Today’s SameHere Hero Story: Donna Brown
I come from generational trauma, which for me, impacted our young family life when our young, wounded mother departed from our family when we were very young children. From there, I became a widow and single mom at age 23, resulting from a tragic accident, which set the stage for how life would continue to unfold throughout the journey of our lives. Numerous, ongoing traumas would continue to take place, each creating ripple effects on our already traumatized family structure.
Trauma left me and others to live in survival mode without even knowing it – until the day the topic of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) came into my life, explaining everything I have experienced in life. It was as if pieces of a puzzle suddenly all came together, and why I started researching how childhood traumas impact us as human beings throughout our lives.
Throughout the many passages of my life, I had gone to therapy to try and address the issues that I alone didn’t understand. But it really wasn’t until I discovered adverse childhood experiences and how our early life traumas impact our bodies that I had a “direction” to place my focus on understanding all that has been a part of my life and my family life.
For me, I learned through research, the importance of working with both the body and mind connection as they work together. How for me, I found that mindful guided meditation unexpectedly opened the door to “connecting and coming home to me”. The one connection I needed to cultivate as this journey of self-care and self-love became vital.
To my surprise, I received mostly positive feedback in sharing my story and all that I learned about trauma be it relating to the articles I wrote or the community outreach presentations I created and coordinated (without any experience) with the awesome professionals I personally know at our local community library. As it turned out to my absolute surprise, the one presentation that ended up being the most well attended was on “understanding trauma”. A presentation where we had a full room and as the event programmer shared with me, everyone in attendance was totally focused on our speaker, so much so that “you could hear a pin drop”. As for one of my articles, I actually received a request from someone in Australia who asked if they could use a quote from one of my articles for a presentation she was creating. Point is, trauma is a world wide reality and the more we connect in addressing this reality, the more solutions we can “together” create for today and the future generations to come.