About
Priscilla Zorrilla is the founder of In The Search Bar, a coaching and knowledge hub built around ending self-abandonment and building self-loyalty. She left an 18-year corporate career in 2025 to build this work, and she teaches it from inside the practice. Not as someone who has it figured out, but as someone doing it alongside her audience. Self-abandonment is the pattern of overriding our own needs, feelings, and truth in order to stay safe, connected, or accepted. This is the work of coming back.
What makes In The Search Bar different
In The Search Bar is rooted in lived experience. It comes from walking through self-abandonment and learning how to return to myself from the inside out. Self-loyalty is the practice of returning to ourselves and making decisions from our own truth rather than from fear, habit, or the need for external approval.
It's an invitation to understand the architecture of your inner experience so you can respond with awareness, presence, and self-trust.
Everything here is shaped by what I've practiced in my own life and now offer to others. You won't find clinical observations here. These are real, lived lessons. Honest inner work, grounded in deep respect for the human experience.
The four pillars of this work
Everything in In The Search Bar falls into four core areas:
Recognition: Making self-abandonment visible. Naming the patterns you've been living but couldn't articulate. You can't interrupt what you can't see.
Embodiment: Understanding how self-abandonment lives in your nervous system and body, not just your thoughts. The pattern holds itself in place physically. This is grounded in how the polyvagal nervous system works. Our bodies store and carry the protective responses we developed long before we had words for them.
Practice: Concrete ways to interrupt the pattern in real time and redirect yourself back to you. This is the work of returning, over and over.
Rebuilding: What self-loyalty actually looks like and how to build a new relationship with yourself that isn't based on performance. Self-trust deepens each time you choose yourself.
Each article, guide, and resource connects to one or more of these pillars. You'll cycle through them repeatedly. That's how the work deepens.
Why this work exists
People aren't here because they want to "stop caring what others think." They're here because something inside feels off. A noticeable tension. A sense of disconnection. They're managing themselves to keep things smooth and wondering why they feel so exhausted.
This work explores that tension without judgment and gives language to what many of us feel but can't yet name. It helps you recognize self-abandonment in action so you can interrupt the pattern and come back to yourself. Again and again.
What this work helps you do
This work helps you recognize when you're abandoning yourself, understand where it lives in your body, interrupt the pattern in real time, and rebuild your relationship with yourself.
It addresses four core areas: making the invisible visible (recognition), understanding how self-abandonment lives in your nervous system and body (embodiment), giving you practices to stop mid-override and redirect yourself (practice), and showing you what self-loyalty actually looks like (rebuilding).
Self-abandonment isn't something you fix once. It's a pattern you'll meet over and over. This work gives you the tools to notice when you've drifted and the practice of coming back. Each time you return to yourself, the pattern loosens.
Each piece in the Library is meant to help you see what's happening, not fix you. Over time, that clarity becomes practice.
How I work
In The Search Bar helps you see the patterns of self-abandonment through grounded observation and lived experience. You're not here to be told what to do. You're here to recognize yourself—your patterns, your armor, your capacity for change—so you can choose differently.
I don't teach you how to abandon yourself less. I help you notice that you're doing it, feel where it lives in your body, and interrupt it in the moment. You'll abandon yourself again. I do too. The work is in the returning. Each time you catch yourself and redirect, you're practicing self-loyalty. That practice builds trust.
The rest unfolds from there.
The practice of returning
Self-abandonment doesn't end. It's a pattern we'll meet again and again, in different forms, at different depths, throughout our lives.
The work isn't about never abandoning yourself. It's about catching yourself sooner. Redirecting yourself with less force. Coming back to yourself with more ease.
You'll override yourself tomorrow. Maybe in an hour. That doesn't mean the work isn't working. The pattern loosening happens in the repetition of returning, not in the perfection of never leaving.
This is lifelong work.
Here is what this looks like in practice. Before a book signing event, I noticed a familiar feeling: guilt that people were going to come support me. I traced it back to a moment in high school when speaking my truth wasn't welcome and nobody created safety around it. I learned then to make myself smaller so I wouldn't cause discomfort. Decades later that pattern was still showing up. I named it, traced it back, identified the bridge, and chose a new way: I feel good that people are going to come support me. That is the work. Small, specific, repeated.
Read more about how patterns resurface and how we return to ourselves.
A good place to start
Some people arrive here after reading an article. Others find this page first. If you'd like to begin with context, these essays are central to the work. You can start anywhere. You'll return to them differently each time."
About the author
This work was created by author and coach, Priscilla Zorrilla. It's grounded in observation of lived experience and a strong desire to help people shift from self-abandonment to self-loyalty.
After 18 years in a traditional career—including 10 years as an early member of a tech startup in San Francisco—she stepped out of the 9–5 without a perfectly defined plan. What followed was a deeper commitment to the inner work she had already been doing—the decade-long process that taught her how to stop overriding herself and live in her truth.
She trained in professional coaching aligned with ICF standards and became certified in holistic coaching—an approach that integrates mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical dimensions of human experience to help clients move forward in deep alignment. This brought structure and methodology to the frameworks she'd been developing through lived experience.
Her technical background shows up in how she builds today—she doesn't outsource the technology behind In The Search Bar. She creates it herself, with privacy and intention at the forefront.
Through articles, guided resources, experiential frameworks, and coaching, Priscilla helps people notice where they've been adapting or people-pleasing, and begin choosing themselves instead.
Her vision is to change how people understand and relate to themselves by giving language to self-abandonment and establishing self-loyalty as a recognized and sought-after way of living.
This work contributes to a cultural shift where self-betrayal is no longer normalized and self-trust becomes the baseline.
Priscilla offers 1:1 human coaching for deep transformational work. Learn more about working with Priscilla.