We See You, We Affirm You: Elya Braden on HaGomel, Expressive Arts, and Healing From Trauma Through Community

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Writing especially, it became my safe place, the place where I could write the things that I was afraid to say out loud. Because even then I could see how art could heal. It's not just something that happens in that moment. It casts a long shadow. I created love out of a situation that was the opposite of love. And when we finally talked again, she told me, she goes, I don't know who put those fake memories in your head. And it just all started flooding back. It was like I hadn't even realized that I'd been repressing it for ten years. I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail.

Welcome to And Now Love. Trauma leaves an unconscious imprint, a shadow that forces who we truly are into isolation, allowing us to feel unseen, to partially disappear. But true healing means that we break through the isolation and know ourselves without the weight of that trauma. We need a safe space where our raw, creative truth can be witnessed by a supportive community. Are our guest today has built a beautiful sacred sanctuary that does exactly this. I am so pleased and happy to welcome Elya Braden, the founder and President of HaGomel to our podcast.

Elya established this wonderful nonprofit organization here in Los Angeles to provide expressive arts programing for women healing from sexual trauma. What I find so profound about Elya's vision is the name she chose. In Jewish tradition, Birkat Hagomel is an ancient prayer of gratitude recited after surviving a life threatening danger. But it is not to be said alone. It needs to be spoken out loud in front of the community, so that the community can answer back and say, we see you, we affirm you, and we are so glad you are alive. Elya has taken that concept of communal witnessing and woven it into the transformative power of art.

Through her workshops and retreats, she is helping women rewrite their painful narratives, dismantle self-doubt, and find their way back to wholehearted self-love. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's really a treasure. And what you're doing is so important and we're happy to shed light on it. Can't wait to hear all about this, but tell us a little bit about your journey to finding yourself being so fully invested in this wonderful endeavor. When I was a child, I always loved the arts, everything. I loved doing all kinds of visual arts, mostly crafts and collages was really my favorite thing.

And I loved dancing and singing and acting. I used to make it plays for my friends and direct them in them, and that was so much of what I was drawn to. What do you think drew you to this world of creativity? I think I always had a need to express myself and had a huge imagination, and just wanted to see that in the world. It wasn't really until later, when I was about 10 or 11, that I started doing more writing, which was right at the time that I started being sexually abused by my brother. And then writing especially, it became my safe place, the place where I could write the things that I was afraid to say out loud.

Were you writing about what was going on in your life? I was really writing around it. I think even then I was afraid that my mother would find it later on, did read my journal on more than one occasion, and that I was writing into how unhappy I was without saying what was going on at the time, and didn't tell anyone what was going on at the time. And this went on for over two years until we moved. And I finally realized, after all the times he'd been threatening me and saying he would tell her parents, I realized he had more to lose in doing that than I did, and finally had it stopped.

But that sense of I've done something wrong, I'm terrible, just stayed in me. So alongside that, I was always looking for secret places to write. We had a little closet underneath the stairs that I used to hide out in so no one could find me there. And I was regularly distancing myself from other people because no matter what I did, how many A's I made, how many things I succeeded at, I always felt like there was something wrong inside of me and would try to please my parents through doing really well in school and doing the things that they wanted me to do in order to try to feel like I would be okay and I would be loved.

And it was always one more hurdle and one more hurdle, even though still, like when I was in college, I was still singing and I was still leading arts workshops at the Duke Hospital for kids who were there for long term care. Because even then I could see, see how art could heal. And those are the things I love to do. And at summer camp, as a counselor, I was arts and crafts counselor and dance counselor. When I started thinking about what to do next, and I was a religion major, and I thought about becoming a rabbi, but didn't really have the confidence to become a pulpit rabbi at that time.

And back in the early 80s, there wasn't really a thought about what else you could do with it, the way that there is now. And very few women in the rabbinate. And my dad was a lawyer, my brother was already in law school, and my parents really pushed me hard to apply for law school, and I really didn't want to go. I had gotten two schools to agree to defer for a year, and then Stanford called me off the waiting list and said, you're in at Stanford. And I do says no. But I asked if I could deferral year. After they stopped laughing, they said, We're Stanford.

We don't do that. Yeah. Let us know by noon tomorrow. We're calling the next person. So I went to law school. Was that another way of looking to be loved? Yes, absolutely. And I hated it. I was so unhappy. My my first semester, I was just there to try to please my parents. Like this was the track. I also was afraid because we'd had a lot of financial fluctuations in my family, very up and down, that what would I do for money if I didn't do this? So there was that fear running as well. But a lot of it was, I have to do this. During my first year of law school, I gained about 30 pounds because eating had always been my secret addiction, and that was how I shut out the noise in my head.

I would just sit in bed reading novels when I should be studying and eat donuts and all of that. Then something brilliant happened. They announced auditions for spring musicals. Like of All Things, I did a musical satire every spring at Stanford Law School when I was there, and that saved my life. It was it gave me an opportunity to have something to look forward to in the evening, and a boundary to when I could be studying. So I got much more focused. I finally found the smaller seminar classes that I enjoyed more. I discovered I amazingly had a talent for business associations and statutory analysis, which led to my becoming a lawyer.

So even though it wasn't what I wanted to do, I found a way through it, especially for my creativity and being in these shows. And then I did plays as well. And then I got out and was in the real world, and I was like, this is what I'm going to do. And even though I found an aspect of the career that I enjoyed, like there was always a part of me that was longing to be creative. And during this period of time, did you have creative outlets or were you well, devoted to the. I had sort of stopped writing for quite a while when I'd gotten to law school, but then during my second year of law school was when I started having the flashbacks about my brother's abuse.

And so then I started writing again into that. Why do you think those came up when they came up? Because it was a really interesting thing, because I had gained all this weight my first year, and then I started losing weight over the summer. I started swimming and taking dance classes. I'd stayed at school. I was working for professor and riding my bike to school, so it was a little bit more laid back than working at a law firm. And so in the midst of starting to lose weight, I got really depressed and I thought, I'm going to be happy. I had one of those if only kind of mentalities, like, if only I was thin, everything would be great.

And a lot of people have that about whatever it is. If I only get the next job, if I only get married, then I'll be happy. And that's very much how I thought about my life. Then I'll. Be okay days my parents will. Love me. Exactly. And it was always one more thing, one more thing. So I thought, if I get then, then I'll be happy and I'll meet somebody and everything will be great. And it wasn't. And I was really depressed. And I went into counseling, and then I picked up a magazine with an article about incest and it just all sorted flooding back.

It was like I hadn't even realized that I'd been repressing it for ten years. And then it just started coming back, like watching a movie inside my head. And I was up all night into the next day just writing everything down that I remembered. And I'd already been in counseling because of the depression. And then I started talking to my therapist about that, realizing that so much of my I had both a desire, but also fear of dating man because I was afraid of feeling anything in my body and feeling ashamed about whatever I felt in my body. I had been so good at just saying no.

It doesn't feel like anything. It doesn't feel like anything. I'm not here and making myself basically disappear, disassociate from my body that to actually be confronted with what had happened and why I felt like that. It was really scary and it was very hard while I was in law school to focus on that, at the same time that all these feelings were coming up and so much grief around what had this done to shape my life. It's not just something that happens in that moment. It casts a long shadow. Oh it does. And so much of what I had done after that was based on this feeling of shame and like no matter what I did, there was always something dark and dirty within me.

And I just carried that around. Like no matter how many hurdles I jumped over, it was never enough. When I first met my first husband, I was just like coming out of like the first year of dealing with all of the the flashbacks and counseling and still had the sense of myself as something less than. And I know I came into that relationship feeling that way, which colored everything that happened after that, in terms of how I let him treat me in the context of the relationship, because of how I saw myself. If I had come into the relationship from a different place, we might have had a much healthier relationship.

Or no relationship. Or no relationship at all. Maybe I was literally on hey, I want something better for myself, but because he looked really great on paper and was really good looking and was very, I thought, this is going to make me feel okay. And my mother actually picked him out when we were in law school. She had seen him and said, you should date him. As mothers will do, right? One more hurdle. Oh, another thing that will create love here. Exactly. The interesting thing is he was also very creative. He wrote the lyrics to my first musical in law school.

But then when I tried to get back into my own creativity, if I didn't do it the way he thought I should be doing, he immediately shut that down. Or if it took me away from what I was doing with him, he didn't like that, which ended up ultimately being the demise of our marriage. When I started pressing more into that later on, I was enabling a lot of things because of my luck of self-worth. And then in the midst of all this and a period of a lot of trauma in our marriage, I went and did a program called the Hoffman Process, which is a week long residential experiential program that deals with family of origin issues.

And that's when I started having flashbacks about my father sexually abusing me when I was about 3 or 4, and that really knocked me for a loop. I mean, it was nine months of just dealing with flashbacks and not being able to really function very well in the world. And I had two small kids and trying to get them to understand, and there was a lot of other things going on in my life then that I was also trying to navigate at the same time, like everything was triggering me. It was just really a scary time. But it also made me realize, like, if I can just get through this, like if I can just let myself feel these things and feel the grief of knowing that this pattern started in my life so early, maybe I can be open to finding out what's really there for me on the other side.

And at this point, you were in a situation where you had the help of others. I did, so I had already left practicing law at that point in time. I worked for an internet company in the late 90s and left at the end of 2000. So when all of this stuff happened, was about 4 or 5 years later. And how did you decide that law wasn't up your alley? Well, you know, I did it for 14 years. I actually had it wasn't that it wasn't up my alley is I'd done everything I'd wanted to do. My last job was general counsel of a public company. The second public company I was general counsel for was an internet company that I took from 25 people when I got there, to over 1000 when I left.

Gosh, yes. As I was basically running a small law firm within this company because our whole business was around contracts. Was there something about the distraction of that? Yes. For me, work really helped. Working all the time helped me get out of my head and not deal with my personal stuff. So then I think part of it was leaving that and having so much open space created an opportunity for the things that I really wasn't dealing with in my life, like my marriage, and how that wasn't really working, like when I was working so much. There was a kind of a balance because that was my time to myself.

But once I was home and with my husband more and our kids like, I realized like how much he wanted to control that experience and how I really wanted to explore my creativity more and how uncomfortable that made him. And I just realized that I couldn't continue in a place where I couldn't expand and grow, that I needed to be able to explore my creativity in the way I always encouraged him to explore his right. It's kind of the opposite of the creative process. Exactly. And I just needed to try it the way I was going to try it. That's when I thought, you know what?

This it's just not working. Every time I brought something up to him that I wasn't happy about, his pattern was to turn it around. You've done something worse while you did this. When did that sort of feed what you already thought about yourself? That you weren't good enough, that you were dirty, that your opinions were not okay? Absolutely. Especially not so much for my father, but for my mother, who was a narcissist and probably borderline personality disorder. I never knew if it was like nice mommy or mean mommy. Like no matter what I said or did, she could find a way to criticize it or put it down or minimize it.

And she was always right. You know, if I ever said, I'm not happy with you, then it was always, well, you're a bad person and how dare you say anything negative to me. So what I realized in all that counseling I had done is that my first husband was very much like my mother. Which is often the case. Which is often the case, right? Whichever parent we have more issues with, we tend to marry. Yes, yes. At first it was like he's the good version of her. And then it becomes, over time, the bad version. If we're not, you know, dealing with our stuff.

And I hadn't been when we met. It's interesting how much we're drawn to the situations that we know, comfortable or unclean. And so many of us just go to the thing that we know. It's as if, you know, we've been unhappy. Let's say that's just a mild situation, and you search out things that provide that same unhappy feeling. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I realized that in my early dating life before him, I was often attracted to guys who are much more like my father, more withdrawn and unable to show their emotions. So when he was more outgoing and always telling me how he felt about me, that felt a lot better.

And till I realized, well, he loves me as long as I'm doing what he wants me to do, as long as I stay in that box, everything's good. And when I realized I couldn't stay in that box, it wasn't so good. Did you? For a long time, though. Just think that was the box that you didn't get to question. I mean, we were together almost 20 years, but it wasn't really until the last several years that I thought, I just don't know how I'm making this work. And so many people had told me I needed to stay for the kids, which is like, one more thing that's my fault, right?

That I'm going to ruin their lives if I leave. So I tried, but at a certain point I just couldn't take it anymore. I remember at one point. I've said this before on our podcast. I was listening to the radio, and the discussion was about the sexual abuse of young teenage girls and was sort of talking about the issue. And it was very, very hard for me to listen to. And because I had separated myself from my own sexual abuse, and I listened to this report and I thought, my heart goes out to these young girls. I cannot believe that this is happening.

I cannot believe that young women are put in this position. And I separated myself from my own experience so much that I didn't know how to support my own trauma. But I felt deeply for these other individuals who experienced the same, or even something more intense than what I experienced. And it wasn't until 15 years ago that I even really came to terms with what happened to me, and I held this thing up like my North Star every. I turned it into something that it wasn't. I. I created love out of a situation that was the opposite of love. And because I made this imaginary North Star, there was nothing I could do after that that could ever equal the thing that was this pretty picture that I had created.

So it's amazing to me how how much we can, you know, box ourselves in just to survive. Because to be faced for me to be faced without the right equipment or the right help with how bad I felt about myself, how frightened I was, how dirty I felt, all of those things needed to be put away. But sometimes it's easier. Like the first step can be feeling for somebody else who's been in a similar situation. I remember during the time that I was starting to come to terms with what had happened with my dad, and that was almost 40 years after what had happened, and I had repressed it for all of that time.

My gosh, I was watching a lot of Special Victims Unit, and it was easier for me to cry watching that show than to really confront what had happened to me. But it was like a safer way to feel those feelings and feel the grief without thinking it had anything to do with me. But I also could go back and see that I'd had patterns where I was clearly hiding that. For instance, when my son was in preschool, when he was about four years old, 3 or 4 years old, they were always supposed to be supervised in the bathroom when the when they were in there.

And for some reason at that moment they weren't. And when the teacher did come in and saw this little boy coming up to my son and trying to get him to show him or let him touch his penis, I just about lost it when they called me at home, and it worked to tell me. I just started shrieking and and I can see now that my relationship, my reaction was a little over the top, but it so terrified me. And it wasn't until later when I realized what had happened with my dad that I thought, no wonder this was so triggering to me. And I had no idea. You probably didn't even recognize why for years.

For years. Yeah. So many of the people we've spoken to who have come to terms with some amount of trauma have talked about the idea of forgiveness in the process. How did that work out in your life? Yeah, it was really interesting at the time when all when all the memories were coming back to me, I was living in Seattle, and then after my divorce, I moved back to Los Angeles. When I moved back to L.A., just almost immediately, my sister and I had not. We had an up and down relationship over the years, my dad was living with her and she had three little girls, and I didn't tell her right away, but unbeknownst to me, and my mother told her and then she stopped speaking to me for many months.

And when we finally talked again, she told me, she goes, I don't know who put those fake memories in your head, but I'm sure if you talk to him, he'd have a very different story. And she had always been a daddy's girl, always adored him, and I'd always felt much more distant from him and not really knowing why. And then immediately after I moved back to LA, she's planning a birthday party for him. I don't remember what year it was and wanted me to participate, and I was really back and forth. Do I want to go? Do I not want to go? And I'd been in counseling it three years for that point, and I thought, you know what?

I just need to be able to move forward. I don't think I'm ever going to get an apology from him, but I just need to, like, let this go. So I ended up going it just it was kind of surreal, like I realized afterwards that I had just been disassociating, like I was drinking more than I usually do and I just couldn't, like, really feel myself be there. I kept imagining myself like in a bubble where they couldn't hurt me, you know, because my brother was there too. And even though I had talked to him after I had the flashbacks of what he had done and he hadn't denied it, he just said, I thought we were playing doctor.

I'm like, when you were 15 and I was 12, that is no playing doctor. But at least he didn't deny it. And that was a huge gift for me. Huge. I mean, it just really made me feel like I'm not crazy here because my mother was constantly questioning my reality. So at least have my brother say no, this did really happen. So I was there at this party and I just thought, I don't know how I'm going to do this. Let's just take it a day at a time. Let's see how it goes. And I but after like a few times of us getting together as a family at my sister's place, I thought, I've got to say something like, for me, it was just the elephant in the room, like, I just need to tell him.

This is why I wasn't in touch with you for the last three years. And I just want to move forward. But I just got to have to tell you what I remember. And I was going to do it in May. And then he got weirdly sick. And then some other things happened and it got postponed. So finally, toward the end of the year, I invited him to lunch, and I told him what I remembered. I mean, not in great detail. I just said, the reason we haven't spoken is that I started having flashbacks about your sexually abusing me when I was a young child, and he immediately said, I never touched you.

I never touched your sister. I wasn't interested in little girls, and it wasn't like I wasn't getting plenty of sex. At that point, I wasn't exactly faithful to your mother. I was like, I never said anything about my sister, and I didn't really need to know about the other women. I mean, it really. And he's also a lawyer, right? So I think it sounded like a prepared witness statement. Yes. It was very odd. And but then we ended up having, like a deeper talk than we had had forever. Maybe he starts telling me, he goes, I don't know how he would even remember that.

I can't remember anything from my childhood. But then he starts telling me what he does remember, and stuff about his mom and dad that I'd never heard before. And I thought, this is it. Like it's a breakthrough. I can't get him to admit that. That's fine. Along the way I said, well, how do you think that I even had this happen to me? And he goes, well, you always had a vivid imagination as a child, thinking of all the things I could imagine. Yes. I mean, and you can't even conceive of that. I used to imagine I was a princess. I used to imagine that, you know, I had been in an accident and I was at the hospital.

All my family was gathered around me telling me how much they loved me, because I was obviously something I needed to hear. Right. But imagining that, no, I just don't think that's something my brain could have even made up as a child. No, you don't even have the your world is not big enough for that kind of information. Exactly. So I thought so. We gave each other a hug on the, you know, afterwards and when our separate ways. And then the next day, he sent me the second letter to Sony. Me for forever. The first time had been via email after I had after giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars, I just said, I'm done.

It's enough already. So I thought, you know, I'm not surprised this is who he is. I was very sad because I really had hoped after the lunch that we could actually move forward, but it was clear that we couldn't. And I had already read at that point that many abusers basically erase their memories the same way as those who are abused do. So I wasn't surprised that he wouldn't remember, which made me sad because it also divided me from my sister and my brother and other things with money. Also ended up requiring me to take a break and say, I can't keep supporting you anymore.

This is your two verbally abusive for me to take that, and I'm never going to be in a healthy love relationship as long as they let you treat me so badly. But in the meantime, I'd already, when I was in Seattle, gotten back into singing and acting and really love that, then moved back to L.A. thinking I was going to keep acting. But then another pretty terrible thing happened where I met a guy and he got very abusive with me, which brought up a lot of this stuff. And I started writing into that and then sharing some of my writing with people, and they said, wow, you're really good writer.

You might want to explore that. So I started taking some writing classes, and that's when I really realized, like, how much had seen some of it in acting class, but in writing class in particular, because I'd found this program called method writing, which is very much about writing from your deep voice and telling your own stories before you can move really into doing more creative writing. For me, it was so healing to be able to share my stories to a group of people who were so accepting. It wasn't therapy, but it was very therapeutic for me just being in that situation.

And that was the class in which I ultimately met my second husband, feeling like I could write these stories about my family and had people cheering for me was just so validating. What a beautiful thing. So the experience you have now is no longer with your biological family, right? Mostly in 2008, we'd stop speaking to each other. Then my mother, she moved back to Los Angeles and reached out to me. And I thought, it's been a long time, let's. And she said, I really want to have a connection with you. She also said something that I didn't let myself here, which is my friends all say that I should have a relationship with you, which should have warned.

Me, right? This is not my decision. But she did actually first ask me why I had stopped speaking to her and why I had this rift between us, and she felt like for the first time she could really hear me. Although after that first time we talked like she kept kind of backpedaling and backpedaling and starting to put more jabs into what she was saying to me. And like, just in the space of like five months, I could already see things being undermined. And then our last time getting together, she had invited me out for lunch, my birthday. I had to pick her up.

We went to a place she wanted to go to, not me at a time that she wanted, not me. And then she spent the entire time telling me what a terrible person I was and how terrible my children were for all the things we'd ever done in our entire life that it upset her. Gosh. And my biggest regret afterwards is that I just didn't throw a bunch of money on the table and say, pay for lunch, get yourself home. I'm done. But after I got home, I was like, we're finished. And I thought, it's not that I don't forgive her for the things that happened in my childhood.

It's that she's not changing now. And it's not that I don't love her. I really do. It's just that I can't be with her because it's too hard for me to be with somebody who is so mean to me all the time. No matter what I do. I don't deserve that kind of abuse. I don't. How do you know you love her? Because often both my parents passed away within six weeks of each other. I really started processing the loss of them on a whole nother level. And so much of what I realized I was really grieving wasn't the loss of them. Now in my life. It was that now there would never be a chance for us to reconcile.

And it also brought home to me how what I was grieving was that they'd never been the parents that I had hoped for, the parents who could love me just the way I am. And that was the hardest part of the loss. From the distance of their passing away, it was finally like I could really come to terms with how do I process what's happened and where our lives are, but I have to do it in the absence of my brother and sister, because they still are buying into that story. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's so much. And you're I mean, what a beautiful treasure that you've been able to forge this great life for yourself and that you are supporting all these other women who have struggles similar to yours, and you found a way for them to express themselves.

Well, that's one of the things I really discovered is as I got to a point where I felt like I was really healed from my own issues, like all I wanted to do was find a way to help other people. And I kept thinking, like, how can I give back? For while? I've been teaching a workshop for other writers on how to send your writing out for publication, I was starting to teach some mixed media art classes and also working some poetry into that, but I thought, I really want to do this bigger. And that's when I came up with the idea for hug ML, and I thought, all of the arts can be healing, and just doing straight up art can be healing.

But I realized that for me, doing the social emotional arts really made a big difference. Being in a process where you're working on getting into your body first through embodied breathing and intentional movement and guided meditation, and then going from that into either a writing process or a visual arts process, and incorporating maybe some other movement in that that mixing it up could really work even more ways for people, because not everyone works just in visual arts. Not everyone responds to just writing. All of us who have experienced trauma need to be brought back into our bodies and to just go and say, okay, I'm going to paint something that could be helpful.

But without doing the other work, you're really not getting as much of the healing benefits. And for me, it was also all about community, like the I mean, that was the hardest thing about Covid. We do do online classes and those really can reach a lot more people in all kinds of places. There's something about being with a group of people and creating with them and having this experience in person. There's an energy in the room that you don't feel when you're just online. 100% yes. And so when we started, we were about to start hugging in 2020.

And then of course Covid happened. And we thought, you know what? Even if we ultimately do programs online, we want to start in person because that really is our target for it. But because so many things were closed in Los Angeles. It was really hard to find places initially to lead programs. So that's when we I decided I'd worked for a group called Free Arts that provides expressive arts programs for youth. One of their models had been to go and partner with community organizations that where the kids already were. And I thought, let's see if we can find groups where they're already serving the women that we want to serve and that have a physical space that we can go to, and they'll bring the women they'll have provide the place and we'll bring the programing.

And that's how we ended up getting started. And so you were able to do that during Covid? Well, no, it was more toward the end. This was already in 2023. We're actually going to lead our first public program in August of 2022. And then I got Covid. So that's what we said. Okay, let's start reaching out to organizations and see. And the first organization we reached out to was piece of her violence. And the next one, the city of LA, had done a series of peace and healing grants at that point in time, and we reached out to a variety of the recipients and one of them, a group called Central City Neighborhood Partners in the Pecos Lake area that supports a primarily Spanish speaking group of women who are they're not homeless, but they are very financially insecure.

And they go there once or twice a week to pick up groceries and get other social services. And that's where we started leading our programs first. And really, I mean, these women sort of knew each other from the other programs there, but got to know each other so much better and we could really see as we were doing, because all of our programs are series of 3 or 4 that over. And we also had repeat people who had come to multiple series. But to see how when they were together several times, like how the conversations could so open up. And and the idea is that this artistic expression is happening, happening in a group.

Yes, exactly. You could be sitting together and working on a project together or sitting together and working on separate projects. Usually they're doing each doing their own thing. So we'll give them an idea of a project. So for instance, one thing we did with those women for De Los Muertos, we did Memory Stones. I got the idea because there was a park in Ventura that has all these painted stones dedicated to people and pets that had passed away. And I thought, wouldn't this be a great way for people to honor the people that are animals that they've lost in their lives and even simple project, right.

You're just going to paint a rock and do something that reminds you of that person, or include their name or whatever you want to do. And I had some samples that I had done, one for my grandmother, one for my cat that had passed away. And but what really was amazing isn't just the creating of the project, it's the stories they shared afterwards. And one woman, for instance, had said, this is in honor of my father, who passed away a year ago, and she's telling the stories that were funny and were sad. And she starts crying. She goes, this is the first time I've cried for him.

And it just broke open my heart. I thought, this is why we're doing this work. What? I mean for someone to figure out a way to know their feelings. And having a grounding object can really make a big difference. It's like a talisman is something you can hold on to. Yeah, and some people do that with crystals or other things. But you know, she's got this rock now that reminds her of him. That's so beautiful. So a lot of her projects are we're not looking to necessarily to create great art. Right. We're we're trying to use arts and crafts processes and also the writing about them.

We always have a sharing circle at the end of our process because it's really important and not everyone has to share. It's completely voluntary, but I think it's really important for people to feel like they've been seeing and just going and doing a piece of art, you know, isn't the same thing as getting to be seen in community and having this opportunity to share your stories through the art that you're creating. What draws these women to this process? Because some of them, well, you just mentioned this woman hadn't really had the opportunity to really feel her feelings about passing of her father.

So she didn't come with the intention of getting to that. And she didn't know what we were going to be doing that day either. Right. Had no idea. So what brings them? In some cases, they're given inducements. Like when we started working with CMP, the women who came to the workshop didn't have to wait in line for the food, the food brought to them, I see. But then once they got there and realized how calming it was, one of the things we keep getting is I was really stressed before I got here, and now that I've done this process, I feel so much calmer.

The initial group of women we worked with, their loved having a yoga intro and our first facilitator who worked with us there it was Luann Spanish was an amazing yoga facilitator and like create this beautiful space. She had this like nightlight thing with swooping lights that would go and really soft music. And we had all these really fun, bright colored yoga pads that they would lie down on, just like a light warm up stretch thing. It wasn't anything challenging, but it just gave the women a chance to get into their bodies and get into their breathing before we would go on to the rest of the program.

And that might be something that's brand new or something that they. Know about. Many of them is that had never done yoga before. It seems that the idea of creativity and expression has kind of taken hold in terms of a way to help people with their trauma. We've spoken to so many agencies who have this as part of their curriculum or that is like yours, the curriculum, and, you know, ways for youth to sort of dance or write and be able to tell their story when they don't have the words to express it. Maybe they're not even like you said, you weren't even really aware of the trauma that you had for a long time.

But it's so curious to me that you had this thirst all the time to be creative. Yes, in one form or another. Yeah. I mean, even when I was a lawyer, I would do things like every single one of my kids parties at birthday parties, and we used to have Halloween parties and other parties. I'd always have an arts and crafts thing for them to do. So many times we'd be writing invitations to things and I would do it in rhyming poetry. I mean, even simple things like sewing Halloween costumes. Like we'd make our own costumes. Like, I just always found ways of doing something creatively.

I mean, like for my first husband's 40th birthday, I created a whole Trivial Pursuit game. The pieces that went up on a at a wall at the restaurant that we were at. Like, I would always find ways of approaching things creatively, which I think also impacted how practice law too. And when you look back, the games you created for your husband's birthday. What did that do for you? It just brought me so much joy. It was like I always felt like when I was doing any kind of the expressive arts, like I was in my groove. And when I really when I got with my current husband because we met through writing, but he was also an artist.

And after we'd been to a couple together a couple of years, I really had a drive to get back into doing some kind of visual arts, but I always thought, I'm not really the artist. My sister was the artist in our family. I can't draw a straight line, you know? I can't even draw a circle without having a cup to draw it around. But I always like doing kind of mixed media stuff in collage. And I decided to class and he was like so supportive of it. And I realized, like when I took one of these classes at UCLA and mixed media arts, that when we had homework to do and we usually did, I hours would disappear when I would just be creating something.

All I'd be thinking about is like, how do I execute this? How do I make this color? How do I attach this thing to this thing? And how do I get this to come together? And it just was like such a fun kind of problem solving for me. So different than what I'd been doing in the business world. And I just realized that this is just it's a sense of timelessness and a sense of like feeling so in sync with everything in the universe. When I'm creating art or when I'm writing, like I'll say, oh, I'm just going to make a little edit to this poem in suddenly an hour's flash by.

Well, I think that's just one of the fabulous things about the artistic process. Whatever it is, is you're just kind of without knowing or naturally taking something inside of you and putting it on the outside. And to say something out loud like, this is what happened to me is so much more, more compromising. Yes. And the interesting thing for me about writing that stuff down, I mean, for instance, one of the other things that happened to me later in life when I was 18, as I was raped by the father of a friend of mine. It was one of those things, like for a long time I thought somehow I must have caused this, even though I was blackout drunk, had told her I didn't want to go to his place.

All those reasons I still thought somehow I must have caused this. And it wasn't even until like ten years later that even told my therapist about it. And she immediately said, you know, he raped you. You couldn't have consented. Unable to consent the whole night. Just blanked out between my telling her in her hallway, no, I don't want to go. And then waking up in his bed the next day. Still, I tried to write about it several times. It would come up when I'd be in a workshop. I didn't want to, but I feel called to write, and it always felt to me like it never got there.

And then, weirdly enough, last year I was in a writing workshop. The teacher said, we're going to do. We're going to look at this poem by Wallace Stevens, a very formal poet called 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. And we were each going to do your own version of 13 ways. And suddenly it came to me, I need to do 13 ways of looking at my rapist. But because it was like looking from the outside in, in these very imagistic short stanzas, it gave me a chance to, like, separate it from myself. And by the time I got to the end and read it out loud to the class, I felt like, oh my God, I have just gotten something really terrible outside of me now, and it's on the page and I can own it in a different way, where it doesn't hurt so much to think about.

That's just the beauty of being able to do something like that and to feel differently and to like you say, just you don't have to own that trauma and it doesn't have to define you. Yes. But for you to have gone through these experiences, you know, over the course of many years and to still be able to move forward, I mean, the kind of courage and wherewithal to end up where you are is, is amazing. Well, one thing I'm really grateful for, for my mother is when I started having kind of nervous breakdown when I was in 10th grade, I just started like crying randomly and was very depressed.

She actually got me to see her therapist. Now, seeing her therapist was not such a good call because I was afraid to tell him anything about her, about the family. But at least it got me into thinking I can go to therapy. And that's not shame. That's not a failure. Like I'm just getting the help I need, like seeing an eye doctor. So having that attitude about it really helped. Like it's okay to ask for emotional help if you need it. I guess I've always had this sort of inner gyroscope, like, you know, where you need to be and you're going to find it and somehow you're going to get through whatever this is.

And yeah, I just had that sense of, I can get through this. That's such a strength. I'm very fortunate because there was some times that I was definitely thinking about suicide a lot when things got bad, but some part of me thought, even the most part the was saying they'd be better off without you. There's another part going, no, you have to get through this. It's important for you to keep going for you, not for anybody else. Well, all that you have contended with and to know that through the process, I think helped you get through the process, to be able to just go to your dad and have that lunch and share what you shared and have it end up the way it ended up, but know that that was a possibility and know also that it was something that you couldn't not do, right?

No, I still had to speak out no matter what happened. I couldn't just keep holding it in anymore. No. And if you had continued to hold it in you, you wouldn't be able to shape yourself the way you have. No. If I had kept staying within my family paradigm of this is how you have to be, I have to shut up about everything that upsets me in order to get along. I would not be the person I am today. Well, I notice even as I look back on my life, I lived in a very, very structured household. My father was an officer in the Marine Corps, and there was basically children were maybe to be seen and certainly not to be heard.

But the thing that saved me was art. The thing that saved me was reading voraciously, doing anything to step out of what my household was, and to find I had to keep churning inside myself and and looking for outlets and and freedom. Because, you know, when I walked out of my bedroom and back into the house, I was gone. I was no longer, you know, existing. So how do you see what you're doing with these women now, the programs that you've set up, how is it working? You're clearly being successful because you're you're able to be a part of these organizations like Peace over Violence.

What is it that you're you're seeing what kind of outcomes. I'm seeing that there's like a huge need for this. And I just think all the women who've been to our programs really feel like they're in a better place afterwards. We need to get better for ourselves. And in terms of asking other people for money, for grants in the future and trying to quantify it, that wasn't what I was thinking about initially. It was more like, let's just see how they're experiencing it, to see what we need to do to fine tune the programs. This is what they want. Are they benefiting?

It's interesting because our first group at CMP loved the yoga, and then when we brought that program to Alexandria House, like, no yoga, we don't the yoga, okay. So it's definitely being responsive, which is what all about doing trauma informed programs are is like realizing everyone's different. And we don't always know why people are reacting the way they are. All we can do is try to respond to it in a supportive way. Interesting that that's sort of was a collective reaction. Yes. Actually wrote it on their feedback forms. No more yoga. So we always do some kind of intentional movement, but it doesn't have to be on yoga mats, you know, whatever feels good.

We do see a lot of the same people coming back to our programs, like with our online programs, we're definitely seeing like we've been doing a series. We've done four series now of eight session workshops, and there's kind of like, you know, a build to how each of these series of eight goes. And at least 4 or 5 of the women have been to at least two, if not 3 or 4 of these that we have done, even though there some of them are a little bit repetitive, just like you get different things all the time, you know, like you can't step in the same river twice.

So you do this writing thing again and it's a different experience. And there's something about the process that is giving them a sense of well-being. Yes. And for instance, I mean, we get not just the feedback forms and the surveys that we do in person and online, but people send us emails after the program, like, here's what I did. I'm so grateful. I never thought I could do art before. A lot of the women that we talked to at CMP would say, I haven't done art since I was five, and it's so great to be able to just do this. I didn't know I could create like this, and now I've learned skills that I can teach my children or my grandchildren.

And that's just so. That's why I do it. I just think it's not about me. I mean, you know, pardon me, would love to grow it. And there's ways I think we could grow faster. But I also really want to focus on the quality of the programs that were leading and bringing facilitators really get the importance isn't slowing down. The importance is in creating the space for women, not just to create something, right. Something makes them art or move, but it's also like, how are they going to share? How are they integrating this into their experience and being with the community and sharing themselves with the community.

And to that, to finding that a community can hold you? Yes. Exactly. When you haven't had that. Yeah, that's a giant gift. Yes. One of the workshop programs that we did is Grounding in Community. And it's a kind of a collage versus where you draw your foot. It's about feeling grounded and then create either through drawing or collage or some mix of all of that, or painting whatever you feel comfortable with images around it of what is your community that stabilizes you and grounds you and strengthens you, and what is that community look like? And it's a great way, and especially when people love to share about this, they love to tell about the other people in their life.

We also I've now a trained silk facilitator and I love soul and said discovered it back in 2018. It's a really simple process with five by eight cards, and it's less about trying to be artistic. Although you can be, it's more about creating an essence of something, either an expression of yourself or an expression of someone who is a member of your community. Or there's some other guides that it might be an expression of. So are you writing or drawing? It starts with just claws, usually magazine images or free images you find online. You can use.

You can do torn paper or whatever you want to create the essence or other pieces of things to create the essence of this part of your personality or someone else in your life. And some of them are animal guides. So we did one on finding strength in your community. So my examples were one was of my cat who passed away, and there's a picture of her on a rainbow. And then there was another one of my husband with one of his art cards that he did for me in the background. And then I did some couple for my best friends. So those are all parts of my community.

And to see how people responded to bringing in and manifesting a visual image of their community members. And you can use photos of them if you want, but you can also do things that are symbolic of them. Like one of my best friends is has this whole thing with owls. I made sure to include that. The online groups. How do people find those that are? Is that also incentivized? Well, we do a newsletter about once a month. So people who are already on our mailing list find out about our upcoming classes that way. And we have social media presence, so some people find out that way.

We also were previously listing our our workshops on Eventbrite and using that for our sign up system. We've now just moved over to ZF as our fundraising platform and our communications platform. So now people get messages through that and can sign up that way, but because they don't have as much of a reach as Eventbrite does in terms of marketing, we are doing more boosts on social media and that's brought more people to us and more people locally, which has actually been really good. And so you are expanding? Yes. And what do you see yourself looking like, let's say, in five years from now?

Well, there was a couple of things. I mean, we started last year doing our first in-person one day or healing retreat, and now we did another one in March, and we're going to do another one in October. Do those revolve around the art process and the collective? Yes. So it's a whole day. So we usually start with some kind of movement program and breathing, and then we'll go into some kind of an art process. And then usually after that we'll break for lunch. Then either do some more different kind of art, sometimes a community project. Our first workshop, we did a community painting process that had to do with painting different emotions, which was really interesting.

After each one you'd pass your canvas to the next person. So at the end, everybody had worked on multiple canvases, and then you just picked to come the one that you started with, which looks nothing like your original one. Right? But it had a piece of everyone who was there in it, which was really fun. And then we'll also have some writing part of it. So like our last one, we were talking about grief, but we started doing these little mini self-care books because that's a really important thing. When you're when you're grieving something, how do you take care of yourself through that?

And as a group, we came up with lists of here's and popsicle self-care. So like here's some things you can do for your body. Here are some things you can do for your spirit. Here's some things you can do for your creativity. Here's some things you can do with community. So we had all these different charts that people kept just calling things out so that when you were creating your book, you didn't have to just go off the top of your head. You could look at the list and say, oh, I hadn't thought of that, but I'd like to do that too. So it became a way of supporting each other around our individual self-care.

I could see how something like that would be helpful to someone who didn't realize they were grieving, but they knew they were suffering. For example, you, yes, you know, were trying to stay away from your real world. You were, let's say, at one point eating too much or drinking too much and, and and feeling tortured, but not really understanding the torture. So this little booklet would be so helpful in terms of helping someone recognize, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm feeling something here. Right now. It's interesting because one of the things we talked about in our first one is sometimes, you know, bubble bath and walks on the beach aren't quite enough.

Like you need something more. And for me, definitely writing and creating visual art are those things. And so sometimes singing, I'm constantly singing all the time around the house, doing dishes, whatever I'm doing, I'm singing all the time. When a. Two hour drive to. Meet with a two hour drive, I'm listening to music and singing. Always that that's just something I like naturally fall into. But the writing stuff, like I realize if I'm not doing my own art because I'm spending so much time creating programing for hug ML that sometimes I lose track of my own art and writing.

So I try to periodically sign up for online writing classes. Last year, for the last two years, I've done something that just starting again called the Poetry Postcard Festival. It's based in the Seattle area, and you sign up and you get a list of 32 people. So you need to send a postcard with a little poem on the back to 31 people. And a lot of people use prepared postcards, but I create my own art for the card, and then I write a poem in response to that art. I see. And does everybody get a different poem? Yeah, so everyone gets a different one.

So I do a different piece of art. I've already done like six of the art parts, but I haven't written the poems yet for this year's one. So I do a different piece of art for each one. I take pictures, I've posted some of my social media and it's so fun. Some people actually respond and they're like, wow, you're a real artist, you know? But but it's about creating community in a new way. But it's also, for me about just giving myself a tiny little art break. I mean, it doesn't take long to do an art piece for a postcard, right? The poet, the poems I write, I start on a three by three post-it note, you know, like I want it to be easy.

Like, these are not poems that I'm looking to publish. Their poems that are just like something fun related to this piece of art. And it might come out of nowhere, like maybe a line will just come to me and I'll just go with it. And then after written on the postcard, I copy it over onto the postcard and it's just it just reminds me, like, it's important for me to get in touch with that part of myself on a regular basis. I love that you're saying on a regular basis, I think that that is a great thing we should gift ourselves as part of a continuing to heal and stay healthy.

I watched it may have been one of your first public poetry readings. Know your husband was in the audience, I think, and it was just a beautiful thing to hear you recite this poem and how well you were received, and how as beautiful as what you had to say and the feelings that you shared, the support that that audience gave you was also beautiful. You know, I have to say, I felt so received by the poetry community, the group that we came up with writing within LA, the LA Poets and Writers community through method writing and Jack graves was amazing, but that I've just gone on to create additional communities.

In 2019, I started being an editor for a review called Gyroscope Review, which is just contemporary poetry and the two women who edited it with me. One lives in Wyoming, one lives in Torrance, but we communicate exclusively electronically through the submission system and through emails, and I feel like I know them so well. But I also feel like it's opened up a whole new world of the people who are submitting to us, you know, because we are now getting over 500 submissions. And so there's a lot of poets out there who have heard of us and are sending us their poems.

And it's like a conversation, like, what kind of world do we want to help create? And it's volunteer thing. It's just one more way of my giving back to the writing community. But then also the poets that like mostly when I'm on social media, I'm reading poems that my friends have written. But I'm super excited because my first full length collections coming out in September. Yeah. So how how do we find. That it's going to be up on my website soon? We'll go into pre-sales in mid-August. So yeah, I'm very excited. It's called the Dragonfly Puzzle Box, and I love the artwork that an artist friend of mine from Ventura created.

And it's also, it's great because it's being published by a publisher that actually them announcing that they were open for submissions because they did like two years of submissions. So they got a whole bunch of submissions over a period of time and then would do two years of publications and the people being published on either side of me two weeks before and two weeks after. One is a coeditor of mine from gyroscope, and another is a poet that I know from the LA community. So we're going to do a couple of readings together as well. And I'm starting to reach out to poets I know in other cities about doing readings with them and do a little travel.

So so that'll be something that the public can. Yes. Yeah. Attend. Yes. Absolutely. So that would also be on your website. Yes. Yeah. My personal and my first collection, which I've given out to a lot of people. I brought a copy for you today, is Open the Fist, which is all about my family of origin issues and coming out on the other side of that. Well, thank you for putting that out there for all of us to pay attention to and to find a little bit of bravery, a little bit of self-respect, to know that we are not dirty, bad, nasty. We are all nothing but pure love.

And all this other junk has been put on top of us. And you're not alone. So many of us have been through this, and I feel grateful that I've been able to find the words to put my experience on paper so other people who don't know how to say it can have a chance to feel it and realize they're not alone, and they are loved and they absolutely deserve joy. And your recovery. You're knowing that you are not that trauma, that you are lovable and can love yourself, and what that did for you in terms of just knowing that you want to help others is, I think, what humanity is supposed to be about.

And the trauma keeps us so wrapped up and so insulated that we lose sight of that. I think fact that as humans, part of our job is to support and help one another. Yes. And we've just over the course of time and over the course of traumas, you know, really lost sight of that. So thank you for sharing that and bringing it to light for us. And and as you say, to know that many of us have so much that we've struggled with and that we're, you know, we're not alone is that's a community. No. And I feel like each one of us that is able to go to a place where we feel like we've healed enough ourselves, that we can offer that healing to other people.

That's what creates a better world for all of us. For sure. It's it's got to happen because we're kind of going downhill here. We all need to just sign our lights, yes, Dark World, and realize that we can expand and have more light together. And I think a lot of us are looking for that. So thank you for sharing. And so we can find you at your website. Are there other places we can look for you? Is that our best source. Yeah. So yeah. So my personal website at and then and then our social media I have I'm on Facebook, I'm the only Elya Braden. So you can find me on Facebook and Instagram and also hug them on.

So HaGomel community on socials. And then if someone wanted to help fund you, it would be best to go through HaGomel. Yes. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's really a treasure and thank you so much for sharing so much. That's obviously coming from deep inside you. Thank you. It's so easy to talk to. Oh well. Thank you. Please follow, rate and share this podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. This is. And now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.