How My Families’ Mental Health Impacted My Beliefs & Relationships As humans, we require a spectrum of care and attention for our overall well-being and physical, social, spiritual, and mental health. Although all aspects of health are intertwined, mental health doesn't have the best reputation. This is why generational trauma is becoming a relevant topic among younger generations, including myself. Growing up, mental health directly impacted me because of my mom and my family. Although the adults around me were struggling with symptoms of mental illnesses, it was too taboo to address, causing them to live in denial, fear, and survival mode without being aware of how that changed them and their behavior. This made my childhood chaotic because the adults that I expected care, support, and love from had a restricted ability to care for and protect children adequately. Rather than address mental illnesses and difficult emotions, my family taught me that I wasn’t allowed to be stressed, sad, or display negative emotions because they were a sign of weakness that showed I wouldn't be able to handle life as an adult if I couldn't even handle my simple life as a child. Although I see the cruelty in those beliefs now, I also empathize with my family because they dealt with trauma for generations and were subconsciously living in survival mode and passing down beliefs that were taught to them. This conditioning ultimately led me to battle with social isolation, depression, and self-harm as early as eight years old. However, I was aware that I didn't want to and that I could not continue to live in survival mode. My Experience With the Mental Health Industry & Career Aspirations I officially started focusing on improving my mental health during my late teens with free counseling through insurance or the university I attended. The student therapist I worked with almost two years ago was life-changing. In six months, she helped me through major life transitions and severe mental health issues after surviving domestic violence. The loneliness I felt during this helped me become more independent and confident, the same way each adversity transformed me into the person I am today and the person I aspire to be as a professional. One of the most significant factors that played a role in my development was deciding to raise my baby sister to ensure she had the present mother and stable attachment I longed for. Although I don't plan on having kids on my own, I pass down my values to my sisters that I learned from our mom and my childhood, but I also teach her to do more than fight to survive; I want her to live and thrive. I want her to see and value the beauty life has to offer. So, I’m teaching her to listen to herself first, trust herself, and always advocate for her best interests. We’re not here to simply survive. My sister truly taught me that, too; she taught me to value my life and the relationships I’ve built. She taught me to value human life in a way that empowered me and brought me to my purpose and career goals of becoming a social worker to ensure that the basic needs of all children are met. I am drawn to many different aspects of social work and the broad array of opportunities to work with children and families in our most vulnerable populations, facing difficult circumstances too many children experience. I’ve always believed in turning something bad into a good thing, but now I know I was being prepared for something great.

To learn the needs of the community, we need to know the community. A good leader is one who can fundamentally understand the experience and limitations of those they lead. This is why every volunteer opportunity I take brings me one step closer towards my career goals. Through my life experiences and research, I discovered that my purpose is to ensure that the basic needs of all children are met in any way I can—and a social work degree is the path I choose to reach my goals. I want to impact the world by helping revolutionize policy as a social worker because I have witnessed and lived through the exact unmet needs that our community continues to face. Due to the limitations and adversities I’ve faced, I’ve grown a strong sense of empathy for other living beings, leading me to my first volunteering experience at an animal shelter called The Animal Foundation in Las Vegas, Nevada. For my future goals, I needed volunteering experience anyway, so I decided to help animals because I loved them more than people at that point in my life. Although not directly related to my career field, I gained beneficial experience involving individuals, families, law, and animal adoption regulations. However, it wasn't until my first volunteering experience as a practicum student in my undergrad social work career that fundamentally impacted my core values and the next steps towards my career goals. Being a practicum student at a nonprofit behavioral health clinic called Legacy Counseling & Workforce Connections provided me with the most insight I’ve ever gained about my plans and myself as a social worker. Before my first practicum and social work experience, I thought that all I needed was the desire to help people, and I would strive as a therapist. Before this, I wanted to be a therapist because I thought that would fulfill my need to help others. However, I quickly learned that I need a toolbelt of support, resources, knowledge, and skills to accomplish my goals, along with that passion. This experience tested me and my desires in ways that fundamentally transformed my way of approaching the social issues in my plans that I no longer want to be solely a therapist. A beautifully terrifying fact about our reality is that social problems intersect and contribute to one another in an endless cycle, simultaneously leaving us with problem symptoms in various institutions and systems. The longer we treat the symptoms, the deeper America becomes lost in the cycle. Even attempting to address only the symptoms can seem pointless until we find the source. Although intersecting issues can be overwhelming, they provide a helpful web trail to guide you to its roots. I discovered this during my time at a nonprofit behavioral health clinic, when clinicians, admin staff, colleagues, along with clients were all faced with the same limitations of mental health in Nevada. Ultimately changing my goals to being a therapist to revolutionizing policy to benefit other helping professionals and the community I wanted to work directly with.

My identity is complex, with many different aspects to it; there are many life experiences, interests, principles, and family values that create my identity. I am a first-generation citizen and college student, which is a huge privilege in my family. I have the privilege in my family of being born in America, speaking English fluently, and being able to obtain scholarships to go to a university. I am who I am because of the values passed down to me and the observations I've made growing up within my family. I'm a hardworking, determined, and independent person due to my upbringing. However, my empathy for others in similar situations also makes me extremely caring, passionate, and vocal about my beliefs because a closed mouth doesn't get fed. Although my empathy extends to various individuals facing challenging situations, I'm incredibly passionate about immigration and child rights because of how I was affected by my childhood adversities and immigration. When my mom was deported right before my eighth birthday, my life was shattered; the only person who ever cared for me was abruptly taken away, and I was forced to live with abusive family members. My mom was a single parent of two, so I could only depend on her for my safety and well-being, leaving me vulnerable for the months she was deported from the U.S. Shortly after she made it back to America illegally, she became pregnant with my baby sister. At that moment, our lives were unstable; we lived in poverty with an unavailable, pregnant single mother with no legal status. Through her adversities, my mom taught me to strive for the best and work hard for it because anything is possible. She showed me and proved that my possibilities are endless. I had a fighter as a role model, a survivor, who taught me the good and bad parts of fighting to survive. Although I'm profoundly grateful for the strength I've gained and witnessed, surviving didn't leave my mom with the time to be a mother. I lacked my mom's security during my childhood, but even that loneliness made me the independent, confident, and resilient person I am today. Although my mother did her best, so did I; with everything I learned and experienced, I decided to raise my baby sister when I was ten years old to ensure she had the present mother I longed for. Although I don't plan on having kids of my own, I pass down my values to my sister that I learned from our mom and my childhood. However, I also plan to teach her to do more than survive; I want her to live and thrive. I want her to live, see, and value the beauty life has to offer. So, I'm teaching her to listen to herself first, trust in herself, and advocate for her best interest always. I'm teaching here that we're not here to simply survive.

All life has a purpose and a way of influencing the world. I want to impact the world by helping revolutionize policy that limits helping professionals like social workers, psychologists, and counselors. I have witnessed and lived through the exact unmet needs that our community continues to face. My life experiences allowed me to connect with struggling children and develop empathy toward others in difficult situations. A significant factor gravitating me towards policy and social welfare was when my mom was deported right before my eighth birthday. My life was shattered when the only person who ever cared for me was abruptly taken away, and I was forced to live with abusive family members. My mom was a single parent of two, so I could only depend on her for my safety and well-being, leaving me vulnerable for the months she was deported from the U.S. Shortly after she made it back to America illegally, she became pregnant with my baby sister. At that moment, our lives were unstable; we lived in poverty with an unavailable, pregnant single mother with no legal status. My mother did her best, and so did I, leading me to raise Cindy when I was ten years old to ensure she had the present mother I longed for. However, I shortly learned that I was not a rare cruel case. Many of my childhood adversities root back to the same national issue that has impacted at least 17.8 million U.S. children with at least one foreign-born parent, including naturalized citizens, lawfully present immigrants, or undocumented immigrants as of 2019 (U.S. Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement 2021). Although my reality during my childhood was complicated, I was always drawn to question what other children might be facing as well. I began researching child abuse and neglect stories that devastated me, some related to immigration and others that didn't, but they all made me yearn for a better life for these children and myself. The stories I read motivated me to want to help; I began to feel the need to put myself in a position to protect and enforce the love and security that every child deserves, no matter their legal status or of their parents. Through my life experiences and research, I discovered that my purpose is to ensure that the basic needs of all children are met in any way I can—and becoming a counselor with a social work degree is the first step to reaching my goals and better understanding the needs on my community. The social work field is the perfect path for me to work directly as a counselor and behavioral health provider for individuals and families within my community before expanding my plans. I ultimately plan on ensuring that basic human needs are met for all children, regardless of their legal citizenship status or of their parents, so I’ll greatly benefit from the experience and knowledge only providers gain from working closely with individuals. Through my clinical intern counseling experience, I’ll be prepared with the necessary tools to engage and practice reflectively and autonomously within the complexity of diverse social structures impacting our community and further advance my problem-solving abilities through the skilled leadership and innovation acquired. I could not have dedicated myself to a plan that better aligns with the goals I strive to meet and involves the skills, knowledge, and experience I require. America's education system will be my next priority after becoming LMSW, specifically the structures in place contributing to the school-to-prison and school-to-deportation pipeline. The school-to-prison and deportation pipelines are defined as the policies and practices that push school children, especially our most vulnerable or at-risk youth, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems (ACLU, 2008). Education policy has historically structured pipelines that directly funnel minority, low-income, or undocumented children into the criminal justice system or immigration court system, thus simultaneously contributing to various social issues, including most, if not all, of the 12 grand challenges for social workers. The school-to-prison pipeline became most prominent when zero-tolerance policies arose to prevent more severe issues in response to the crime concern. Zero-tolerance policies increased the criminal justice system's use as an intervention in child development in schools, gradually transforming it into a disciplinary tool and collectively contributing to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system (Hall, 2020). While education policy contributing to these pipelines will be my priority, many ways exist to address this social problem. A beautifully terrifying fact about our reality is that social problems intersect and contribute to one another in an endless cycle, simultaneously leaving us with problem symptoms in various institutions and systems. The longer we treat the symptoms, the deeper America becomes lost in the cycle. Even attempting to address only the symptoms can seem pointless until we find the source. Although intersecting issues can be overwhelming, they provide a helpful web trail to guide you to its roots. I discovered this when adapting my original goals of reforming child welfare rights within immigration policy and when I became interested in our alarmingly increased population of incarcerated individuals with mental and physical disabilities. I realized that these social issues are multidimensional, so I need to address them at the roots. I asked important questions like, “What is contributing to these issues? Why are American families being torn apart by immigration policy and or the criminal justice system?” and I found my answer: firstly, our education system is funneling our most vulnerable populations into our criminal justice system and our immigration court system as early as preschool. This is why reforming zero-tolerance interventions is the first step to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Replacing harmful disciplinary interventions and implementing early rehabilitation interventions like restorative justice, college-readiness programs, and improving youth and family access to public assistance are vital in dismantling the pipeline that contributes to innumerable intersecting social issues. In an overwhelming world of intersecting problems, I have found comfort in knowing the possibilities of addressing multiple problems with the same roots. Further in the future, I hope to continue to work individually with clients as a therapist in select communities, limiting my services to those with less access to mental health services, like the Deaf community. When I obtain my LMSW, one of my goals is to become a certified ASL interpreter and counselor to hopefully work with the Deaf community to ensure their basic human needs are also met. If nothing more, I plan to further my connection with the Deaf community to support ASL over ableist ideologies enforced in the past. Growing up in a traditionally Hispanic ableist household, I have learned to have my biases. Although my biases were not prejudiced on purpose, are they ever? I grew up lacking awareness of different people, needs, and issues. I always felt horrible for disabled people because I did not understand how they could continue to live life that way. However, “feeling horrible” was not a helpful view to have of disabled people. It wasn't until I was told my little cousin was hard of hearing that I exposed myself to different lifestyles and American Sign Language (ASL). I was around nine years old when a Deaf woman tried to approach me with a business card with the ASL alphabet on it. She was trying to communicate with me, and when I tried to communicate with her, she handed me the card. Before I could show off the ASL I had been learning for my cousin, my mom rushed me into the car and left the woman alone. I still don't know what she was trying to say, but I will never forget the powerless feeling of being unable to communicate with someone. Although different, it felt similar to when my mom (A native Spanish speaker) struggled to communicate in an English world. I always wanted my mom to have the ability to communicate with the world, and I then felt the same way about Deaf people. When I first began college, I started taking ASL classes and attending ASL-only events. My professor was born Deaf from a hearing family and made a home in the Deaf community. She taught me about Deaf history, accomplishments, public figures, and current struggles and needs. I learned how Deaf people make a world for themselves in a hearing world as normal human beings, helping me see the normal in differences and disabilities. With my new knowledge and experiences with the Deaf community, my perspective of disabilities transformed completely, from feeling horrible pity to comfort with my new normal, and the ability to acknowledge unmet needs. Then, when I furthered my exposure to the Deaf community through my third ASL class and Deaf Studies courses, I found a way to combine my new knowledge with my plans within the mental health field. I learned about my limitations and the limitations Deaf people face in Nevada. Although the Deaf community has come a long way in history, there is still a massive demand for social workers, therapists, and interpreters who know ASL. My experiences with Deaf culture not only transformed how I think about people with disabilities but also transformed my passions and goals.