read on - sanarnetwork.com - August 21, 2026

Luis Villafuerte on representation, boundaries, and the stories we inherit.

When I asked Luis Villafuerte how he got into therapy, he told me he didn’t exactly choose it in a straight line. He stumbled into the work, then realized the stumble was actually a path. What stayed with me wasn’t the resume. It was the pattern underneath it: every step of his journey kept pulling him closer to the people who need someone in their corner, and farther from the idea that healing should be done in a language that feels foreign.

The hardest part of the work is often unlearning what we’ve been told strength means.

We talked a lot about collectivism, sacrifice, and the way those values can become burdens when nobody stops to ask at what cost. Luis keeps coming back to one question: if sacrifice leaves you exhausted, anxious, and unable to sleep, is it still serving you? That landed hard. Not because it’s radical, but because it’s familiar. He said this is where machismo shows up too - not just as something that harms other people, but as something that harms men themselves. The work isn’t to shame people out of it. It’s to help them see where the pattern came from, and whether it actually belongs to them.

Boundaries are about your behavior, not controlling everybody else.

This was one of the clearest reframes in the whole conversation. Luis said he often meets clients who’ve been told by other therapists to “just cut them off,” as if family ties in Latino households are that simple. His answer is more careful and, honestly, more useful. A boundary is not “you can’t do that.” A boundary is “if you call after 9 PM, I’m not answering.” That difference matters. It keeps the focus on what you control and makes room for the discomfort that comes with holding your line, without turning every conflict into a war. There's another layer to this: sometimes people want justice, sometimes they want distance, and sometimes they want both. Luis doesn’t flatten those choices. He lets clients decide what relationship, if any, they want to keep - even when the history includes real harm.

A lot of what we call personal struggle is actually systemic pressure.

Luis named something I think many people feel but rarely say clearly: individualism can trick us into believing every problem is ours to fix alone. But families, communities, and institutions shape what pain looks like and how it gets passed on. That showed up in his examples of emotional neglect, too. Not always dramatic neglect - sometimes it’s just parents who never had the tools to ask deeper questions, or who taught boys not to cry, or who responded to pain with blame instead of safety. Those little absences add up. They become a whole emotional vocabulary that never got taught.

The full conversation goes deeper into emotional neglect, family dynamics, and how he uses workshops to get people talking - listen here: LINK​

Warmly,

Richi & Mariah Sede
Co-Founders, Sanar Network

P.S.

If this conversation made you think differently about boundaries, identity, or what support can look like in Latino communities, reply and tell me which line stayed with you most.

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