Why Your Trauma Isn't Your Fault (and How to Fight Back)

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Keeping It Real on Purpose and I am your host Edna White. In this powerful episode, we are going to sit down with Linda and I hope I don't destroy her last name, Dratell, survivor, author, advocate, and warrior. From escaping a terror attack in France to navigating life after hearing loss and embracing the challenges of raising adopted ch children facing social stigma. Linda shares her raw truth about trauma, PTSD, and self-worth. We dive into the second arrow of pain we inflict on ourselves by revisiting trauma and how to break free. This con conversation is not one to be missed. And I like you all to welcome today to keeping it real on purpose, Linda. Thank you very much for having me, Edna. I appreciate the opportunity to chat. Awesome. So tell me how you show up in the world. Um so generally I uh I lost my hearing in my 30s. Um we're not sure why. It might be genetic. They never found a reason. But um I did lose my hearing when my children were very young. And um my children are adopted from Colombia, Bogotaa, Colombia. And we had I guess I had my first feeling of ostracism when I adopted them because they were from a different country and um they were considered different. We were considered different for just generally having adopted children. uh people had to get around that issue and so uh we we dealt with that for a number of years in in different situations and then I gradually lost my hearing and that was difficult because I had to relearn how to navigate social situations even in the family how to communicate and now I'm um I'm classified as deaf and I learned sign language. I worked for a number of years uh for a deaf organization. I became an advocate for the heart of hearing and Lake Defen and um I actually eventually established my own uh advocacy nonprofit organization and it closed down during COVID but I did that for a couple of years and um my husband uh is an attorney and he worked for a company and was transferred for six months to London and so we went there for 6 months and before he left we decided to go and have a vacation in France and that's how we wound up in Nice during the terror attack that happened on Bastile Day on uh I think it was July 16th now I can't even remember the date um I wrote it down and I wrote a poem about it so that I wouldn't have to remember and if I want to remember I write it down and I take a look and say oh yeah okay now now comes back to me but anyway I started writing poetry um to to deal with uh issues of trauma to deal with my hearing loss to um just deal with a lot of different situations excellent and um uh I had a horse for 34 well he was 34 I had him 29 years and I had goats and as they aged and I had to deal with um aging situations and barn managers that didn't think they were worth keeping around that was stressful and traumatic and so I wrote poems about that. So poetry really helped me in a lot of different situations. That's good. Awesome. Awesome. I know you know um for you audience um Linda is using a teleprompter. So that's why you hear or you you hear a a big gap between us is she's using a teleprompter and I applaud you so much for doing that because I just found that out just now. Just now. So I I just applaud you for that, Linda. Um, you talk about the second arrow, the pain we cause ourselves by replaying trauma. How do we stop throwing that second arrow when our minds keep pulling us back into the pain? Well, it's it was interesting. We uh when we came back from from France, my husband actually had two colleagues from work who had been in a terror attack in in India. And one of them had seen a post-traumatic stress disorder therapist and one had not. and the one who had recovered rapidly from the trauma and the one who hadn't suffered for years. And so she said, the one who attended who saw the therapist, she said, "You must see a PTSD therapist." And so we did and we went to see this guy and I wrote about him in the poem. Um when we went to see him, he didn't want to hear about the what happened. He wanted to talk about soccer and sports and who was your favorite team and he and my husband were laughing and I'm sitting there, you know, scratching my head like, you know, what the heck, you know, let's talk about what happened. He was like, no, no, no. You know, and he's like talking about everything else. And finally, he said, if you keep thinking about what happened, what happened to you is a gravel road in your brain. You keep talking about it and it becomes an asphalt road and then it becomes a two-lane highway and then it becomes a four-lane highway. Then it becomes a freeway and it just gets bigger and bigger and it it really messes you up. He says what you've got to do is not think about it because like the Buddhist parable, there's the pain of the second arrow. The first arrow is the trauma that happens to you. The second arrow is what we inflict on ourselves. Yes. And it's what we do by revisiting the trauma again and again. So what you have to do is think about other things. And that's what he was trying to do in therapy is have us steer away from what happened and think about other things and make us laugh and and talk and talk about things that were positive. Right? So that's what we try to do. And actually I will show you a couple things. This is the book that I wrote remember this day that has the poem and these are very serious poems about different traumas that I experienced or I witness. This book is a book of funny poems called the lighter side of horse manure. And this is when I learned to laugh. And these are funny poems that just laugh at life. And then this book is Who Wants to Be Friends with a Dragon? And I wrote the I co-wrote this with my Spanish tutor Eve Marie Little. And both of us when we felt like we didn't fit in because me with my hearing loss and she's half Mexican and sometimes we just didn't feel like we fit in everywhere. And this is a funny book that laughs at the whole situation and learns how no what makes you different makes you special and those are special skills you have that somebody else appreciates. So that's how I you how I learned to deal with the second arrow. Abs. That's good. So after surviving, I know you talked about this, but after surviving a terror attack, many people never talk about the raw ugly parts of healing. What's something nobody prepares you for when you survive a trauma like that? Well, one thing is it's very difficult to listen to the news. You know, a lot of people can justify what happens to someone else, the enemy, the other side, those people, and just write it off and say, "Well, they deserved it." Or, um, "Well, it's not us." But when you go through something like that and you see how indiscriminate terror is, um, there's no way you can do that. you know, we we cry at the news and it doesn't matter who it's done to. It doesn't matter um forever, we're Jewish and we cry for Jews who are hurt. We cry for Palestinians who are hurt. We cry for what's happening in Gaza. We cry for what's happening in Ukraine. We cry for what's happening anywhere in the world because there are innocent people who are being destroyed and being torn apart. And it's it's so unfair. It's so hurtful when you see a baby who has been run over by a truck and it's and it's um the the carrot was in smashed. I mean, we had to walk by that and we had to walk by a teenager whose body is covered by a tablecloth and his bicycle crushed. I mean, there's no way you can sit there and listen to the news and just turn away. I'm sorry. You could just turn away and say that doesn't affect me. It's them or God wills. You know, God doesn't will something like that. No. Mm- not at all. Thank you for sharing um that very hard part of your life. Losing your hearing in adulthood changes everything. Social life, work, identity. What was the hardest lie you told yourself during that that isolation and how did you break free? Well, the hardest part was feeling like I wasn't worth anything. You know, you get people start treating you like a child. You can't understand conversations and it's very common for people to say, "Hold on, I'll tell you in a minute. Well, we'll let you know." And um they'll summarize later. And it's like you just stand there and and it's like you're worth you're worth nothing and it's so hurtful and you want to know now, you know, just like anybody else would want to know now. Well, what's the joke? So repeat it, right? And they say, well, it loses something in the repetition. You say, but it's not a repetition for me. I'm f if I understand I'm hearing for the first time, you know. So um what happened for me was when I went to the local community college and learned sign language, I also met uh members of the deaf community. And it was wonderful because I learned how to self- advocate. I was welcomed with open arms. And yeah, it's true. A lot of uh people in the deaf community might be standoffish, but there are a lot of people that are very welcoming and they they make you feel like you have worth and they help you understand. They teach you the slang and suddenly you're part of a group again, you know. And um I learned enough sign language to use um an interpreter. So, I was able to be part of the community. I was able to join uh conferences and things again with an interpreter and it was a lot of fun. Um, I advocated for captioning in uh movie theaters and I was one of two uh plaintiffs for captioning against CineArk theaters and AMC theaters. AMC. Wow. Wow. That's cool. They we didn't have to go to court. a fa greed. And so that was a wonderful thing because I used to go to the local Blackhawk theater with my husband. We used to watch movies and then we'd go out to dinner and then suddenly I couldn't do it anymore. And once they agreed and we had an arrangement with uh a company called Doi um that created captioning uh devices. After all that was put together, I went back to Blackhawk Theater, which was run by Cinema, and I sat down, I watched my movie, and went to dinner with my husband again. It was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. You just really presented letter to AMC. Yeah. Yeah. You can do things. Yeah, you can. You can. So good. Well, you're so resourceful. I love it. You know, and that's what it takes for anything that we're going through is resilience. You know, yes, you go there or you Yes, you feel that or yes, it's you're happening, it's happening, but the resilience we have and we ought to applaud ourselves when we have that resilience like you. Um I'm currently um the executive secretary on the board for Ability Central Philanthropy and they provide uh funding for a number of organizations that support local communities like for a variety of different disabilities, not just deaf but also you know just cognitive or physical wheelchair name it. And um uh it used to be um uh California Communication Access Foundation and it combined now and it's now Ability Central Foundation uh philanthropy. Right. So um I'm very proud to be part of that. That's awesome. That's awesome. You've become an advocate for the hard of hearing and late deafened community. What's the biggest misconception that keeps people with disabilities from thriving? And what's your message to anyone feeling invisible or sidelined? The biggest misconception is that people with disabilities or who are deaf or heart of hearing can't contribute to society. Um that's the biggest dis uh misconception. you know, they they look at somebody and they assume and and they get that, for example, from Trump when he was first running for office and he he mimicked a reporter that had disabilities. You know, I think that someone that has a disability has nothing to offer. But these people are brilliant, just as brilliant as anybody else. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you you've raised some um beautiful children. when you adopted children who were treated different um and can expose parents to harsh judgment and social bias. How do you hold your family together or held them together during these hard times and these pressures? We we've always been a very tight-knit family and um our daughter is getting married in September. We live in California and she lives in our daughter lives in Col uh Colorado. So, actually, we're in the middle of a move. We're going to move to Colorado now that she's settled. And our son lives in South Carolina. So, he's going to move now to Colorado. So, we're all getting closer to each other. Oh, nice. Just been I don't know, very, very close. We have a WhatsApp conversation group and we're constantly ripping each other. Sarcasm is our love language as is ours. I think that's every family and I that's lovely. I love to hear that. I love to hear that. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience especially around anything about trauma or any of your experiences? We um we have always been extremely open about uh their adoption and uh provided whatever information they wanted to have access to and we took a trip with them to Colombia to visit the orphanage where we adopted them from and actually our son's birth family found him and reached out to him. So he has been in communication with them and we've supported that. Um but um I don't know they've always considered us their primary family and you know just we've just been open to whatever they've wanted. Um I don't know it's you know it's just been tight like families are tight and families are created in a lot of different ways. Okay. So, where do you see yourself going in the near future that you can share with the audience? Well, um I've written a full-length novel that I hope to get published. So, I'm in the process of doing that. And it's about a young immigrant woman who comes to this country and marries someone and lands in a uh upwardly mobile white picket fence neighborhood and throws everybody off and they're not willing to accept her. And she does all kinds of crazy things to try to be accepted. And the more she does, the more they don't accept her. and she finds in her process of trying to be accepted, she builds her own community that um becomes very successful. Oh, nice. Well, we're going to be looking for that this coming fall, maybe. Is it coming this fall? I hope. Fingers crossed. I've sent it out to a number of publishers, so we'll see. Okay. All right. Well, audience, we really hope that you take away something that Linda has said today. This is really a deep conversation and it's really really needed and let let you know that you're not alone. If you look in the comments section of the the content section of the video of of the audio that you're going to see or hear, please reach out to Linda, you know, ask her any questions you may. But I think that we have gotten just about our um all the information that we really need or we've been talking to her and we want to thank you for being so real and so with us today. You know, your story is a masterclass of resilience and self advocacy. For everyone listening, remember that trauma doesn't have to be your life sentence. And the second arrow is a choice you can refuse. If you're someone you love or struggle with trauma, reach out to Linda. Reach out to her. Her information it will be on the the video and she's at at linda d r a t e l l. Okay. Her advocacy and writings are real lights in the darkness. Thank you for tuning in to keeping it real on purpose where real conversations lead to real breakthroughs. Stay strong, stay real, and keep living on purpose. Bye for now. Yes. And uh do you have my my uh my website address? They can reach out to me through that. Okay. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so