Psychology, mediation, and the culture of peace are not, in the hands of most practitioners, disciplines that speak to each other. In the hands of Dr. Elena Baixauli, they form a single unified practice, one built over thirty years of clinical work, academic research, public speaking, and a personal commitment to conflict resolution that runs deeper than professional interest. It is, for her, a life philosophy made visible through a career.
Today, Elena serves as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Valencia, where she has built her academic identity alongside a private practice, five published books, a doctoral degree earned with summa cum laude distinction, and a media presence that has carried her ideas to audiences far beyond the lecture hall. She explains, “Marketing should not only enable growth but also create meaningful value, and when work is connected to purpose and impact, the boundaries between professional and personal fulfillment become less rigid.”
The Child Who Wanted Justice
Elena’s story begins with a characteristic act of defiance. As a child, she wanted to study Law because, as she puts it with characteristic directness, she thought life was not fair. When a teacher told her she was not capable of academic study and should dedicate herself to dancing instead, she spent two months in an existential crisis before arriving at a decision that would define her life: she would study Psychology.
She chose it to imagine it would be easier than Law. She was wrong, and she is grateful for it. Psychology became not just a profession but a vocation, a discipline through which her childhood conviction about justice found its fullest expression. She never fully abandoned Law either. When she finished her degree, she began working as a family mediator, combining psychological insight with conflict resolution, seeking what she describes as peaceful solutions and social justice.
Her family background shaped her in quieter but equally powerful ways. Her parents worked from early adolescence, her mother from age 13 in her grandparents’ hair salon, her father from 14 in the family business. Hardwork was the family’s native language. As the middle child of three sisters, Elena developed an additional fluency: the need to prove herself, to be seen, to show the world and herself that she was a person of value. She explains, “Everything I have done in my personal and professional life has been to prove to the world and to myself that I am a valuable person, and that is why I have not given up despite my failures.”
Building a Career Brick by Brick
Elena did not graduate from her psychology degree feeling ready. She felt the opposite: five years of study, and still not confident enough to work with people in real pain. So, she did what she had always done when faced with a gap between where she was and where she needed to be.
She pursued further studies, earning a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, followed by internships that deepened her practical experience. Within two years, she was consulting patients at a private medical center.
From there, she moved through a sequence of roles that most people would find exhausting to even describe. Giving classes on job search techniques and occupational health to unemployed people. A position at a town hall that gave her first real contact with family mediation. A revelation: mediation was not just a professional tool. It was a philosophy; a way of approaching conflict that aligned precisely with everything she believed about human beings and their capacity for resolution.
She proposed a mediation program for parents at her son’s school. It earned her a research award and opened a door she had not expected: an invitation, on her own merits, to join the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Valencia as an Associate Professor. She has been there ever since.
The years that followed were dense. She highlights, “From the beginning, I worked between 10 and 12 hours a day, always finding time to study and improve at my job. There were times when I juggled four or five jobs at once.” Her son Javier, born in 2004, once argued with his classmates because he insisted that a person could have several different jobs at the same time. He was simply describing his mother.
When the Ground Shifted
The challenges Elena has faced have not been abstract. They have been specific, personal, and at times genuinely devastating.
Early in her career, when she tried to charge the fees stipulated by the Official College of Psychologists, her bosses pushed back hard. She negotiated. At the City Hall, when she began expanding her mediation projects beyond her original mandate, she was politely shown on the door. She had just gotten married and was earning a good salary. The loss stung.
When her son was born, she was self-employed. She took one month of maternity leave, a decision she has always regretted but understood: more than a month away meant losing clients and opportunities she could not afford to lose. She performed what she calls veritable acrobatics to be present for Javier’s early years while sustaining her professional life. She says, “I knew that my son was the most important thing. I didn’t want to miss anything in his life, so I found ways to be present for his most important events and witness his first steps and first words.”
Years later came a separation from her husband, a new apartment, meager savings, and two emotionally difficult years of rebuilding trust with her son. And then, just as things stabilized, COVID arrived.
45 Euros and a Lesson in What Matters
The pandemic dismantled Elena’s professional life with a precision that felt almost personal. The live radio shows have disappeared. The conference stopped. The book signings vanished. The stage invitations went silent. She went from being professionally recognized and constantly busy to receiving no invitations at all. At the lowest point, she had 45 euros in her bank account.
What she found in that empty space was not despair but clarity. She mentions, “I understood that what’s important isn’t money, or having more or fewer things, but being at peace with myself. This humbling experience completely changed my life, and I haven’t been the same since.”
That shift, from a life organized around professional recognition to one organized around inner peace, became the philosophical foundation of everything she has done since. She began to understand, with the full weight of lived experience rather than theory, that peace is internal. That when you find it inside yourself, conflict with others becomes genuinely harder to sustain. That mental health, at its deepest level, is not the absence of difficulty but the presence of grounded Ness.
The Speaker, the Writer, the Voice
Elena’s professional life found one of its most natural expressions on stage. The moment she began giving talks to large audiences, something shifted. She could feel the room moving. She could make people laugh and then make them cry. She could watch an idea to travel from the stage into a person’s chest and land somewhere real.
That experience led directly to her books, five of them now, each one a contribution to the legacy she is consciously building. Writing for Elena is not a professional exercise. It is an act of love toward a world she wants to live better than she found it.
For six years, she hosted the radio program “Mediating with Elena” on Clickradiotv, a platform dedicated to helping people become better individuals and promoting a culture of mediation and peace. She travelled by train to Madrid every Wednesday to record live radio shows. She gave the airwaves to voices that were not otherwise heard.
She explains, “The world that opened up to me as a writer and speaker allowed me to reach people I could never have reached in a clinic, and that reach became the most fulfilling part of my work.”
Accolades That Tell a Story
Elena’s achievements form a picture of someone who has contributed across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Her doctorate, awarded summa cum laude in 2016, stands alongside a José María Moreno Royo Prize for research, recognition among the World’s 500 Most Influential Experts in Psychology by IASR in 2017, and the World Academic Championship in Psychology the same year. The AMMI Award for Best Media Outlet from the Madrid Association of Mediators followed in 2020. The Leading Woman Award arrived in 2023. She received the medal for professional merit in promoting peace in 2017. Since 2022, she has served on the Internal Conflict Management Committee at the University Clinical Hospital of Valencia. Since 2025, she has been a member of the Board of Directors in Spain for the promotion of equality and prevention of gender violence at the Documentation Sciences Foundation.
And at 45, she ran her first race. Since then, she has become an Haute Couture and High Jewelry model, a diver, a television presenter, and an Open Water and Advanced Water diver. She says this not to impress, but to make a point. She highlights, “The sky is not the limit, and for the brain nothing is impossible. If I could do it, you can too.”
The Legacy Being Built
Ask Elena about legacy and she answers with the kind of expansiveness that characterizes everything about her. She wants to reach as many people as possible. She wants to empower women, prevent gender-based violence, and build cultures of peace from the inside out. She wants to leave behind books, talks, films, and radio programs that inspire others to continue the work when she is no longer here to do it.
She mentions, “Success in life is not a prize or recognition. Success is leaving a mark, so that our absence is noticed more than our presence.” For Elena Baixauli, that mark is already visible, in the students she has shaped, the families she has helped mediate, the audiences she has moved, and the readers she has reached. She is still writing. Still teaching. Still dancing. Still building.
