Javier Peñalba is an ICF-certified life coach helping people with a fear of commitment to creating fulfilling relationships. Having dealt with anxiety for decades since the young age of 6 after the sudden suicide of his father some meters away from him, Javier has worked on a long journey of self-discovery, where he uncovered symptoms of commitment phobia, relationship OCD and anxiety. In particular, he could not stay in any intimate relationship for more than a few months without running away from it. Having dedicated the last years of his life to understanding and overcoming this issue, Javier is now happily married and is providing seminars and life coaching services to help people suffering from fear of commitment.
Javier Peñalba, Life Coach
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
“Everything you need to be happy and at peace is right here within you, now.” – Javier Peñalba
I come originally from Nicaragua. I was born in 1986 in the midst of a small family, including my mother, father and older sister. We were living in my grandmother’s house at the moment, close to many of my father’s brothers and my cousins, so although my core family was small, we had a lot going on socially all the time. There was a lot of love and companionship between all of us and I really enjoyed that part of living there.
My country was going through a big economic and sociopolitical crisis as it was suffering from civil war and a harsh dictatorship, although these were not things that really affected me directly at the moment. However, it did affect my father, who was not generating enough money and, therefore, a lot of the financial support came from my mother. This, apart from his habitudinal alcohol addiction, made him get into a depression. I thus watched at times how he came home drunk, yelling and acting strange or getting aggressive, even against my mom at times. I grew to love him but also fear him a lot at the same time, as I did not recognize him in those moments.
One day, when I was 6 years old and it was only me and my mom at home as my sister and grandmother were abroad, he came back home from a brother’s birthday at around 4:00 am, very drunk and agitated. As he went into his bedroom and lied in bed, he got restless and started looking for a gun. My mother knew his intention and tried to stop him. I nervously watched as they argued and he tried to hide with his gun while my mother fought for his life, one that he didn’t want anymore. My mother was able to take the gun from him and left me in the room with him as she went to look for help. Little did she know that he had another gun in his bedroom. He scared me out of the room easily by making a strange face and noise, and as I ran out, he locked himself in. That crazy face he did was my last sight of him alive. My mother came back with one of my uncles and the three of us were trying to get into his bedroom and stop him from whatever he was planning, until we heard the loud “bang” that marked my life forever.
My mother was somehow able to break into the room and we stood in awe at the picture in front of us. That image got fortunately deleted from my brain, despite the rest of it being as vivid as a horror movie that just happened yesterday, where I was just a secondary actor and didn’t have to do much but could still witness everything and be as scared as the protagonists. I did not cry, yell or speak. I was shocked at everything, and my automatic response was to dissociate and, upon being called up by my aunt, I went to play video games all alone at her place. This marked the onset of my anxiety. We moved out of my home and went to live at my grandfather’s house, far away from my cousins and uncles. A feeling of separateness and of being different than others started growing within me, as I did not have a father and I saw all of my cousins having one and as I was so far away from my father’s family. I also developed a sense of guilt for the death of my father, having thought that I could have done a lot more to help him as I was the last one to be in his bedroom before he took his life.
For years, I was not able to talk about my dad, see his pictures, or even think about him. I never cried or expressed any emotion about what happened. Neither did we address it much in the family, as it became sort of a taboo. However, I became very fearful and every time that my mother would leave home or come late when picking me up from school, I would begin getting nervous, restless, and if it lasted too long would start crying unconsolably telling those around me that I was an orphan now.
My mother married again 3 years after my father’s death with who is today my stepfather, a very kind and quiet man who has supported us since I was 9 and who has been a great companion for my mother. As I was growing up, I became a good student at school, had a couple of friends, was very athletic and loved to play soccer. I was extremely responsible, respectful and usually very quiet. I tended to take things very seriously and had very strong values, gaining the nickname “el abuelo” or “grandpa” for a couple of years during my school years due to my strong morality and seriousness. However, given my own trauma and very introvertive way of having processed everything, I also became a very distracted, forgetful, insecure, shy and anxious little boy. My mother who tends to worry a lot, found a great reason in her life now to worry about: me. I thus grew to dislike her constant worrying, which I translated into her not trusting me and on top of that controlling me. At the same time, I always wanted her to be safe and worried about something bad happening to her like it had with my father. This inner struggle made me at times distance myself from her. She took me to some psychiatrists to look at my distractedness and nervousness but they all just assumed it was my trauma. In the end, they prescribed me anxiety pills that helped me a bit while taking them but left the underlying causes unresolved.
As I became an adult my personality became that of a good student, good worker and good friend. I was close to my family and we all got along pretty well, at least most of the time. I decided to study Industrial Engineering in the university, having at the beginning no real idea of what it meant or my purposes for doing it. However, after some years I got to enjoy it more and more, but never to the point of it becoming a passion. I thus worked in different companies: as an operations supervisor in a dairy manufacturing plant; as a logistics advisor in a logistics company; and as an intellectual property analyst. Nevertheless, I deeply lacked a sense of meaning and purpose for what I was doing.
In relationships, I became very fearful and insecure. I developed a fearful-avoidant attachment style, which basically means that I feared rejection, got anxious very easily and avoided deep interactions and relationships of almost all kind. Once my relationships were more stable I would obsess over my partners’ flaws and the relationship itself and would quit them within a couple of months. After feeling trapped in one of those relationships when I was 24, I looked for an escape route by applying as a Spanish teacher assistant in France and left some months later, giving me a good excuse to break up during that time, all while being able to discover the world a bit more. I thus lived 7 months in that country, where I created some nice experiences and where I got the idea that perhaps I did not belong to Nicaragua and needed to live elsewhere, as I always had this feeling that I was different than others there. Hence, after coming back to Nicaragua and living some years there, and after having one more relationship that I quit after 4 months because of my same issues, I got a scholarship for an MBA in Taipei, Taiwan.
I lived in that country for 3 years, making some good friends, learning the language and understanding a bit more of myself every time. After 2 years, I graduated and most of my friends moved back to their countries, so I stayed there and started feeling a bit lonely and hopeless that I could actually find a job that fulfilled me there. I also deepened in my own insecurities as I suffered some romantic rejections but also another failed relationship where I left my partner after some months. My love life felt always like a baseball game, I was either batting the ball away, or being batted away. I started really believing that the issue was in me and perhaps not in my partners, as I used to think.
After 3 years, at the end of 2016, I moved to Germany, as I found a job here as a patent technical writer given some of the experience that I had built back in Nicaragua. I could now enjoy a new experience learning a new language, getting to know new people, and developing myself further in the area of patents. After around a year in the country, I started a new relationship. I was very enthusiastic at the beginning, but after about 9 months to a year, I started getting obsessed over perceived flaws and having a strong urge to escape the relationship that wouldn’t leave me alone for one second. Anxiety got the best of me and forced me to break up after about 2 years into that relationship, marking the onset of an in-depth self-inquiry journey. I could not believe that this was happening again. I thus began googling all of my symptoms online: obsession with flaws, urge to escape relationships, fear of intimacy, difficulty creating deep connections, etc., and I started understanding more about fear of commitment and relationship OCD.
I decided to go to a psychologist to get this checked all while reading books on my own and starting to meditate. Understanding more about this helped me to reduce my own shame and guilt about all of my failed relationships and people that I had hurt in my life. I also started opening up about my past, including my trauma, something that I had avoided for all of those years of my life. I started healing my life and understanding the nature of my fears. After some years in this new path, where I felt I had a lot more clarity about who I was and what was happening to me, I changed my relationship with my thoughts and started connecting to something way bigger than me that gives me an underlying sense of peace. I started speaking to more people about my thoughts and hiding less from the world and realized how many people out there suffer because of their own unquestioned thoughts and unprocessed emotions. I realized also how a fire burned in me when I talked to others and listened to them intently, always open and willing to give them my advice if it was asked for or simply asking questions and letting people come up with their own answers. In this process, I found my coaching school iPEC, whose vision of “increasing the consciousness of the world, one person at a time” fully resonated with my new self. I thus started certifying myself as a life coach and fell in love with the profession, which connected me to a higher purpose that I had not found in any of my other career paths. I started my own coaching business called Transmute Yourself Coaching where I mainly help people to transform their fear of commitment into long-lasting, fulfilling relationships.
2 years after my last breakup, I met who is now my wife, Karola. I had gone through a transformation process, but the path was still ongoing, as many of my fears would only surface in a relationship. I got some of the old fears, obsessions and escaping urges I had in the past, but I took a compassionate distance from them, understanding their nature and separating that from the depth of my being. She, a coach herself, gave me the opportunity to put everything I had learned into practice and supported me along the way. The more that I could connect to the deepest part of me while in the relationship, the more I realized that it was possible to find peace and stability in it. After 2 years of being together, we got married and are now living happily together in the city of Bad Soden am Taunus near Frankfurt am Main, Germany. We have created our own recently published podcast and life coaching startup in Spanish called JavOla Coaching, where we help people to create a lighter life and with greater connection with themselves and their partner. We plan our first in-person event in the city of Malaga on 26th November called “Vision Workshop Malaga 2022 – Creating The Life Of Your Dreams”.
I am today the proud uncle of two precious nephews that I love playing with when we have the chance to meet. I love walking in the forest that is close to my place, writing, reading, coaching, making videos, running, and hiking. I love animals of all types, melt at the sight of dogs and am a vegetarian by conviction. I love speaking about various topics, but especially those that have to do with the human mind and soul. My favorite series has been Stranger Things. My guilty pleasure is learning about the paranormal, having always had a special passion for alien life and UFOs, ghosts, or anything that is hard for the human mind to explain. Languages have always been also a passion of mine, having learned 6, including Spanish, English, French, German, Italian and Mandarin Chinese. During my free time I also like traveling with my wife and learning a bit of the language of the place where I travel.
What is your business name and how do you help your clients?
My business name is Transmute Yourself Coaching. I focus mostly on helping people to transform their fear of commitment into long-lasting, fulfilling relationships. This includes people that, like me, tended to run away from relationships without even understanding why, who obsess over flaws of partners, and who have a hard time committing to anything.
My clients tend to see relationships as a wolf that they meet in the darkness of the middle of the night. I tend to ask them, “would you commit to taking care of a wolf if you knew that it would attack at any moment?” and the answers is always no. But when I ask them, “if it were a cute rabbit, would you take care of it?” And the answer is almost always yes. I help them by shifting their perspective of relationships from that of a dangerous wolf into that of a rabbit, so that they can decide by themselves the type of relationship that they want without letting it be fear that takes the decision for them.
Each client is unique and I tend to tailor my sessions based on their individual needs. However, generally speaking, I help them to shift their perspective first through a huge amount of acknowledgment and validation so that they understand that what they go through is totally normal for them, reducing a lot of the shame and guilt involved with their behaviors; by creating awareness and exploring each of the core beliefs that hold them back, questioning also the truth behind them and generating new beliefs and emotions that can help them to be comfortable first with themselves, and then in relationships; and by helping them to build new actions and behaviors that make them actively face their fears to realize that commitment in itself is not as dangerous as they thought.
With that being said, I have also helped people in topics not related to fear of commitment, and I am eager to do so as the need arrives. I thus love helping people to connect to their own strengths and potential, to connect with their sense of purpose and realize any frustrated dreams or projects, to reduce stress and anxiety, to heal and improve family relationships, and to increase confidence and reduce shyness and insecurity.
People interested in my coaching services can request coaching here. Those that just want to get updates from me are also invited and join my email community, which will give them access to my free gift PDF: "3 Powerful Tips to Overcome Commitment Phobia and Connect to Yourself in the Process!".
What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
My clients are people who have discovered that they have a fear of commitment, especially in relationships, and have realized that the issue is not in others but in themselves. This as of itself is a little moment of awakening, which usually leads them to start digging out information about the topic and prompts them to understand themselves better and grow in the process. As they are in this journey, sometimes they may feel stuck and that’s when my personalized life coaching services come into play to help them to accelerate their growth process and find their own peace with themselves and in relationship to others.
My clients can be men or women usually in their early twenties all the way to late fifties. Those in the lower age range usually have just gotten to realize that they have this issue based on a couple of past relationships, bringing them to the conclusion that their urges to escape relationships cannot just be because of them not finding the right person. Those in the higher age range are usually tired of going through the same cycle over and over and have also come to realize that this is something that they need to work on and that the issue is within themselves. At times, my clients are already in a relationship and are having the urge to leave it, creating the need to find help, while others come to me right after having broken up because of their fear. However, what is common in all of my clients is that they really wish to have a relationship but simply cannot stay in one for too long because of a fear that is hard for them to understand and that seems to control them.
What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?
I want Transmute Yourself Coaching to grow into the go-to life coaching business for self-development and spirituality, primarily for people with fear of commitment but also for anyone who wants to build a happier, more connected life filled with inner peace. Apart from my coaching services, my plans are for Transmute Yourself Coaching to provide courses, seminars and books about self-development and spirituality. I wish to see my business helping thousands of people to create fulfilling relationships and inner peace around the world through the services provided.
My first book is now released and it is called “Awaken Through Anxiety: 6 Steps to Transcend Anxiety and Awaken to Your True Self” available on my website. My second book, called “Becoming a Commitment Master: 10 Powerful Tips to Overcome the Fear of Commitment and Connect to Your True Self in the Process” will be available soon and people can already subscribe to get notified of its release date.
What is your work inspired by?
My work is inspired first of all on my own experiences in life. I realized that overcoming a strong fear of commitment and obsessive thinking, and also finding meaning in one’s life and coming to peace with oneself and the world is totally possible with the right amount of introspection, self-work, and guidance from others. Life itself is our big master, and if we study its lessons through the situations it puts us through, every day becomes an opportunity with connect to who we truly are.
Apart from my own life, my work is greatly inspired by my coaching school, iPEC, who, apart from the great coaching tools they provided me with, taught me many life principles that have resonated deeply with me and helped me greatly in my own spiritual healing process. Their coaching approach of letting coachees come up with their own answers, while enabling coaches to share the right information as it is required in the process based on the current level of awareness of the clients, has provided me with a high level of confidence to be able to tackle any client situation.
My work is also inspired by one of my favorite authors and spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle. I consider the way that he has put forward ancient spiritual concepts on how to find inner peace and connection to our Being to be very practical, easy to understand and most importantly to experience. I also find his teachings very flexible and non-dogmatic. By not bringing up so many dogmatic and strict rules, but just guiding his readers to connect to the dimension behind our identities and live from that place as much as we can, I learned that all needs are fulfilled now, in each moment, and that the rest is just the icing on the cake. This teaching is not something to be just read but to be experienced, and when that happens, a huge inner transformation can take place as it did in me. I try to bring part of this beautiful dimension of presence and connectedness to my clients as I guide them to find peace and stability in relationship to themselves and to others.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
A pivotal moment was definitely my last breakup. The irrational anxiety that I used to get in that relationship got to such unmeasurable levels that I found it hard to concentrate on anything but on my urge to break up. After breaking up, I took the decision that I was not letting this preventing me from being happy and that I would work on it until I found a solution for it. The growth that was created after that definitely led me to where I am today.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
I would definitely love life coaching and self-development to be included as part of the school pensum. Kids learn a lot faster than us adults, and they would pick up these principles in a natural way as I know they would resonate with their Being. Integrating coaching and self-development with the education system would accelerate the rate at which we as humans wake up to our true spiritual nature, reducing suffering around the world and speeding up our evolution as a race. I also think that these tools should be openly available to everyone around the world to increase our overall wellbeing, love and compassion as human beings.
