When Your Past Shapes Your Future: Healing, Choice, and Responsibility

Two brothers grow up with the same alcoholic father, yet their lives take completely different paths. When asked why, both give the same answer: “Because of my father.” That story opens the door to a powerful conversation about trauma, resilience, personal responsibility, and how our perception of the past can shape the choices we make in the present.

In this episode of Steel Roses Podcast, we explore how childhood trauma, abuse, assault, and painful family patterns can influence the way we see ourselves, trust others, cope with stress, and build our lives. Trauma does not make someone weak, but it can wire our beliefs, reactions, relationships, and sense of safety in ways that are hard to untangle without support. Healing takes work, and support matters.

We also talk about what it means to turn pain into purpose. Whether it is breaking generational cycles for your children, building a safer and more stable life, or helping other women who are still living in survival mode, trauma can become a catalyst for change. I reflect on past guests who have transformed violence, fear, and hardship into advocacy, strength, and purpose — reminding us that recovery is possible and resilience is real.

This conversation also explores women’s financial independence, family separation, motherhood, and the lessons our children absorb by watching us work, struggle, rebuild, and succeed. Are we chasing stability from a place of fear, or are we building a life rooted in hope, freedom, and self-worth?

If you have ever felt torn between honoring what happened to you and choosing to move forward, this episode is for you. Listen now, subscribe to Steel Roses Podcast, share this episode with someone who needs encouragement, and leave a review with one thing you are choosing to change next.

 #trauma healing, childhood trauma, generational trauma, breaking generational cycles, resilience after trauma, healing after abuse, women’s empowerment, financial independence for women, survival mode, personal growth podcast, motherhood and resilience, overcoming trauma, trauma recovery, family patterns, women’s podcast, Steel Roses Podcast. 

Transcript

Steel Roses Welcome And The Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Everybody, this is Steel Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is having a really, really wonderful week. Um, I saw a post recently and I wanted to address it because it actually made me think of something else that I've talked about before. So the pose was an image of two brothers. And the brothers are sitting next to each other, and the one brother's in a business suit, and the other brothers dress really bummy and like just, you know, you could tell like it it something's not quite right with his situation. You just dress really poorly. And um, the quote says, two brothers raised by an alcoholic father, and then it was like one brother went into business, X, Y, and Z, and the other brother is an alcoholic. Both brothers say, if you ask them, how did you end up the way you did? The brothers will say, Because my dad was an alcoholic. Now, the the perception part here is that one brother saw his father's alcoholism, decided, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna let that happen to me. I'm gonna fight this, I'm gonna do better. Went down a whole different path. Went to business, went to college, like high achieving in life because he didn't want to end

Two Brothers And One Choice

SPEAKER_00 1:07

up like his father. Brother number two comes to the table and this is gonna sound mean, but uses this as a crutch. My father's an alcoholic, I'm gonna be an alcoholic, that's why I am the way I am. The thing about the whole situation is that it's our choice where we end up. It's our choice where we end up in life, it's our choice, the path that we take. We make conscious choices all along the way of how we're gonna do things. Now, there are for sure pre-learned things and things ingrained in us that definitely affect how we approach our life and how we approach things. That's at our core for sure. But it's up to the individual to decide

Turning Trauma Into Purpose

SPEAKER_00 1:48

how they're going to let it lead their lives. Now, I know some individuals that had past trauma and, you know, trauma from assault and shut down from that. It took their lives. The assault took their lives, and they still functioned, still got married, still had kids, still had a family, you know, still did everything, but it stole from them parts of trust and it stole from them how they react to things. It stole like part of their um ability to be free. You know, it happened. And not to and this is not a judgment for everyone handles trauma differently, especially things like assault. Very, very trauma traumatic situation. You do need to get the appropriate support and help after something like that. And you have to fight for yourself, you have to fight for your life after that because that kind of thing couldn't take you out of the knees. There are some people that achieve over it. There's some people that use it as a catalyst to fight for something more. I interviewed um a woman on the podcast a few years back, Marissa Phipps, I believe her name was. And she came onto the podcast and she tells her story about her and her ex-husband and explains to me how this man almost beat her to death and she had to go running for her life out of the home to her neighbor's house for safety because this was going to happen. He was gonna kill her. And from this, though, she had a child when this happened. From this, she survived, she thrived, she got married again, she found the will to trust and got married, and then she founded an organization to help support women in those kinds of situations. And to see somebody taking a trauma and turning it into something else to help others is the most beautiful gift. And it almost leads you to say, had this not happened to you, you would not have been able to touch so many other lives. There's another woman that I interviewed many years ago that's a relative of mine, Carrie is her name, and same situation, terrible trauma in her childhood, awful, awful abuse, horrible assaults of this young one, young girl when she was a child. She took it and turned it into, I'm gonna help other people. She's certified to be able to coach and help other women who've gone through this thing, and she flipped it. She flipped a script. It is up to us what we do with our trauma. Now, case in point, maybe it's not something so big. Maybe you don't want to go that large to say, I'm gonna found it, you know, found an organization to help others. I'm not saying it has to be that big, but again, it's your choice. How are you going to take what you've gone through and flip it to something else? Because it could either be a crutch or it could either be a catalyst. The catalyst could also be, I'm gonna break the chain of abuse now. I'm gonna step up to the plate and I'm having children and I'm gonna make sure that they don't have the same kind of trauma that I had, and I'm gonna work towards that. To stop the cycle of abuse is incredibly hard because it becomes learned behavior that is deeply ingrained in you, and you have to fight with yourself internally to turn that around. Now, on a lesser, on a less intense side, if we go back to the analogy of the two brothers that turned out vastly different, that's also real for you know

How Family Patterns Shape Ambition

SPEAKER_00 5:09

everyday situations in your life. Now, if you have siblings and you if you have siblings, you know. Every single one of you is going to have a different perception of how you all grew up. And each of you is going to go in your own path. Now it's very interesting, and I often reflect on myself and my brothers and how we all turned out. Now, you know, we started as a traditional family unit. My dad and mom separated when I was 14, roughly. 14, yeah, about 14 years old, they separated. That had a massive effect on me. That really, and is it's very interesting because their separation is and me observing that firsthand and observing how my mother turned from it. That whole situation is what the catalyst was for me for driving myself so hard for my professional career. And it's crazy to say that, but that's like the reality of it. And I reflected on this quite a bit. The reason I was so dead set on making sure I had a profession to back me up and that I could stand on my own two feet was because I watched my parents. And my mother went into the marriage very trusting, because that is who she is, and she went into the marriage very much wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. That's what she wanted. And my dad allowed for that because he provided, he provided, he was a good provider and he provided for her and us. And she was able to stay home with us. So for 18 years, she was a stay-at-home mom until the separation occurred. And then she had to go to work. And I watched the rug get pulled out from under her. And so I knew in my soul, I would never let that happen to me. So what am I doing? I'm stepping up to the plate. As you know, I have my professional career and I make sure that I can be financially stable and stand on my own. No one will be able to pull the rug out from under me. Now, the interesting part to me is my children are getting this version of me, this professional version of me. My kids get to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. They see when I've achieved and they can celebrate with me, but they also see when I have those really bad days. And I wonder to myself, how is this defining their future? How is what they're seeing from me defining themselves? They've come to me many times and said, I wish you were like the other moms. I wish you could volunteer at school. Why can't you come and volunteer for the school functions? There have been times that I was late to school functions and just missed my kid, you know, walking across the field or whatever it is for, you know, little like they do like little functions at school. There's times where I've just missed it and it's killed me inside and it's killed my kids. And so I wonder to myself, are they going to grow up and say, for my son, I don't want to have a wife that works. I want her to be a stay-at-home mom. It's like, well, then you're going to take the burden of being the breadwinner. I have two daughters. I ask them all the time. We always talk about what do you want to do when you grow up? What do you want to be? And you know, we always talk with them about it. And to be honest with you, and I'm not offended by this, neither of them say, I want to be like mommy. You know what they do say though, not like be like mommy. They say I don't want to do mommy's job. You know what they do say though, and they're very proud of? They're proud of this podcast. And I think it's because they know that the podcast lights me up. Like you wouldn't believe. Like this is the podcast, this podcast at doing this, and talking to all of you, and bringing topics to the table that I think we need to talk about more. This is something that if I could do this every day for the rest of my life and just do this and really lean into it, I would. I would pick it. I love this. And they know it. And when Mother's Day came around this year, and they were writing their little things about, you know, what's cool about mommy and what do we love about mommy, my podcast was in there. So it's interesting that they've honed in on that. Again, though, when we talk about like, oh, what do you want to be? No one says, Oh, we want to, we want to be in business like mommy. We want to do marketing. And I tell them, like, there's so much more you could do. There's so much, so many more things. I needed to do this because of my triggers, right? I don't want them growing up thinking I have to do this because I need to be able to defend and I need to be able to, yes, all those things are important and I want them to be able to stand on their own, but I want them to do it for positive, good reasons, not so much a trauma reaction, right? Now, circle back to like the differences between me and my brothers or myself and my brothers. My older brother, he told me from when we were young he didn't really want to be a career guy. He wanted to just have a job and be able to go home. Like he was not into it. And that's what he ended up doing. He's not a career guy. He's not a profession, profession guy. He has a job, clocks in, clocks out, goes home. That's what he does. He's not like, I'm driving my profession. My younger brother, a little bit closer to me, definitely driving towards a profession. But I think there's a little difference there in like the dedication that I had and the drive that I had, the reasons for my drive, my driven success are completely different than others because of the factor of me wanting to make sure I didn't end up in the same situation as my mom.

The Hard Truth About Excuses

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Now, one more thing before I let you guys go, and this is the part that people don't necessarily like to hear. And I want to give some some truth, and I'd like to say this is that there's a lot of folks out there that will stand here today in their 30s, in their 40s, in their 50s, and say, excuse me, in their 60s and their 70s as well, and say, Well, I don't do this because when I was little, this happened to me. Well, I'm a mess now because when I was a kid, my mom wasn't around. I'm a mess now because when I was a kid, my dad left. Yes, these are traumatic things. But when you get to a certain point in your life, the flip, the switch flips, and it no longer becomes an issue of, oh, this happened to you when you were young, and so now this is how you are. Because now you have all the tools available to you to be able to course correct and achieve the life of your dreams. It's there, you just have to reach out for it. You have to put the work in for it. And I don't think that it's acceptable to just continue to make excuses based on past history. Now, again, yes, there's absolutely exceptions. And I'm making a blanket statement here because there's a lot of young adults today that are growing up in this age of, I'm gonna sound like a real jerk, but they're growing up in this age of all your feelings and all feel all the feelings and do, you know, lean into that and lean into the emotions. Yes, like I'm all for it. Like definitely feel the feelings. But then at some point you have to be an adult and come out of it and say, and now I'm on to my next phase. What happened to me and what I didn't like, I'm actually I'm in charge of my life. I own my life, and I'm gonna make sure that the from this point forward, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that that doesn't happen to me or this doesn't happen again. You have a choice and you have to make the choice for yourself for what works for you, but you do have a choice. And it is not fair to you to continue to make excuses because at the end of the day, when you lay your head down, you're going to have regret. It's gonna be there. So I encourage you to really try to take the bull by the horns, look at what you don't like, accept the fact that yes, you had trauma, knowledge of the trauma, honor the trauma, but then move on from there. This is your life. We only have one shot at this, and you don't want to get 60, 70, 80 years old and look back and say, I didn't, I didn't achieve what I wanted. I didn't live the life that I wanted. You want to be proud to be able to stand tall.

Final Encouragement And Thanks

SPEAKER_00 12:31

I hope that you found this episode informative. Um, I hope again you're all having a really, really wonderful week. Thank you again to all of the new subscribers. It's been very, very exciting. And I just am very grateful for all of you. So until the next episode, thank you so much for being with me. And I will catch you later. Take care.