1. What is your experience, if any with childhood trauma (this can be real or imagined)?
2. What short or long-term effects did it have on you, on your family?
3. What is one thing that you did to combat it?
4. What is part of your recipe for success?

My own words: when I was in my country I witnessed violence. I lived in a town called Coatepeque which belongs to the country of Guatemala. I lived in my grandparents' house with my mother. I did not know about my father or his existence of him. I only knew him through half of a photo from the year 2011. I met my father after returning from the United States, where he lived for more than 9 years. It was then that my mother decided we should live with my father after I told her that it was my dream. But my dream would turn into a nightmare and living with him changed my whole world. He began hitting my mother and my father didn't like me to help my mother with things around the house like sweeping or washing dishes, for that was a woman's job. Every man in Guatemala is very old-fashioned, which means that women couldn't go out to look for a job because their job was to be at home and have the food ready for their husbands. Men beat their own children, who were boys, because they would cook and clean their house and men believed that it was a women's chore to clean the house. My father treated me badly because he would not let me go out and play with my friends because one of my friends is gay and that's what bothered him. When I talked to him he said that I was going to get his habits, and when my mom defended me, he always said that my mom was a bad mom because what she was doing was raising a girl, not a man.