Invisible

B. Duran W., a first generation Latina, worked hard to defy the odds and lived independently as she attended college and achieved higher education degrees and raised her two daughters. She experienced multiple traumas throughout her growing years due to poverty, racism, and abuse within a family of constant births, ten in total, and with an alcoholic father and an overburdened mother. Her panic attacks without explanation puzzled her and little did she know, she was holding all that trauma in the back of her mind, creating an unacknowledged mental health challenge to emerge at a later time. But on the positive side, B. worked with students, teachers and parents and it all filled her with joy and purpose.

Though there were many siblings, B. took each one as unique and special to the point of creating a trajectory to find out how each one did in life. The results were dismal, where statistically half the siblings had died, the rest either failed high school or received their GED, and only two had been successful in college.

While her first two marriages were failures, at the age of fifty, she married a good-natured man who had a background in farming and livestock. They took a risk and built a successful alpaca ranch business, but tragedy struck when cancer caused his early death and added further trauma for B.

After some anguishing down time, she found a partner having much in common with her. She married and moved to Northern California; there in retirement, surounded by quiet nature, she researched childhood trauma and C-PTSD (Complex-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). That is when horrifying memories emerged and it was like she was there again, experiencing them now with expressive tear-jerking emotions. The author found a connection between her body and how trauma has had a strong impact on her life. She found help through yoga exercise and yoga therapy which is a somatic approach encompassing body and mind.