Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing

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Eirene: Silence doesn't start with us, it echoes. It's passed down through gestures, prayers, and unspoken rules. In my family, silence wasn't a symptom. It was tradition. A way to survive when speaking the truth was too dangerous. The women in my lineage learned early that silence was strength. That loyalty meant endurance, that faith meant never questioning what hurt you. They prayed through their pain, called it sacrifice, and taught their daughters to do the same. And for a long time, I believed them. I believed silence was the same thing as peace, that keeping the family together was worth losing myself. But silence has a way of spreading like a vine, wrapping around everything you love. At first, it protects you, and then it keeps you from breathing.

This is Born Tired, Where Survival Meets Healing. A podcast for those of us who [00:01:00] grew up in survival mode but are ready to heal and speak our truth. I'm Eirene. A cycle breaker, learning what peace feels like after years of survival. Every episode is an invitation to rest inside your truth, to feel seen, and to remember you were never alone. This is what it sounds like when silence finally breaks.

Before we begin, I want to share a gentle reminder. This episode includes stories and reflections about childhood trauma and abuse. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. If at any point you need to pause or step away, honor that. Your wellbeing matters more than finishing the episode. You are not alone. Take care of yourself while you listen.

When you grow up in the kind of world that requires you to make pretend the things that are happening aren't you learn to smile when it hurts. You learn to stay quiet even when everything inside you is screaming. You learn to make peace with what [00:02:00] should have never been normal, and that's how silence survives.

Because silence doesn't just live in words unspoken. It lives in the body, in the way you tense before a conversation. In the way your voice lowers without permission. In the instinct to explain, soften, or shrink the truth before it ever leaves you. It teaches you to read the room to measure safety by other people's comfort. To believe that disruption is more dangerous than harm. And eventually you stop asking whether something is wrong. You just learn how to endure it quietly. You learn how to carry contradictions without language. How to call survival maturity, how to confuse silence with love.

Until one day something in you notices the cost, eventually the body grows tired of carrying what was never allowed to be named, and it speaks it anyway. And [00:03:00] in that speaking, you finally feel the grief of what silence took from you. In our last episode, we talked about the door that closed. About the kind of silence that doesn't protect you. The kind that hides truth behind love and forces you to carry stories you never asked for. That story was about the silence I lived through. This one is about the silence I was born into. This story is about the silence that shaped the women in my family, the kind we prayed with, protected, and eventually mistook for love. And it's about what happens when one generation finally decides to break it.

When I think about where it all began, the silence, the shame, the way women in my family learn to protect appearances over truth, it always leads me back to my maternal grandmother. She was a deeply religious woman. Every day without fail, she prayed the [00:04:00] rosary at the same time, gathering everyone like it was a sacred duty.

Her faith ran deep, but so did her fear of judgment. She believed in God yes, but she also believed in reputation. And in her world a woman's worth was measured by how well she endured and whether she had a husband. My grandmother cared more about what people thought than what was actually happening inside her home.

She passed that belief down first to my mother, and later without realizing it to me. She and my paternal grandmother actually went to school together as children, two girls from the same campo in Dominican Republic. Campo means countryside. They didn't have the same lives, but they carried the same lessons. That silence was strength, obedience was virtue, and forgiveness was the highest form of faith. That kind of [00:05:00] silence doesn't die easily. It gets passed down like an heirloom, wrapped in phrases like "God sees everything" and "What happens at home stays at home".

We used to visit the Dominican Republic most summers when I was little. My grandparents lived in the campo outside of Santiago, palm trees, red dirt roads, and a quiet that always felt like it was holding a secret. The air smelled like wet soil after rain, with roosters crowing before dawn. One summer, a male cousin was also visiting. We were playing in the front patio, barefoot and laughing, carefree in the way children are when they still believe they're safe. He told me he wanted to play a game and I agreed to play with him. He told me to lie down and close my eyes, and I did. I remember the cold feeling of the patio floor beneath me and then I felt him lie down on top of [00:06:00] me.

Before I could move, my grandmother walked in. Her voice sliced through the air like a whip, but she wasn't yelling at both of us. She was yelling at me. She told him to leave. Then turned to me, her face, stone cold, and said I had provoked him . That I was, the reason this happened. Mind you, this is the same woman who was married to the man who violated me. I didn't understand, I was just a child, but that day I learned what generations of women before me already knew. That girls carry the blame and boys carry the excuses. The shame was heavier than her words. It was the way she looked at me and the way she made sure no one ever spoke of it again.

A few years later, it happened again, not in the campo, but in my hometown. My mother and I went to visit one of my father's uncles. When he [00:07:00] leaned in to greet me, it was supposed to be a kiss on the cheek. Instead, he missed my cheek entirely and put his tongue in my mouth right there in front of my mother. I pushed him away. I was shocked and disgusted. He apologized like it was an accident, and my mother, without looking at me, told me not to tell anyone. That moment broke something in me. It wasn't just what he did, it was seeing how quickly she closed the door on truth. It confirmed what I had already learned as a child that even when people see it happening with their own eyes, they will still make pretend it didn't.

Years passed. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I told my mother's sister, my aunt, what her father had done to me. At first, she was angry. How come you didn't say anything? She asked. Then the anger melted [00:08:00] into sorrow. She said she wished she would've known, but when my uncle found out. He told everyone, he didn't believe it, that the next time he saw me, he was going to interrogate me.

Three years after that, I told my father what , my grandfather had done. His response was, some people are sick, but he kept his relationship with my grandfather like nothing happened. That was a moment I realized the truth, that even if I had spoken up as a child, nothing would've happened. The silence didn't start with me, and it wouldn't have ended with me then because silence was the rule. The air everyone breathed. The code no one dared to break.

My grandmother always reminded me of the grandmother from Flowers in the Attic. The original movie was made in 1987. It's based on books written by VC Andrews. I don't know if I'm showing my age right now, but that's who she always [00:09:00] reminded me of. The grandmother was cold, calculating. There was no warmth in her love, only rules, only judgment, only the constant reminder that appearances mattered more than truth, and that's what my mother learned. That's what I inherited.

Silence doesn't just protect abusers, it raises them, it shelters them, and it teaches everyone else how to survive around them. That's the system I was born into, one that dressed pain in prayer and called it family. When I look back now, I see how silence wasn't just a pattern in my family. It was a belief system. It told us who we could be, what we could say, and how much truth was too much to tell. And like all belief systems, it was protected by fear, by faith, by shame. I used to think that if no one talked about what happened, it meant we had all moved [00:10:00] on. That inherited silence kept generations trapped in the same story, telling it without words, acting it out through denial, distance, and blame.

And that's what I inherited a lineage of women who mistook endurance for strength and a culture that mistook silence for holiness. It's strange how deep those lessons go. Even after everything I've lived through, there are still moments where I catch myself wanting to stay quiet, to not make anyone uncomfortable, to keep the peace that never actually existed. That's what generational trauma does. It teaches you to survive the very thing that broke you. It trains you to anticipate pain before it happens and to apologize for existing when it does.

I can still hear the echoes of it sometimes in the way I second guess myself before telling a story, in the tightness that shows up in my throat when I start to cry, [00:11:00] in the way I've learned to make pain sound poetic, so it doesn't scare people. But every time I speak, every time I say what happened out loud, I disrupt that silence.

I used to think telling the truth would destroy my family. That if I spoke it, I'd be the problem, but the truth didn't break us. The silence did, and when I finally understood that, I realized I didn't need their permission to heal. I didn't need their belief to validate my story. I just needed to stop waiting for someone else to name what I already knew, because once you name it, it loses its power. That's the real work of breaking generational silence. Understanding that the healing you do now reaches both backward and forward.

Every time I tell the truth, it frees the version of me who couldn't speak, and it teaches my children that they never have to carry what isn't theirs. It took me a long [00:12:00] time to realize that breaking the cycle isn't about hating where you came from. It's about seeing it clearly, seeing the dysfunction, the patterns, the pain, and choosing to do it differently.

It's about deciding that love doesn't have to look like suffering. That loyalty doesn't have to look like silence. My grandmother believed silence made her holy. My mother believed it kept her safe. I've learned that the silence I inherited wasn't holy or safe. It was surrender, and I'm done surrendering.

Now I speak even when my voice shakes. I rest even when the world tells me to keep going. Because healing doesn't mean rewriting the story to make it prettier. It means finally telling it as it is and still choosing to live in the light of it. There was a time I thought healing meant closure. Like one day the pain would stop and I'd [00:13:00] finally be free. But now I know healing doesn't silence the past, it softens its grip. The memories still visit, but they don't control me anymore. The fear still whispers, but I don't mistake it for truth. Healing has given me space to hold both what happened and what I'm building now.

The silence I inherited was meant to protect the system. The voice I found is what finally ends it. And some days that voice is loud, raw, shaking, full of fire. Other days it's quiet. Just a breath, a choice, a boundary I keep without explaining it away. Both count. Both are sacred because the power isn't just in the telling, it's in the living that comes after, the living that doesn't hide. The living that chooses softness, the living that no longer apologizes for taking up space. Breaking generational silence isn't just about speaking. [00:14:00] It's about building a life where silence is no longer needed, where truth doesn't feel dangerous, where love doesn't require for you to erase yourself.

I may have inherited their silence, but I'm leaving something else behind. A lineage of honesty, of healing, of voices that don't whisper when they mean to roar. This story isn't easy to hold. Some stories don't end neatly. They unfold slowly, like waves returning to shore, carrying pieces of what we've buried, showing us that healing is less about erasing and more about allowing. Sometimes healing looks like remembering something painful and realizing your body no longer flinches. Sometimes it looks like finally saying the words you once believed would destroy you, and sometimes it's simply sitting in the quiet without waiting for the next storm.

You don't [00:15:00] have to rush to understand it all. You don't have to turn pain into meaning overnight. Understanding comes in seasons. Some clear, some messy, some silent. It's enough to honor that you made it here. Still breathing, still becoming.

Healing doesn't erase what was done. It reshapes the space it takes inside of you. The memories remain, but they begin to move differently. Less like anchors and more like reminders of how far you've come. You begin to see your story differently. Not as a scar, you have to hide, but as a map of how you survived. And over time, peace arrives quietly, not as a grand revelation, but in small ordinary ways. In the mornings that feel light for no reason. In the sound of your own laughter returning. In the stillness that no longer feels dangerous. You deserve those moments, the ones that ask you for nothing. [00:16:00] To rest without guilt, to breathe without fear.

What happened to you is part of your story, but it's not the whole book. The next chapters belong to you now. To the version of you who knows what peace feels like and refuses to let it go. Maybe that's what healing really is, the quiet decision to live differently because you finally can. And little by little, the silence that once held your pain begins to sound like peace.

Breaking generational silence isn't about blaming the ones who came before. It's about understanding the systems that shaped them and finding the courage to stop repeating them. For so long I thought my family's silence was ours alone. A private wound, too heavy to name, but the more I speak, the more I realized how many of us were raised by people who mistook endurance for love and [00:17:00] confusion for faith. Unspoken pain lives in so many homes passed down like heirlooms Tucked inside traditions meant to protect us, but endurance is not healing and silence is not peace.

The more I tell these stories, the more I see how connected we are. Each of us trying to turn what we inherited into something softer, something that could finally breathe. If this episode brought something up for you, know that you don't have to fix everything today. Just noticing the pattern is already an act of rebellion against it. We are not defined by the pain that raised us. We are shaped by what we choose to do with it. By the way we speak, create, rest, and love now. We are not erasing the story. We're reclaiming the voice that was lost inside it.

So wherever you are, in the thick of remembering or in the slow rebuilding, be [00:18:00] proud of how far you've come. Because courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it just whispers i'm still here. Every truth spoken, every silence broken becomes a doorway for someone else to walk through. And that's how healing multiplies one voice at a time.

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Thank you for being here, for listening with an open heart. Most of all remember this, your story matters. Your voice matters, and you are not alone.

This episode was written and narrated by Irene Torres Audio production by Carlos Torres. Original music composed by Carlos Torres.