Susan Keller

We’ve all had pain. Some of us have survived trauma. I’ve lived long enough to now see childhood trauma as a gift.

When I was six, my family moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles. My dad had a new job. It was January. We came from a gray, freezing winter to a balmy L.A. I’d never seen a palm tree and they mesmerized me. I still love palm trees. My dad’s new company put us up in a charming Hollywood apartment. The lawn was green. The sky was blue. The breeze was warm. It was heaven.

Our first day there, I found a four-leaf clover—the promise of a beautiful future. I still remember that joyful moment. A moment that did not last long as we fell headlong into a traumatic future: My dad’s alcoholism, my mother’s depressions, and their divorce. My dad remarried and adopted his second wife’s daughter. I was replaced. Tossed aside. I had no dad anymore, and years would go by when we didn’t see him.

With four kids to raise alone and never enough money, my mother took her anger at the world out on me and my youngest brother. Life was a nightmare.

She scarred me with her hateful comments: I was never good enough. Pretty enough. Smart enough.

Right after I graduated from high school, I moved out of her house, got a job, and started school at Santa Monica Junior College. I began my life away from all of that heartbreak.

I stumbled. I fell. My parents never gave me as much as a pencil to help me through college. But I managed to graduate from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Immunology and Public Health.

I built my career. Met my future husband and we married. We had a daughter. Bought a home. But I would occasionally cringe from the cruel comments I received from my mother. Sometimes even think she was right. Until recently. Now I can see her cruelty as a gift. I am so grateful for the life I now have and attribute some of my strength to overcoming the trauma I lived through as a child.

Gratitude and wonder fill my mind and heart, I wish the same for you: To see how pain or trauma have made you stronger. Given you resilience, and power. Enabled you to feel gladness and gratitude for the life you now have. I am smiling for all of us.

If you read and liked my book—Mostly Sober: A Love Story and a Road Trip—I would be so grateful for an Amazon review.

All the very best to you. Susan