There was nothing on the shelves for this

Growing up, my father owned a pharmacy serving Korean immigrants in our community.

People came in for their prescriptions and stayed to talk to my mother. I'd watch their shoulders drop as she listened–something in them loosened simply because someone had made room for their stories.

But then they returned to the same lives that were hurting them.

I was too young to name what they needed. I only knew it wasn't on any of our shelves.

The painful part?

My mother could create that for strangers, but she couldn’t create it for me.

I thought it was “just my family”

My mother and I fought throughout my childhood. Over time, I lost my voice in those conflicts—figuratively and literally.

But I didn’t call it trauma. It was just my family, and other people had it worse.

Repairing our relationship required my own therapy, learning enough Korean to have conversations we had never been able to have, and years of repetitive boundaries.

It wasn’t fast or fair. But my mother changed.

So did I.

Developmental trauma doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes, it becomes the person you think you are.

“I’m too sensitive.”

“I’m bad at relationships.”

“I should be able to handle this.”

What if you’re not broken? What if you adapted?

In my family, I learned to silence my needs to preserve the relationship.

I stopped trying to become more acceptable.

I started becoming more myself.

As I confronted the trauma in my family, I found my voice and built a different relationship with my parents—one that didn’t require me to keep abandoning myself.

That freedom became the foundation of my work.

The root work.

I help people uncover the parts of themselves they learned to hide, understand what made hiding necessary, and build new ways of caring, healing, and connecting.