My Trauma Resume Keeps Me Motivated to Succeed

Trauma can be a stumbling block or a stepping stone. This episode focuses on how I do not let the worst experience of my life define me anymore. Tonight's sponsor is Relief Factor! Get your discount today! https://bit.ly/3f5iKMo 00:04 Good evening and welcome to my humble podcast abode. I am Cocoa Griot. You know the 50 something who geeks out when she has the opportunity to talk about life, love, and a smattering of other topics. Recently, I had a conversation with my best friend of over 40 years, whoo I am dating myself, Molly. We were talking about obstacles in our lives and I suggested that we look back at the things we have gone through and let them remind us of our strength. We can view trauma as a stumbling block, or a stepping stone. The choice is definitely ours. This evening, I'm going to share a few points about why it is important to take the lessons we learned from trauma, and use those lessons to keep us motivated to succeed. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study or ACEs captured important data to show the impact of childhood trauma, the experiences might be abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, etc. This study found that as exposure to these types of events increased, the likelihood for unfavorable outcomes, such as disease risk factors incidence and poor self-rated health was a problem. The lack of healthcare utilization and mortality increased according to how high the ACES score was. Seriously scary stuff right? I put a link to the ACE quiz in my show notes, and you can take the quiz if you would like to see where you score. 01:38 Thinking about trauma exposure as a guaranteed ticket to failure is not healthy. I've discussed before that I am a sexual assault survivor. My neighbor attacked me when I was just four years old. I suppressed the memory for decades until one day I had to face it. The evidence of my trauma was the unhealthy lifestyle I lived. Even when I didn't talk about it, it still permeated every cell of my body. When I confronted my abuser 46 years later, I freed