What is Story Work & Why it's Important to Healing
Updated: Sep 24
Welcome to Mamahood After Trauma, a space created to support mothers as they heal from trauma, break generational cycles, and discover healthier ways of showing up for themselves and their families. Here, you’ll find honest conversations, practical tools, and encouragement to remind you that healing is possible, one step at a time.
I'm gonna get you to introduce yourself, and share with us a little bit about your story, and how you came to be working in the trauma recovery space.My name is Wendy J. Olson. I'm a healing coach and I'm also the founder and executive director of my nonprofit GRIT plus gumption.
We work with women survivors of sexual exploitation and domestic violence through my healing coaching practice. I walk with women through their stories of past hurts and traumas and help guide them to find their freedom and healing.Oh, gosh, how did I get to be, how did I get to be here?
So I think to know myself and my story, I have to go back to the beginning. Also, I'm incapable of telling a short story. So, here we are. I was born to a single mother and I grew up in a house with two other parents, namely my grandparents. For the first half of my childhood, I lived with my grandparents being raised by them and then the rest of my family but in the latter half, I was raised solely by my mom.When that shift happened in my life, all the things that had been hidden from me about my mother came to light and I saw where I had to become the parent as a child so often does to a parent that doesn't have the capacity to love and care for you, let alone themselves.So there was a lot of emotional neglect and abandonment early on in my life, aside from also growing up without. Without ever knowing my dad. I grew up also at the height of the purity movement of the Southern Baptist Convention here in the States in the nineties and fell prey to the spiritual abuse there that we endured during that time.
When I was 18, I was raped and then stayed in that abusive relationship for about a year and a half. I was raped again at the age of almost 20. After that second rape, I would say that's when all the hope had officially been snuffed out. I turned to using sex as a weapon, using drugs and alcohol to numb my pain.
And you know, while I was able to get sober in late 2001, I found myself in another abusive relationship in 2002 and with that person, I ended up marrying him and having a child with him. So I endured that abusive relationship for 6 years. I left that marriage after he tried to take my life in September of 2008.Then I just turned back to my numbing way, still not having any coping mechanisms, any tools or anything, just, Hey, you know what works. Drugs and alcohol, that works well– it does– I just don't recommend it.In 2009, I met my now husband, and we've been together, for over 14 years.
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