About Duende

A word with soul, a model with meaning

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Duende is a Spanish word with no direct English translation. The Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca described Duende as a deep, soul-stirring force, something that arises from struggle. Lorca wrote that Duende appears when something “burns the blood like powdered glass," when art, performance, or presence reaches a raw, honest intensity that cannot be faked.

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Thus, Duende is not talent, beauty, or technique; it is raw truth. It lives at the intersection of grief, love, fragility, and courage, and it transforms both the person expressing and the person witnessing. It is the dark composted soil from which authenticity grows.

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Here, we are committed to churning over the hardship of brain injury, into the fertile soils of a new mind. 

 

The Duende Model of Self-Reconstruction

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Brain injury can fracture a person’s life into before and after. Survivors often describe the experience as one of disconnection, identity loss, emotional overwhelm, and deep grief. Our model was created to address the most common and pervasive themes in qualitative research studies and years of individual therapy services with brain injury survivors. That means people just like you helped create this model. They said things like:

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• “I feel like two different people.”

• “I’m grieving the person I used to be.”

• “No one can see how lost I am.”

• “I’m exhausted all the time.”

• “It’s like I don’t fit into my own life anymore.”

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These statements are not just symptoms, they are soul-shaking experiences that demand a healing model rooted in emotional truth, nervous system regulation, neuroplasticity, and identity healing in addition to functional outcomes.

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That’s where the Duende Model of Self-Reconstruction (DMSR)comes in.

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The DMSR is Evidence-Informed, Emotionally Grounded

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Our self-identity and reconstruction model is built around the principle that recovery does not mean returning to who you were. Recovery from brain injury is about integrating who you were with who you are becoming. Our model incorporates:

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• Neuropsychology – Symptom evaluation, education, executive functioning tools, sensory monitoring, and encouraging brain plasticity. 

• Relational repair – Supported dyads (survivor + chosen support person) work together, parents and children, spouses, friends, family members, and members of the brain injury community working together. 

• Creative expression – To combat the feelings of depression and apathy, expression is often the antidote. 

• Group cohesion – You are not alone; others walk this path, too

• Emotional integration – Grief, anger, hope, despair, and joy are all part of healing

• Duende as catalyst – We use the struggle itself to create meaning, agency, and wholeness​

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Our therapy services were shaped directly by qualitative research investigating survivors’ “worst” and "most frustrating" experiences after their injury:

Loss of identity, memory struggles, emotional lability (mood swings), cognitive fog, social isolation, and disconnection from self.

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Why Duende?

Because we believe that even in pain, there is power.
Because we believe that fragmentation is temporary, people can be whole.
Because we believe that authenticity is the beginning of healing, and duende lives there in the muck waiting to bloom into a new life.

 

This isn’t just a therapy model. It’s a philosophy:
The wound is not the opposite of the self, it's where a new self begins.