I'm Marisa.
And I've lived this story.

Before anything changed, there was the ceiling.

I’ve overcome childhood trauma, addiction, self-sabotage and self-loathing. Those are parts of my story, not the whole of who I am. But I won’t pretend they weren’t there.

I know what it’s like to build a life that looks good from the outside while being unkind to yourself on the inside. To want more — in your work, your relationships, yourself — and still get caught in patterns that take you further away from it.

I spent 25 years in corporate. I earned an MBA. I built a career that, from the outside, looked like proof I had it together. And still, the same loop. The same ceiling. The same quiet voice saying not enough.

I didn’t need to become someone else. I needed to stop turning against myself.

For over 20 years alongside that career, I've been training in Neuro Linguistic Programming and a range of communication modalities, studying how language shapes the way we think, relate, and choose. It became less of a discipline and more of a way of living.

My late friend Ashley was the first person who showed me what it felt like to be spoken to with genuine kindness. No agenda. No performance required. We were young, living in London, and something in me recognised what I'd been missing, not just from others, but from myself.

He remained one of the most important people in my life. He was proof that the way we use language, with ourselves and with each other, changes the entire architecture of what we allow in.

That's where The Disconnect started. Long before I had a name for it.

When the ceiling moved, everything moved.

It wasn’t until I came back to my own life that anything shifted. And I want to be honest about what that means, because it isn’t woo. No crystals, no rituals, no incense-and-affirmations version of healing. Coming back to yourself is the plain, unglamorous practice of coming home to you — and that is exactly what The Five teaches.

I met my husband at 40 and had my daughter at 43, within about three months of doing this work. Not because I’d become a perfectly healed version of myself. Because I’d stopped abandoning myself and started living my own life.

I didn’t stop wanting more. I stopped abandoning myself while I worked for it.

I wasn’t “finished”. I hadn’t healed every wound or become a perfect version of myself. I’d begun to be present in my own life, and to let myself be met as I was.

Today, I'm living the life I love, with the love of my life, and that isn't an accident. Coming back to myself changed how I lived, what I chose and what I allowed in. That work is ongoing. Love doesn’t require me to be finished.

Whether the cycle is in your relationship, your career, your sense of self-worth, or all three at once, I will help you see it, name it, and leave it exactly where it belongs.

In the past. Where your five year old self can finally rest.