About the Author
Anna Paretas — Creator of TEG-Blue
From erasure to mapping emotional systems—how survival became systematic clarity.
The Short Version
I'm Anna Paretas, creator of The Emotional Gradient Blueprint (TEG-Blue).
I'm not a therapist or an academic. I'm someone who spent a lifetime trying to understand human behavior—and then had no choice but to map it in order to survive.
TEG-Blue is a visual system for understanding emotional patterns: how they form, how they spread, and how they heal. It synthesizes over 40 peer-reviewed models across psychology, neuroscience, trauma science, and systems thinking into one integrated framework.
I didn't invent these patterns. I just mapped what was already there—because no existing map was adequate for what I was experiencing.
The Longer Story
What Created This Framework
This work didn't come from theory. It came from necessity.
I created TEG-Blue while trying to survive the unsurvivable: being systematically erased by those who said they loved me. A coercive business partnership that destroyed my professional life. A family system that punished healing and rewarded silence.
What started as a desperate attempt to make sense of what was happening became something larger: a system for seeing emotional patterns with clarity.
Traditional psychology offered labels—"narcissistic," "abusive," "dysfunctional." What it couldn't show me was why these patterns formed, how they transmitted, or what systems created them.
So I built what I needed: a framework that could trace individual behavior back to its systematic causes, enabling both accountability and compassion without excusing harm.
What the Framework Revealed
My family's patterns—and my former partner's—weren't random pathology. They were intelligent adaptations to systematic conditions that made authentic connection feel impossible or dangerous.
Society taught them emotional performance is safer than authenticity. Cultural scripts equated authority with submission. Economic systems created competition for recognition and worth. And intergenerational trauma transmitted survival strategies disguised as love.
This perspective—seeing through pain rather than stopping at surface behavior—became foundational to everything TEG-Blue offers.
Why the Children Matter
Every framework in TEG-Blue is ultimately designed for Iona, Ivet, and Aran—my nieces and nephew—and for every child who deserves to inherit emotional wisdom rather than unconscious wounds.
Losing access to them could have been devastating. Instead, it became fuel for systematic change. Watching younger siblings unconsciously repeat the patterns they once cried about together as children revealed how trauma transmits across generations without conscious awareness.
This isn't abstract activism. It's concrete love translated into tools that could prevent the transmission of intergenerational pain.
Professional Background
The Visual Mind
I studied arts but failed to graduate. Traditional education couldn't measure what mattered most about my mind: an innate ability to see patterns and translate complexity into visual clarity.
Long before I had language for it, I was tracking emotional dynamics—watching how people shifted depending on power, safety, or fear. That quiet noticing became the foundation for everything that came later.
Motion Graphics Career (2000–2024)
In the early 2000s, I taught myself After Effects when motion graphics was still cutting-edge. That led to a 25+ year career in visual communication, working on projects for major clients including Google and YouTube through production houses.
At 34, Bloomberg hired me and relocated me to Singapore—international recognition of my professional capabilities. But the corporate environment led to massive burnout and my first major breakdown, catalyzing deeper self-exploration.
Building Roadroom (2018–2024)
I co-founded Roadroom and led its creative direction for six years, scaling the company to €500K annual revenue. I single-handedly built the entire visual ecosystem, growing Instagram from 50 to 20,000 followers through content I shot, produced, and edited myself.
When the business partnership became untenable in April 2024, I walked away from everything I had built rather than compromise my integrity.
From Crisis to Framework
What followed was complete reconstruction. I found myself not just rebuilding my life, but questioning the very emotional systems that had allowed manipulative patterns to flourish undetected—in my business, my relationships, and my family.
Drawing on decades of visual communication expertise, I began systematically mapping the emotional patterns I had experienced. TEG-Blue emerged from recognizing that individual healing and social transformation are the same process operating at different scales.
About the Methodology
Survival-Driven Innovation
TEG-Blue was created from inside the nervous system. Inside the moment of collapse. Inside the place where meaning breaks and survival takes over. The frameworks emerged through what I call "survival-driven innovation"—the necessity of making sense of complex emotional dynamics in real-time, under pressure, with no existing tools adequate for the task.
Transparent and Trauma-Informed
My approach combines rigorous pattern recognition with radical transparency about the personal experiences that informed the work. Rather than hiding behind academic objectivity, I demonstrate how lived experience becomes systematic understanding when approached with both emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor.
Integration, Not Invention
TEG-Blue synthesizes insights from over 40 established frameworks in trauma science, psychology, neuroscience, and systems thinking. Not to replace those models, but to connect them—and fill the emotional and logical gaps between them. This origin ensures TEG-Blue remains practical and immediately applicable rather than purely theoretical.
Living the Work
I'm building TEG-Blue full-time while sharing my recovery transparently.
As a neurodivergent woman healing from complex trauma, I bring precision, systems thinking, and emotional depth into everything I create. My work is especially for those who've been overlooked—offering tools that are honest, trauma-aware, and grounded in everyday reality.
Because if this is what we call "normal"—if lying, manipulating, and hurting others is seen as love—then life itself makes no sense.
There had to be another way.
Connect
The Emotional Gradient Blueprint – TEG-Blue™
© 2025 Anna Paretas-Artacho. All rights reserved.
May be shared non-commercially with attribution under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.