Your story doesn’t end with what you’ve been through. Together, we’ll uncover how to rise above painful experiences, reclaim your identity, and move forward with resilience and hope.

Hartland Fall Convocation 2025: Engage Clarity Mode

<p>Your story doesn’t end with what you’ve been through. Together, we’ll uncover how to rise above painful experiences, reclaim your identity, and move forward with resilience and hope.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Debbie Raj

Martin Raj

Lilena Walker

You Are More Than What Happened to You – Triumphing Over Trauma

First things first, how many of you have this printout with you?

We have some of them that will come and give it to you.

Thank you, Martin, for leading us in that.

Because as we were all standing, I hope it did give the feeling that I'm not alone in this experience.

Sometimes that's the deceptive thing about trauma.

We feel like we can't talk about it because of how bad it was.

So I hope that this gave hope to all of us seeing that other people have experienced what I have.

And even we, even those of us sitting up here, right?

Can we share maybe some of the traumatic events we've been through, 1 or 2?

Well, for me, the 1 that really hit hard was have you ever had a parent that has abandoned you?

And this story I have not shared with many people.

I have written it in my book, but not a lot of people know about it.

It is when my mother was pregnant with me.

And he really fought for it, and she felt pressured, and yeah, so she went to this clinic and Thankfully the doctor Tried to abort me but 3 times he tried it and he was not able to take anything out.

But when I heard that story, and recently when we went to India as well, the aunt that accompanied my mother for that procedure, she shared also about that.

And I felt really abandoned knowing that my own father didn't want me.

Yeah, I might have not known that my father did not want me if my mom did not share it, but he also left even before I was born.

So we were raised in a single mother family and I exactly know how that trauma feels.

So for me I was raised in a Christian home with both parents and with a desire to really follow God's will.

But for many years, my parents struggled a lot with communication, a lot of fights, a lot of disagreements.

But I grew up feeling like I was the counselor to my parents, they would confide, share their struggles.

And so there was a lot of fear that I had for future marriage.

I was like, I don't want to go through what all of this marriages are going through.

I don't want to be in a situation that I feel stuck or abused or misused and I also feared a lot conflict.

So I tried to run away from it, be a people pleaser, be the nice, kind girl, but I would pile everything inside and that really impacted me later on in relationships when I wanted to build healthy relationships.

So that was 1 thing that till now I'm working on and growing from and trying to make changes to not follow in the same patterns that maybe we grew up with.

Those are very vulnerable sharings, you know, experiences they've had.

I, too, experienced something that I definitely would say was traumatic in the sense that I told you all earlier, My dad died when I was 9.

And she had started dating this new guy, I didn't like him, but this new guy, his name was Vincent.

And we were at his house watching movies, watching TV.

So I would estimate, okay, the distance to get to the store, how long it would take for the groceries she said she needed when she'd be back, And she took longer than that.

And I remember having a bad feeling that something bad had happened.

And then Vincent comes back and he said, your mom's been in a fender bender.

And I knew what a fender bender was right?

That's like if your rear-ended or you know something that maybe causes damage to the car I'm like, why isn't mom telling me this herself?

My mom is covered in blood from head to toe She's literally spitting out blood and glass from her mouth as she mouths, I'm okay, I'm okay, Lena.

And my brother, she doesn't even say anything to him.

She's telling me because she can see on my face, trauma.

And having had the feeling that something bad had happened.

I know that I was traumatized from that event because after, and thankfully my mom was able to heal.

She had deep lacerations all down her legs, her arms.

She also cut her liver from the seatbelt.

But I remember any time she would leave the house, fear would take over my body.

Any time she was out of my sight, she was going to die.

Something is gonna take her away because the last time you felt that way, that's what happened, right?

And so I struggled for years with deep separation anxiety.

And it was only through what we'll talk about in a minute that I was able to overcome that, to move past that trauma.

And could we have it without even realizing it?

So trauma comes from a Greek word that actually means wound.

A wound can be, you know, something small or it can be something deep, as we just talked about with the lacerations.

Trauma by the mental health community is usually thought of as an emotionally and psychologically distressing event that overwhelms the person's capacity to handle it.

So it's Like something happens to me that I can't make sense of.

I don't know what to do about this thing that's happened.

That's usually how we as therapists think of trauma.

In terms of can someone be traumatized without consciously being aware?

Maybe in our own experiences, we maybe thought like, oh, no, I'm good.

But usually that I'm good was because we kind of just pushed it to the back.

And our bodies, as I was talking to Rico earlier about this book, our bodies kept the score.

So sometimes even if we don't think we're traumatized, our bodies will let us know this was heavy for you, right?

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You Are More Than What Happened to You – Triumphing Over Trauma

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