then down more staircases, without knowing exactly where I was going.
At some point, I lost one of my shoes.
Suddenly, I was walking around a university without proper shoes, still unable to find my classroom. I felt deeply embarrassed. Instead of continuing to look for the room, I began searching for something I could put on my feet. I hoped that perhaps somebody had left a pair of shoes behind, something I could use so that I would not have to remain there barefoot.
Eventually, I found a pair of flip-flops.
They were not my shoes, and they were hardly what I would have chosen to wear on my first day at university. But I put them on and continued searching.
Finally, I found the classroom.
It was in the basement.
To reach it, I had to go all the way down, beneath the rest of the university. It felt as though I had spent the entire night trying to get there.
Just before I woke, I entered the room.
Someone was already there, apparently playing me, as though standing in for me until I arrived. As soon as I entered, I said:
“You can leave it here. From here, I’ll take it.”
Then I woke up.
What the Dream Brought Back
At first, I did not understand the dream.
Later, I began to recognise what it had brought together.
When I was growing up in Brazil, my father would not allow me to work. I was expected to remain at home, keep my mother company and help care for my brother. I did not have my first job until I was twenty-one, when I finally stood my ground and insisted.
It was a terrible job. I sold Europa water purifiers door to door. We would be placed in a Volkswagen Kombi van, driven somewhere and left in the street to knock on strangers’ doors.
I did not enjoy the work, but even that felt better than remaining at home without being allowed to work.
Still, the experience was not without value. The company gave us considerable training in sales, communication and how to approach people. Until then, I had never received any formal training of that kind. I had never worked before. Whatever social skills I possessed had developed through life itself.
Each group of salespeople had a manager. One day, my manager offered an observation that stayed with me.
“You walk tall,” he said.
I found this fascinating. Until that moment, I had never really considered how someone outside my circle of friends might perceive me.
At just 1.5 metres tall, I am short in stature. Yet he explained that I carried myself as though I were much taller.
He was not describing my height.
He was describing the way I occupied space.
Long before I had language for inhabiting one’s life, somebody had noticed something in the way I moved through the world.
His recognition did not create that quality in me. But it allowed me, perhaps for the first time, to glimpse it from the outside.
Years before that, when my childhood friend was sixteen or seventeen, she began looking for a job.
My father had many contacts in banks because he sold his cheeses there. He would set up displays in the staff kitchens and had developed relationships with people across several branches.
Sometimes, I went with him.
I remember looking at all the young people working in those banks and imagining what it would be like to belong there. I desperately wanted to work. A job in a bank seemed like a wonderful possibility.
My father used those contacts to find my friend a job in a bank branch located within a university.
It was almost the precise combination of everything I wanted for myself: work, independence, young people and education.
Yet the opportunity was given to her while I was not permitted to work at all.
I was consumed by envy. I remember thinking:
That could have been my job.
But it did not end there.
When she lost that position, my father found her another job. Later, he found her a third.
My own father found three jobs for my friend while preventing me from having one.
It felt as though the message was being placed directly in front of me:
You are not allowed to work, but I am entirely capable of opening doors. I will simply open them for somebody else.
The Friend at the Beginning of the Dream
The presence of my childhood friend was not incidental.
She belonged to the original experience.
In the dream, we were supposed to travel to university together, taking turns to drive. But she disappeared, just as her path and mine eventually separated.
The rest of the journey was mine.
More Than One First Day
I had always loved studying.
When I wanted to attend university, my father was against it. He believed that I should work instead.
“I have more important things to spend my money on than paying for university,” he told me. “University doesn’t lead anywhere. What matters is working.”
There was a painful contradiction in this. For years, I had been prevented from working. When I wanted to study, I was told that I should work instead.
But my mother intervened.
By then, our financial circumstances had already changed completely. My father had lost everything and gone bankrupt when I was fifteen.
Years later, when I wanted to attend university, my mother began buying jewellery to resell so that she could pay for my studies. Through her effort, a route opened where there had previously been none.
Because of her, I was able to begin.
Her jewellery business supported my university education for approximately two and a half years. When the business failed, the income that had made my studies possible disappeared.
I could no longer continue at university.
I had to leave before completing my degree.
The route had first been opposed. Then, through my mother’s intervention and labour, it became possible. For two and a half years, I was able to follow it. But when the practical conditions sustaining that path collapsed, my education was interrupted once again.
Years later, when I moved to the United Kingdom, I was back at square one.
I did not arrive with a completed degree or an established professional path. I did not yet have enough English to enter university. Before I could return to education, I first had to learn the language in which that education would take place.
I was not simply beginning again within another educational system. I was beginning from zero, in another country, in another language, rebuilding from the ground up a path that had already once been interrupted.
Perhaps this is another reason the dream began on my first day at university.
There was never only one first day.
There was the university I imagined while watching young people working in the bank.
There was the university my father opposed and my mother worked to make possible.
And there was the university I eventually entered in the United Kingdom, when I began again.
My education was not a single doorway that eventually opened.
It was a route repeatedly obstructed, partially opened, lost and rebuilt.
Still, somewhere within me, I never fully accepted that what was available at any particular moment represented everything that would ever be possible for my life.
I did not accept that being born in Brazil meant I had to remain there.
I did not accept that an interrupted education meant education no longer belonged in my future.
I did not accept that the life imagined for me or the life left behind after everything collapsed_had to become the final life I inhabited.
Eventually, I returned to university in the United Kingdom and completed the education that became the foundation of my profession.
Today, the work I practise is the work I believe I was born to do. Without returning to university, I could never have entered that profession.
I had to return for what had been obstructed.
I had to begin again for what had been interrupted.
I had to create a route towards something I had recognised long before I possessed the conditions required to reach it.
The Lost Shoe
When I remembered the dream, I began to understand the emotional truth gathered within it.
I was trying to enter a place of education while feeling late, disoriented and improperly equipped. I was exposed and ashamed, but I did not leave.
I found a pair of flip-flops.
They were not what I should have had. They did not erase what had been withheld, and they did not suddenly make the journey fair.
They were simply what I could find at that moment.
And I used them to continue.
This is how much of my life was built.
I rarely had the right conditions. I often did not have the guidance, resources or permission that might have made the journey easier.
But this does not mean that I received nothing.
My mother created a possibility using what she had. Her effort enabled me to begin, even though circumstances later prevented me from completing that first journey.
Sometimes, what we receive cannot carry us all the way.
Sometimes, the support is real and still insufficient to protect a path from everything that may happen around it.
Sometimes, we have only the psychological equivalent of a pair of abandoned flip-flops.
But I did not mistake insufficient provision for the total limit of what might still become possible.
What the Past Makes Available
The past matters.
It shapes what a person can see, what they believe is available and which decisions appear possible at the time.
In my clinical practice, I often meet adults whose present lives remain organised around what happened to them. This does not mean that they are weak or that they simply chose wrongly. Many decisions that appear self-defeating in the present made sense within the emotional, relational and practical conditions in which they were originally formed.
At the time, those decisions may have represented what the person could perceive, tolerate or imagine.
The work is not to blame the past for everything.
Nor is it to deny its influence.
It is to recognise how the past continues to organise the present, so that what once appeared to be the only available possibility does not have to remain a permanent destination.
I did not escape my history by pretending that it had not affected me.
Nor did I build my life from ideal circumstances.
I built it while carrying what had happened, repeatedly refusing to allow what had been offered to me to become the complete definition of what was possible.
Where This Meets the Innate Entitlement Framework™
This is where my story meets the Innate Entitlement Framework™.
My eventual return to university did not create the original legitimacy of my life.
My qualifications did not confer it upon me.
Leaving Brazil did not manufacture it.
Nor did my professional life prove that I had somehow earned it.
The legitimacy of my particular life to exist, participate and move towards its own becoming was already present.
What had been withheld were many of the relational and practical conditions through which that legitimacy could have been recognised, supported and lived more easily.
My Innate Entitlement™ was never my father’s to create.
It was therefore never his to remove.
Nor did my mother’s support create that legitimacy. What she did was recognise something in me and help provide a condition through which it could begin to be lived.
The distinction matters.
Innate Entitlement™ is not produced by perfect parenting, permission, education, success or recognition. It is the original, non-conferred legitimacy of a particular life to exist and participate in the life that is its own.
Recognition does not manufacture that legitimacy.
It can help restore awareness of it and support the capacity to live from it.
This does not mean that every person can overcome every obstruction through determination alone. Lives are differently situated. People are shaped by different histories, resources, relationships, bodies, opportunities and degrees of safety.
A life may remain fundamentally legitimate while the conditions required to inhabit that legitimacy are profoundly restricted.
My story is not evidence that anyone can achieve anything if they simply try hard enough.
It is evidence of something more precise:
What an environment makes available to a person is not necessarily the complete measure of that person’s life.
I did not create my right to become.
I created a route through which I could begin to live it.
And I did not create that route entirely alone.
At one point, my mother helped open it.
At another, the route collapsed.
Later, I had to find it again.
Taking My Place
Perhaps this was why, when I finally entered the classroom in the dream, someone else appeared to be playing me.
For much of my early life, other people had occupied the position of deciding who I could be, where I could go and which possibilities belonged to me.
But I had reached the room now.
I had reached it after opposition, support, interruption, loss, migration, learning a new language and beginning again.
I no longer needed anyone else to represent me, interpret my place or continue the story on my behalf.
“You can leave it here,” I said.
“From here, I’ll take it.”
Author’s Note
This reflection is part of Behind the Framework, a series in which I explore the personal experiences, clinical observations and moments of recognition from which the Innate Entitlement Framework™ emerged.
These reflections also contribute to my forthcoming book, in which the Framework and the lived experiences behind its development will be explored more fully.
About the Author
Janaína Mahé, MBACP, is a psychotherapist, clinical hypnotherapist and clinical supervisor, and the originator of the Innate Entitlement Framework™. She is the Founder and Director of Esperansa Counselling & Psychotherapy Services in Swansea, Wales.
[Read more about Janaína Mahé and her work.]
Related Reading
- The Lived Experience Behind the Innate Entitlement Framework™
- Why the Innate Entitlement Framework™ Matters
© 2026 Janaína Mahé. All rights reserved. The Innate Entitlement Framework™ and its original concepts are the intellectual work of Janaína Mahé.