My Father in Law

Monday, June 29, 2026            MY BLOG

Today I'm going to depart from my usual lighthearted observations and the random thoughts that spill out of my head. Instead, I want to talk about Venezuela—a country I've come to know surprisingly well.

My wife is Venezuelan, so when I married her, I didn't just marry into an incredible family. In many ways, I married into a country that has endured more hardship than most of us can imagine.

My father-in-law is approaching his 90th trip around the sun. During those nine decades, he has witnessed Venezuela at both its highest peaks and its deepest valleys. Conveniently for this story, he also happens to be a psychologist.

He remembers the years when Venezuela's oil wealth made it one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America. During the oil boom, spontaneous weekend shopping trips to Miami weren't reserved for celebrities or millionaires. They were simply what many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans did. Life was comfortable, businesses flourished, and optimism seemed endless.

Those days are long gone.

Today, my father-in-law lives with realities that would be difficult for most Americans to comprehend. Inflation has devoured savings. Basic services are unreliable. In his neighborhood, running water is sometimes a luxury rather than a guarantee, forcing residents to wait for water trucks because the municipal system can no longer provide something as fundamental as water.

As I listened to him describe the country he has watched change over nearly ninety years, it occurred to me that Venezuela almost sounds less like a nation and more like one of his patients.

If Venezuela walked into his office, sat down on the couch, and quietly said, "Doctor, I don't feel like myself anymore," what diagnosis would he give?

And then, as if the patient needed another reminder that life has not been kind, Venezuela was hit with another trauma: two powerful earthquakes that shook the country and left behind a trail of destruction.

A psychologist knows that trauma is rarely just about the event itself. It is about what the event awakens from the past.

For Venezuela, the earthquake was not simply buildings shaking and streets cracking. It was another blow to a patient already exhausted from years of stress. A person who has spent decades dealing with uncertainty, shortages, and instability does not experience a new crisis the same way a healthy person might.

My father-in-law would probably tell me that when a patient suffers repeated trauma, eventually the patient begins to change. They become anxious. They lose confidence. They stop believing things can improve. They develop coping mechanisms just to survive another day.

And maybe that is where Venezuela finds itself today—not a country without strength, but a country carrying the weight of too many wounds.

The interesting thing about my father-in-law's profession is that psychologists don't usually ask, "What's wrong with you?" They ask, "What happened to you?"

If Venezuela were sitting on his couch, perhaps that would be the first question he would ask.