Hello. I'm back. We had a great episode last week with cousin Monica. today I want to talk about something hard because some families don't heal, they hide. Some families don't pass down recipes, they pass down silence.

They passed down tolerance. They passed down denial. They passed down pain nobody ever names. And if you grew up in a family where truth was, well, let's say inconvenient, where keeping the peace mattered more than keeping people safe.

Well, then this episode may just feel familiar.

Welcome to the Unfolding podcast. I'm your host and friend, Yvonne Wink. And I'm on one today. I titled this episode What Stops With Me? Because I this is the best I've felt. I've never felt so comfortable in my skin, comfortable telling the truth, my truth, putting myself out there. If you've been listening since the beginning.

You know I call myself out often. I truly believe you can't heal what you won't name. I'm enjoying feeling comfortable, creating and adhering to boundaries, letting people know that I don't like what you just did or I don't like what you said. Don't do it again.

See, and this sounds simple to some people, but it wasn't always my reality. Remember, I am a recovering good girl. I spent years being that good girl. That was my mask. But now, this good this good girl has, she's grown up. And she's speaking up.

Before we begin, a gentle trigger warning. Today's episode is more emotional than most. We'll be talking about family dysfunction, betrayal, childhood harm, and healing.

So please be gentle with yourself. Make sure you're in you're in a good place, in a good headspace where you can listen with care, grace, compassion.

Because there are adult themes, I'd say this one is not for little ears. Because sometimes healing doesn't begin until someone is willing to name what happened. And today that someone is me, yours truly.

When I was a child, a family member harmed me. Years later, he was arrested, convicted, and went to prison for brutally harming another child.

I remember I was standing in another room, hearing my parents quietly talking about what he had been arrested for, for raping his stepdaughter.

And as they're talking, suddenly everything I had buried came rushing back. Every memory I had buried, every feeling I had pushed down. And as they kept talking, my body felt like it was disappearing. Everything got real quiet and then really loud all at once.

I loved that family. I trusted them.

I spent many nights at their house. To me, it was it was familiar. It was family. It was where children were supposed to fe feel safe. They were supposed to be safe. I was a child. They were adults. I trusted them. And they failed me. And I say they very intentionally.

Because the woman in that house, the woman who actually ran the house, knew exactly who she was married to. She knew exactly what was happening. Well, how about this? She knew enough. And she chose to look the other way. She chose comfort over protection. She chose denial over a child.

And what I remember most is not always the details. It's the feeling. That deep discomfort I used to get whenever he was around. The kind children often don't have words for. The body knows long before the mind can explain. I remember somewhere around six years old-ish telling my parents.

I don't want to go there anymore. I I didn't want to spend the night. I I didn't have the language for why. I didn't have the proof or the evidence. I didn't have adult words and reasoning. I just knew.

And that is something I want every parent listening to hear. Children often speak through resistance before they speak through sentences. They say, I don't want to go. I don't like being there. I don't want to sit with them. I don't want to sit next to them. I feel weird.

And adults sometimes call that stubbornness or even disrespect.

When it may be intuition.

My body was telling the truth years before my mouth could.

And I think so many of us spend adulthood learning to trust again, what our younger self knew immediately. That's been a journey I've been on for a while. And as I was standing there listening to the pain he inflicted on another unsuspecting little girl.

I remembered the innocence of who I was. Knowing what he was doing didn't feel right, but also not knowing what to do or say or who to tell. I remembered what my body knew long before my mind could process it.

And in that split second, as they were talking, I walked right into that room where they were discussing the details, not knowing I was listening. I just walked right into that room and I blurted out to my parents. He hurt me too.

And even as the words came out, part of me was shocked to hear myself say them. Because up until that moment, I had spent years convincing myself it didn't really happen.

Or if it did, it it didn't count. I had filed it away as something smaller, something confusing, something uncomfortable, but not something worthy of being named. Because it didn't look like the dramatic version people talk about. It didn't look like the stories on television.

Even years later, it didn't look like the warnings they give children.

There were no flashing lights, no arrows pointing, no obvious monster, no language in my young mind for what was happening. So I minimized it. But trauma often survives through minimization.

See, I made it manageable. I told myself it wasn't serious enough. It wasn't bad enough. It wasn't that kind of abuse.

But this is how many children survive. They shrink the truth. They shrink the truth until it feels small enough to carry. And we carry that. We carry that. We throw it in a big, large backpack, and we walk through life with it.

We normalize what should never be normal.

And we protect ourselves the only way we know how.

Sometimes people well they don't understand what happened to them until years later when safety and maturity or someone else's story finally gives them words.

Because the truth was never that it didn't count. The truth was I didn't have the capacity to understand it. I was a child. He was an adult. And that was enough.

What I called confusion was violation that I had no language for.

And when I finally named it, I named it to my parents. And to their credit, they believed me.

He was convicted and he went to prison and I'm sure what he had done to all little girls before prison was done to him tenfold. I'm sure all of that happened. So he spent years and years in prison, I don't even know how long. And you would think that that would be the end of the story, right? That was the end of him in our family as we knew it.

But I call their next move the second wound. Because in families shaped by trauma, shaped and molded by trauma, sometimes, well, the sentence ends, but the dysfunction doesn't.

So he eventually gets out and he was able to go back to his house, integrate with his family, which also happened to be my family.

And some welcomed him back. Never mind the overwhelming evidence stacked against him. Never mind the rape and assault conviction against him. Never mind the truth. Never mind that he's a registered sex offender for the rest of his life.

In one tiny corner of the family, I was the liar.

And that's when I learned something devastating.

One of the deepest wounds in dysfunctional families is not just the abuse, it's the denial. It's when truth threatens the system. So the truth teller becomes the problem.

It's when the person who names what happened gets labeled dramatic, difficult, bitter, disloyal, the liar. Some families would rather protect the story than protect the child.

And grieving this is complicated. Because you're not only grieving what happened, you're grieving the protection you never received. And and the adults who failed you. You even grieve the family that you loved and missed and wished you had, and it could be what it used to be.

The years spent doubting yourself, talking yourself out of what really happened to you. You grieve the birthdays you smiled through, the holidays you tolerated, and the parts of yourself you silenced just to belong.

If you've ever been betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect you, you know the wound is not only what happened, it's what happened after. It's the people, it's what they excuse, it's what people deny. It's the silence they ask you to carry. So that so that they don't feel uncomfortable.

And that's when I understood something even deeper.

This wasn't just about one man. This was about generational trauma. And generational trauma doesn't always look dramatic.

It doesn't always announce itself with the sirens, right? And the light, the flashing lights. Sometimes it looks like everyday family culture, right? It c it sounds like, how about we not talk about that? Let's keep the peace. Well, that's just how he is.

If no one saw it, it didn't happen. If you can't prove it, it didn't happen. It looks like family is family. Just let it go. Why are you bringing this up now?

It looks like protecting image over truth. Women expected to endure. Children expected to adapt.

Conflict punished.

Boundaries mocked and pain minimized.

What was called normal was often just familiar. In my family, I can trace patterns through the women. These women were strong, incredible, beautiful, wise, resourceful, protective, loyal, hardworking, funny, resilient. They knew how to survive. They knew how to carry everyone else.

They knew how to keep going through the pain, pushing through. They knew how to show up no matter what.

But many of them were also fully armored. They had learned to endure more than they should have, to stay quiet when something hurt, to keep the family together at their own expense.

To confuse suffering with strength.

To her sacrifice like a badge of honor.

My grandmother toler tolerated more than she should have. Because in her generation, many women were not taught they had options. They were taught duty. They were taught loyalty. They were taught to hold to hold the home together, no matter what it cost them. They were taught to survive.

My mother inherited some of that. She loved deeply. She gave generously. She fought for her children. But some of what she knew about love also included overgiving, staying too long, caring too much, and believing love meant sacrifice.

And then I inherited beliefs. Not because she or or anyone ever sat me down and taught them to me, but because children learn by watching. We absorb what is modeled long before we understand it.

So without anyone saying it out loud or directing me to, I learned things like love means suffering, love is pain. Loyalty means silence.

Respect adults even when they are wrong.

Keep people comfortable.

Endure disrespect.

Love is earned. Don't rock the boat.

Be grateful for the crumbs that

Ignore your intuition. Need less. Shrink more.

And the hard part is those lessons can feel like love when they are all you've ever known. And those beliefs, listen, those beliefs don't stay in childhood. They follow you into adulthood. They shape who you choose, what you tolerate, how you receive love, how quickly you abandon yourself, how guilty you feel for having needs. They shape the rooms you stay in too long.

People you keep explaining yourself to.

The apologies when you were the one hurt.

The red flags you rename as potential.

The loneliness you accept just to avoid being alone.

The love you keep trying to earn. And this is why some of us keep calling chaos chemistry. Because chaos feels familiar.

If love was inconsistent, well consistency can feel boring. If love was confusing, calm can feel suspicious.

And if love required suffering, sometimes peace can feel undeserved.

If affection had to be earned. Well, healthy love can feel almost slightly uncomfortable, a little cringy.

Your nervous system often mistakes familiar for safe. And that really matters. Your body is not always choosing what is healthy. As a matter of fact, it's probably never choosing what's healthy. Most of the time, it's choosing what it recognizes. It's choosing that it understands the outcome. We've been here before, so we're good. Sometimes it's choosing what it survived before. It has memory. And so we repeat what hurt us.

Not because we're foolish or or not tuned in or maybe we're not weak, for sure. For sure we're not weak. But because unresolved pain often recreates itself until it can be understood.

We chase people who just can't meet us. We overgive to feel valuable and we stay too long hoping this time it will end differently.

Importantly, we ignore our intuition because we were trained to doubt it.

We betray ourselves trying to be chosen. And then we shame ourselves for the outcome. We call it bad luck. We call it yet another failed relationship. We say, why does this keep happening to me? And sometimes it's not punishment. It's a pattern asking you to be healed. It is your life bringing you the curriculum.

You didn't ask for until you learn what love is not, until you remember what love should feel like.

Until you become conscious enough to choose differently. And that is the turning point.

The moment you stop asking, why does this keep happening to me? And you start asking, what in me still believes this is what I deserve?

That question alone is worth millions of dollars. Because that question can change a life. It can change the trajectory of an entire generation. Because the moment you become conscious of the pattern, you gain the power to interrupt it, to break the cycle, to choose differently, to make sure what wounded you does not continue through you.

And to let it end with you.

Inherited patterns are not destiny. You can receive something and still decide that it ends with you.

Yeah, sure, patterns can travel through generations and generations and generations and generations until one person finally gets honest. One person goes to therapy. One person names it. They call it exactly as it is. One person sets boundaries. One person stops calling dysfunction love. One person says, This stops with me.

And speaking honestly here, I don't know the exact day I knew that. I don't know if it was one grand awakening or a thousand quiet moments adding up. But somewhere deep down, I knew from a young age that this cycle would not own my future. I knew the pain that moved through generations was going to meet resistance in me. That somehow

I knew in this lifetime I was meant to be here to interrupt what had been repeated for far too long. I knew it was my cross to bear. I knew that's why I was here on this earth, and it was my cross to bear, to question what was normalized, to challenge what was excused, to heal what had been inherited, and to make sure what wounded us did not continue through me.

I think that knowing unfolded really slowly. It unfolded through heartbreak, through therapy, through disappointment, through finally getting tired of abandoning myself, through seeing the same pain wear different faces, through realizing that different people can carry the same pattern until you decide to stop choosing it.

And little by little what began as pain began became purpose. And the purpose became this it stops with me.

And one of the clearest, clearest moments came near the end of my mother's life. As she was losing her battle with cancer, she began telling more of her truths. She opened up about the pain she carried most of her life, the trauma she experienced, the things that were done to her, what she tolerated, what she wished she had walked away from sooner, the ways she gave too much, the ways she lost herself.

Trying to love others is

And as painful as it was to hear, it was also clarifying. Because learning more about her helped me understand more about me.

So, parents, talk to your children. And children, talk to your parents. Listen. Because I could suddenly see the patterns clearly as she was sharing more with me through her our conversations, through her journals. I saw the patterns clearly, where they came from, how pain had been passed down quietly through the women, how survival became identity.

How endurance became love.

How silence became loyalty.

An alliance.

And I remember thinking, with compassion, not blame or judgment.

this is bigger than me. And because it's bigger than me, it gets to end with me. Not by being angry, holding grudges toward the women before me, but by honoring them enough to do differently.

See, I understand they survived what they knew how to survive. And my work was to heal what they did what they didn't have the tools to heal.

And what didn't repeat with my daughters, there are things that did not repeat with my babies.

They were encouraged to speak, speak up, even challenge me as a mom, and even as a human. They were believed. They learned their voice was not a problem to manage. It was something to trust. They saw a mother rebuild, not perfectly, not gracefully every day. It was messy. But they saw honesty.

They watched a woman fall down, lose everything, and get back up and rebuild.

They learned love doesn't require suffering. They learned that women can leave, they can walk away, they can heal, they can grow, and they can choose again.

They learn feelings can be discussed, not buried. And that hard conversations, they don't destroy love. They understand that avoidance does.

They learn boundaries are allowed and they use them. They they learn that no is a complete sentence and that access to them is not automatic, that guilt is not the same as wrongdoing.

They learned a woman can be soft and still strong.

Tender and still powerful. Loving and still unwilling to tolerate disrespect BS. My favorite is they learn to take up space in this world, that they matter, that they're important. What they have to say, what they do is important. That when they walk in a room, my face lights up. Every time. I see it. And I'm so proud of them.

I see the cycle breaking in real time with my nieces and nephews. I see it in how they question things I would have accepted. I see it in how they speak up faster than I did. They fight for the underdog. I see it in how they expect reciprocity.

I see it in how they leave what is misaligned sooner.

I see it in how they comfort each other. I see it in how they know they matter.

I see it in the shaky voice scared to speak truths, but doing it anyway. I see it in how they don't confuse chaos with love. Love isn't pain.

Do they have struggles? Yes. Do we have struggles? Yes. Of course, they're human and I'm human. But they started from a freer place than I did, and that really matters. They may inherit some of my wounds, but they also inherited my healing. They inherited language, awareness, permission, and a new example. That is how cycles break.

Not in the perfection, but right smack mid-growth in the progress. Not in never hurting again and hurting differently, healing differently, choosing differently.

And before I say this, let me be really clear here. You do not have to experience something extreme to carry generational trauma. It does not only come through abuse. Sometimes it comes through silence, through emotional neglect, through growing up around chaos, feeling lost, feeling unseen, unheard, through emotional neglect.

Through growing up around the chaos, through watching women disappear inside relationships.

Through never seeing healthy conflict. Through being taught to people please.

Through being loved but not emotionally understood, or even emotionally supported.

Sometimes no one hit you and you still inherited pain. Sometimes nothing big happened, but something important was always missing. And that shapes a life too. So if this is your story and you're asking, how do I begin to heal? How do I break the generational cycle that I inherited?

Well, take some work, but it's doable. Number one, name what happened. Because what we name we can work with. What stays unnamed often stays in control.

Truth is where healing begins.

Two, stop romanticizing dysfunction. I see this a lot. Because loyalty without truth is bondage. Just because it's familiar does not mean it's healthy. Just because it's family does not mean it's love.

Next. Learn new love. You get to describe what love looks like and what feels like. Healthy love may feel unfamiliar at first. So don't confuse unfamiliar with wrong or boring, right? Because peace can feel boring at times, especially when chaos was home.

Consistency can feel suspicious when unpredictability was normal.

Four, set boundaries with systems, not just people. This is important because sometimes it's not just one person, it's the whole damn dynamic. The unspoken rules, the guilt, even the eye, the looks that people throw at you, the roles everyone expects you to play. And sometimes healing requires distance. Sometimes love from afar is the healthiest love available.

Sometimes access must be earned.

A few more. Learn how to reparent yourself. This is one of my favorite forms of healing. Because reparenting means becoming for yourself what you needed then. It means speaking gently to the sacred parts of you, to the younger parts of you, protecting yourself the way no one protected you. Believing yourself, comforting yourself, keeping promises to yourself, letting rest be allowed.

Letting joy and laughter be allowed. Teaching your nervous system that life no longer has to feel like survival.

Give yourself now the protection, the tenderness, the grace, the truth, and belief you needed then.

Let me say something very direct here. This is very true in my life and in my family's life. Being related to someone does not make them safe. Sharing blood does not excuse betrayal. And age does not automatically equal wisdom. I tell my kids all the time, when they ask for advice, you know, or they're looking for advice through their friends or through pe other people, I say, make sure that they've been where you're going. If they haven't, I'd take their advice lightly, gently, right? Extract what you need from it and then just allow the rest to go.

Some people they get older, but they don't grow.

Some people choose to grow. So be one of them.

I used to think healing meant keeping everyone comfortable, keeping the peace. That's why I carried all those masks, had them in my big closet. Carrying what was never mine.

Many, many years staying quiet so others did not have to feel discomfort. Now I know healing means something very different. It means telling the truth and building a life that honors it.

It means choosing peace that is real, not peace that is performative.

It means loving yourself enough to stop abandoning yourself.

And in a strange way, breaking this cycle in my family also gave me something back: my power.

Because for years, power can look like silence. It looks like doubting yourself. You're carrying shame that never belonged to you. It's like you're waiting for someone else to validate your pain, to apologize, to acknowledge it. But healing taught me something deeper. I believe me. I protect me. I trust what I know. I honor what I feel. And I no longer need anyone else's permission.

To call the truth by its name.

And if you've been listening to this episode today, I just want to thank you. I know this was not a light conversation, and I know for some of you it may have stirred memories, grief, anger, rage, confusion, or relief. But please be gentle with yourself.

Especially after this episode. Drink some water. Take a walk. Place your hand on your heart. Reach out to someone safe. Let yourself exhale.

If this story touched something in you, I want you to know you're not alone. There are more people carrying silent pain than you realize. More people healing than you know. And there is support available when you are ready. Therapy, trusted friends, support groups, safe community. You do not have to carry everything by yourself. I am not what happened to me. I am what

I chose to stop. What was hidden in my family became healed in me, and the cycle did not survive my honesty. And if no one has told you this lately, you are not disloyal for telling the truth. You are not cruel for setting boundaries.

You are not bitter because you're speaking up about what happened to you. You are not broken for being affected by what happened to you. You are not too late to heal. You are so, so worthy of safe love. You're worthy of peace and calm. You matter.

You're unfolding.

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