No high school diploma. Twenty years in the Navy. Now a licensed therapist and author of six books on masculinity, generational trauma, and the cultural code that runs in families before anyone gets a chance to read it.
Francisco Castillo is an author and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT). A U.S. Navy veteran with twenty years of active-duty service, his books sit where masculinity, generational trauma, and Mexican American cultural identity overlap: the rules nobody writes down, the patterns nobody names, and the language a household quietly teaches you before you can speak back. Clinical precision, lived reality, and a voice closer to coffee with a friend than therapy homework.
I was born and raised in Hollister, California — a small agricultural town on the Central Coast where everyone knew everyone's last name and most of the stories that came with it. School and I didn't get along. I struggled academically, and by the time it mattered I was already halfway out the door; I left high school without a diploma and without a map for what came after.
My map, eventually, was a GED and a Navy recruiter's office. At the time it was the best chance I had at building a meaningful adult life, and I took it. I enlisted young and served twenty years on active duty, retiring in 2019. The Navy taught me systems: how they drift, how they correct, how a small error compounds two oceans from home. It taught me leadership. It also taught me, quietly, what men are allowed to carry and what we're asked to bury.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started taking college courses — a few credits here, a few there, between deployments. Listening to people's lived experiences and learning about their backgrounds made me more curious about the human experience, which pulled me toward psychology. I finished a Bachelor of Science in Psychology while still on active duty, then a master's, then the clinical hours for a license. I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Hawai'i now, and sitting across from people as they translate their own families into language for the first time is its own kind of education, one that keeps turning up on the page. The clinical work and the writing feed each other; they're really the same question approached from two sides.
The books came out of years of notebooks: dichos I grew up hearing, arguments I kept having in my head, patterns I started to see in every family I was close to. I wrote the first one because I wanted to read it; I wrote the next five because once you start naming the code, it gets harder to un-see.
The books are all one argument, told six ways: that the emotional code your family runs on was written before you were born, that you can learn to read it without betraying the people who taught it to you, and that being the first one in your line to see the loop is a kind of lonely work that deserves company.
Lately the frameworks from those books (the DECODE Method, the language I keep reaching for in sessions) are also becoming workbooks and companion materials, for readers who want to do the work on their own and for clinicians looking for culturally informed tools. Same argument, different forms.