Tracey Yokas Author Of Bloodlines: A Memoir Of Harm And Healing

In this episode, Timothy J. Hayes welcomes Tracey Yokas, the author of Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing. Together, they explore the profound journey of generational trauma healing, delving into the personal stories that shaped Tracey’s compelling memoir. Tracey shares her experiences of coping with sudden family loss and her daughter’s mental health crisis, intertwining these with reflections on her own childhood. Tune in to hear how these events inspired Tracey to confront and heal from deep-seated family patterns. This episode promises a heartfelt discussion on the complexities of mental health, self-care, and the power of open conversation.

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Tracey Yokas Author Of Bloodlines: A Memoir Of Harm And Healing

Tracey Yokas creates stuff. When she isn’t writing about mental health and wellness, she can be found playing with paint, glitter, and glue. She shares about her family’s journey with mental illness. Others will know they are not alone. She’s dedicated to supporting women in the journey towards authenticity and fulfills her mission by creating safe spaces where art words and vulnerability meet in a dynamic community. Tracey earned her Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from California Lutheran University and lives in Newbury Park, California, with her family. You can find her on Facebook at Tracey Yokas Creates and on Instagram @Tracey Yokas or on her website, TraceyYokasCreates.com.

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Tracey, thank you for joining me. It’s delightful to see you.

It’s delightful to be here. Thank you so much.

I’m hoping you can give us some of the juicy stuff about your book Bloodlines, which came out in 2024, and how you came to write a book that’s so moving.

It’s Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing. It took me several years to write. It is a true, honest labor of love. I gave up many times, but something always called me back to dig back in and get back to it. The frontline of the story is about a time, several years ago, when my mother died suddenly, and my daughter had a mental health crisis.

I intercut that with scenes from my childhood to show how generational trauma and how our conditioning can in a story way without getting into fancy language or any of that stuff, but to show how ways that we’re conditioned from childhood can impede our ability to be the type of people and the type of parents we want to be. That’s not in any way about blaming people for things that happened. It’s more about understanding. I was surprised by some of these things. I got into therapy for the first time when I was 30. Some of these insights I didn’t have until I was in my 50s. It can take a while.

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The story is a passion project. My family and I, luckily I had their permission and willingness to share because it’s vulnerable for all three of us, my husband, my daughter, and myself. We are passionate advocates for normalizing the conversation around mental health, mental illness, well-being, and self-care. We need to be having these conversations in an open and honest way. Many teens are suffering. I wanted parents to know that they’re not alone in this journey.

You’ve succeeded beautifully. The question that comes to mind is, was your mom’s death unexpected? Did you have a warning? Was it abrupt? What happened?

Sadly, it was abrupt. There was no warning. She and my daughter were close. It was the summertime. We had talked a couple of days prior. They were planning a visit out for summer to see my daughter in the play that she was performing in. The next thing I knew, I got a phone call from my mom’s partner saying that she had had a stroke and was in the hospital. She passed shortly after that. She was still working. It was unexpected. We don’t understand how all of these things came into play, but my daughter was able, throughout the journey, to identify that this was somehow a trigger for her to start having some significant struggles.

The timing of it indicates that in the book. You can see from your hindsight that they’re connected somehow. You don’t know what the cause and effect is, but the timing was certainly there. The other thing that erupted for me as I kept reading the book and was drawn into it is the pattern in your family growing up. I don’t know whether it’s hiding emotions, running from them, or secrecy. Can you talk about how that became a discovery for you? How did you tune into that as one of the causal factors in your family pattern?

It took a long time. I hope what I show in the book, because it’s something that we don’t talk about enough in regular life, is that a healing journey can take a long time. You can understand parts of it. The first time I got into therapy, as I said, I was 30, my daughter was six months old, and I knew that I struggled with communication and feeling not great about myself. I had been struggling with weight and body image like many women do since childhood. That was a big thing that I was struggling with. I didn’t want to pass that on to my daughter, but it took a long time. Her illness was the time when the suffering became intense for all of us.

We were moving along with life and doing our things. She was going to school, doing well, and had friends. My husband was working. We were living our lives, and we got frightened off course. That as often is the case. A crisis can be a mirror held to our faces. We were trying to support our daughter the best we could, following instructions, taking her to therapy, and doing all the things.

What I had to realize in the course of our journey was that I couldn’t control her illness. The best thing I could do was take care of myself and work on unlearning harmful patterns. One of those was how I was communicating. Was I communicating clearly with her? Was I getting swept away by currents of emotion every time she did? I was.

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There were things that were confronted in the suffering that were what was necessary for me to find that space to be able to say, “I cannot go on anymore this way.” There’s a moment in the book with the pie chart scene. You’ve read it. If anyone reads the book, they’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s where it became clear that my low self-esteem was not only impacting myself but, through mechanisms I didn’t fully understand, impacted my daughter.

It took a long time, and in the course of writing and rewriting, I had to understand the patterns better, but those patterns were playing out. They needed addressing. The only way I could address it was because the only person I had control of was myself. That is a fundamental thing I wanted to show in the book because, as parents, we get wrapped up in trying to help our children and looking at their behavior, and the behaviors hurt them, us, and the family. We want those things to change. We want it to stop, but the actual people we only have control over are ourselves.

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If I remember correctly, the pie chart situation you’re referring to was in a family therapy setting when you were there trying to participate. It was some a program that your daughter was in.

She was in her second residential treatment facility at that point. It was a family group assignment. That meant all the kids and parents who could be there were there. We all had to do it. We were not told ahead of time that we would have to read our answers out loud. I’m sure they did that on purpose. It was on a scale of 0 to 10. How fulfilled did we feel in these certain metrics about life, like our emotional and physical well-being? Everybody’s answers were high, like 8, 9, 10 fulfilled. My answers were not that. I was overwhelmed with shame and loathing.

First of all, I felt like everybody must be lying because I still thought everybody’s ruminations and thoughts spiraled the way that mine did. I realized since then that was not the case. It became clear that everybody didn’t feel the same way that I did. The only person in the room whose chart ended up looking the most similar to mine was my daughter. That is a fundamental eye-opening moment for me. There are some things here on my side that are not well on my own mental health, well-being, and journey. That’s what I have to focus on.

The old adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and the whole thing about how family constellations work talks about how we pass these things down from generation to generation. When it’s a cross-generational family pattern, it tends to be all but invisible and sometimes completely invisible, even when we’re first shown. Look what your pie chart shows, and you say, “I don’t get it.”

 

I don’t remember reading that much in terms of what you might have learned about your mother’s past in her childhood, but I do remember you telling an incident that happened when you were sixteen years old and you had an argument with your mother, and you said to her, “What is wrong with you?” She said, “Here’s what’s wrong.” You were completely shocked. Can you tell us about how that led to this reveal for you about one of the traumas in your family?

I appreciate you bringing that up because you mentioned silence earlier, and that’s one of the things that keep these patterns ingrained. This is not something our parents or their parents are trying to do to us or ourselves consciously. I was supposed to have a baby sister, and she was stillborn. I was two when that happened.

Additionally to that, I don’t know that much about my mother’s childhood because she would never talk about it. I don’t know that much about my father’s childhood because he wouldn’t talk about it other than knowing he was a child during the Great Depression. He was older than my mother. He was a World War II veteran. My mother had suffered significant losses in her childhood, her father and her stepfather, and fast forward to me being born and the death of my baby sister.

This was something that was never discussed. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I didn’t even remember I was supposed to have a baby sister. In the book, her name is mentioned twice. It was one of those things we don’t talk about. That’s how it was handled then. My parents didn’t forget that they were supposed to have had another child.

Into that mix of the things that were passed down to them, their own life experiences coming together, having more life experiences, having me, and into all of that, we learn what we learn. When we’re little, from the time we’re born, we learn what we learn, and we don’t learn what we don’t learn, which is a lot of words to say we don’t know what the patterns are sometimes that are directing our choices and our life. I did not understand until now that I am also an adult survivor of childhood narcissistic neglect and rejection on one side and codependent and meshed energy on the other side.

I have a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. I am not a therapist, but with my background in everything that we had gone through, it was still a surprise and a shock to have that insight this long into my journey. I don’t say that in a way to be pointing fingers. I understand my parents better now, and I have more compassion for them as individual human beings, having gone through my own journey with my daughter now than I ever had before. It can be difficult because we can be in therapy. We can have certain levels of insight. We can learn things. There’s more to learn, understand, and grow.

I’ve been blessed and privileged to be in and out of therapy over the years. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. People ask me, “Would you change your journey?” I’ve spoken to my daughter about this, and the answer is a hard no. I wouldn’t change anything because as painful as it was for her to watch her go through that and to know how badly she was suffering. We are also where we are now because of everything that we went through as a family. I’m being able to have conversations with her about that. She’s read the book. We’ve had conversations that I don’t think we would’ve been able to have without having written and lived it.

It’s great to be able to read that because there are a lot of us who are still struggling to say, “I wouldn’t change what I have.” That means you’ve reached a level of acceptance, comfort, and appreciation for what is good in your life and how so much of it has grown out of you. It’s like the idea of the lotus flower that has to have the mud to grow in. If you don’t have any mud, you don’t ever get a lotus flower.

The other thing is when you talk about what your parents had been through, the losses your mother had had, and the traumas your father had been through, it’s good because if we use blame as one of our weapons or shields, it is a big waste of energy. It doesn’t lead to a productive or constructive resolution to a problem.

Yet to be able to see what my parents did so they could put their heads down, trudge through trauma, keep moving, and build a life, how it may not have led to good wide, open communication skills and/or deep relationships with others. It might have helped them isolate, shield, and have secrets, and how that leads to unproductive patterns. That’s good to see because if I can see what led to the unproductive pattern, now I can start to unravel it. If my secrets are part of what keeps me sick, my commitment to deeper honesty is the path to health and growth.

When you were in that situation in the book that you described, being sixteen and getting frustrated with your mother and saying, “What is wrong with you?” She says, “What’s wrong with me? Now is your sister’s birthday.” You did not even know you had a sister at that point or not have it register in conscious awareness. It is such a wonderful example of how your life was shaped by these things that you had no idea they were being shaped by.

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I have now started hearing more about the zeitgeist. It’s another way of looking at something as these relational patterns from childhood and trauma because I never thought of myself as someone who experienced trauma. I didn’t tick any of the normal boxes that these things called adverse childhood experiences. There’s a list, and I didn’t tick any of those. I didn’t see myself in any of that dialogue.

We can experience trauma from what we didn’t get. I see myself much more in that language. I didn’t get it in terms of support and all of these things, but I agree with everything you said. It can be easy to not see yourself that way, even if you have some insight. The first time I got into therapy, talking about my relationship with my mother and father, throwing up as a child for no discernible reason, and going to the hospital all the time to check on my stomach, why is she throwing up for “no reason” and never finding any answers, that still wasn’t enough to illuminate for me the depth of my experience.

It’s important to start somewhere, anywhere, and work on it, and talk about it because the more you do that, you break the chains that have bound you that you don’t even know were there. I started doing that for myself in therapy long after these events happened and after the journey with my daughter, but I had to start with myself first. Another key takeaway from the book is all of the insights, work, and healing. I had to start with myself first before I could start reaching out to my daughter in a way that would be more helpful to her. All of these things increase the happiness in my daily life, and looking for ways to be grateful and find compassion.

 

All of these things started first with me because I had never learned how to do them. Maybe that sounds like a cop-out. Anyone who has had a similar childhood to mine knows it is not a cop-out. You don’t know what you don’t know until suddenly you start to know it. There’s a whole lot of learning that goes along with that.

You bring up a great point about the study on adverse childhood events. While that’s a wonderful study to help awaken people to the role of trauma in our physical and mental problems later in life, if people look at that and say, “If you don’t have what’s on this list, you didn’t have a traumatic childhood,” they’re missing the point.

Dr. Lila Massoumi is a psychiatrist. I had the privilege of interviewing her. She talks about her theory that children are like a laptop and a rock. A rock you can bounce off a wall, drop in a lake, and throw in a snowbank, and it still functions perfectly well as a rock, a projectile, a doorstop, or a paperweight. A laptop, not so much. You can’t bounce it off the wall, drop it in a lake, or draw it in a snowbank and have it function.

What might have been experienced as neglectful or traumatic for one child might be like the perfect nurturing growing environment for an introverted child with more resources. For a child who’s creative, a child, emotionally sensitive and/or emotionally intelligent, or has the capacity for emotional intelligence who doesn’t get coached into what these energies are, what they mean, and what words you might develop to use to communicate your emotional states, that can be traumatic. You have a lot of situations, all of us in our lives, that we might have experienced as wonderful, and one of our siblings experienced it as traumatic, and they’re growing up in the same household.

It’s important to be able to help people understand how they downloaded energies, beliefs, and conclusions from their life events because it’s the energies we download in those negative beliefs and conclusions about ourselves that constitute trauma. It isn’t the event that’s traumatic. It’s what the person downloads.

This is why we have people who go off to war, they come back, and they function beautifully, but somebody else in their platoon comes back and can’t sleep, has nightmares and flashbacks, and can’t hold down a job. It’s what the individual has in their personal strengths and resources and what they interpret and download from their life events that constitute this thing we call trauma. It’s personal and individualized.

That’s one of the reasons why it can be hard for people to understand, especially if you are someone who has siblings who grew up with you under the same roof. You can end up feeling one way about it, and they can end up feeling a completely different way. That has caused so much pain for people not to have their experiences validated by somebody who you would think was there and would have the same experience about it, and they don’t. It’s confusing for those of us who didn’t look at ourselves that way. It’s such an important dialogue for us to be having about this matter.

It’s one of the many aspects of your book that I appreciated. I told you in one of our previous pre-interview calls that I appreciate the way you wrote the book. It didn’t have a magical happy ending. You’re discussing the process that you went through and that your daughter has gone through. In our conversation, you’re highlighting you’re still on the path. You’re still learning and growing.

Something you touched on a few minutes ago relative to language is a big part of why it took so long to write the book and to write it in the way that I felt comfortable putting it out into the world. The reason it took so long was because of the deficits in my understanding and how I downloaded my experience, wrestling with the words and coming back to certain scenes over again. After several years, having an editor working with me say, “I don’t understand the point of why you’ve included this. What’s your point?”

I didn’t feel this way in the process. In the process, I felt frustrated. I’m like, “Why can I do this? Why is it taking so long?” I understand now that the literal wrestling was part of my healing process. As someone who has had a childhood like mine and downloaded it the way I did, that’s a great way to put it. I had to wrestle with the words to find the way to say what I meant to say, which was not so much writing. It was a living thing that I had to figure out. That has helped me get to the point where I am now.

Many of us will have years after we lived through something and we’ve downloaded some a belief or an interpretation about ourselves. We’ll have years later that we finally realize, “This is what happened. Ever since then in my life, I’ve veered in this direction. I must have made it mean X, Y, and Z.” That’s the value if you can find a therapist that you are comfortable with and who knows what he or she is doing, and you keep looking at ways to make your life better. You’ll start to uncover those things.

People ask me, “What do you mean by patterns?” I get a pattern like such a dry word for relationships. That’s the thing. What I was struggling with all these years was I had my husband, daughter, family, and this life, but I also had a long string of failed friendships in the rearview mirror, looking at my past. I had difficulty in the relationships I was having, particularly in the relationship with my mother while she was still alive.

That never got resolved while she was living. There’s so much difficulty. What is all that difficulty about? The difficulty can be related to what we’re talking about with patterns, energetic patterns, and communication patterns. How are we showing up with these people? What happens when the relationships don’t work out? What is your sense of why that happened?

It took years for me to be able to look and realize part of that codependency and being over-identified with other people’s emotions and being like, “I’m only going to be okay if you’re okay. You have to invest as much in this friendship as I do.” I’m over-exaggerating to share my point, but you know what I’m saying. We can miss the forest for the trees. We hear whatever patterns, but they mean something important when we’re living our lives and trying to have meaningful, joyous, healthy relationships with other people.

In the book by Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know, she did a wonderful interview with her therapist, Dr. Ham, about his understanding. The longer-term process of complex post-traumatic stress disorder has developed within us, whoever we are in relation to other people. It’s a relational process. The healing has to be a relationship-based process.

What she did in her work with Dr. Ham in micro analyzing their conversations and understanding these little dynamics that go unnoticed by most of us, especially anybody who’s raised by relatively healthy parents and has a relatively healthy pattern of relationships, people do it like breathing. They don’t even know what they’re doing.

If you didn’t have that and you’re raised by someone like you or your mother who was traumatized by other losses in her life and losing a baby when you were two years old, your relationship with your mother was crafted by that trauma. What she was willing to share or able to share was highly restricted. There you were, this young, vibrant, creative, intelligent soul growing up looking for interaction that couldn’t happen. What did you download about what it meant? Why aren’t you connecting with your mother?

Most of us, when we’re that age, we download a belief that it must be my fault. There’s something wrong with me. Uncovering those patterns in terms of actual dynamic interaction with somebody, whether it’s a therapist or a good friend who’s willing and able to help you with that, is critical to learning how to have a healthy relationship with somebody and communicate openly with somebody.

I appreciate how succinctly you explain that because that’s exactly it. When you’re growing up, and you’re living your life when you’re young, and you’re in high school and college and starting out, most of the people you meet along that way do not have the time, inclination, or understanding to wonder why this friendship isn’t working or doesn’t feel good, they take off.

It was going great for the first few months. All of a sudden, it goes sour.

For those of us who are left reeling from that, all those relationships reinforce that initial message. There’s something wrong with me. We learn it over and over again in a variety of different ways and scenarios, but that’s the bottom line. It didn’t even enter my mind that the reason that was happening was because I didn’t get something in my childhood. I knew and believed there was something wrong with me.

That was the reason I got into therapy the first time when my daughter was six months old because I was afraid that whatever it was, whatever was wrong with me, I was going to repeat with her, and that would play out in a variety of ways, but mostly it would play out like she would feel about me the way I felt about my mother.

How much is happening at six months old? A lot, but it took a lot of time. I like to be careful with how I say this because there are many factors that go into somebody receiving a diagnosis of mental illness. I will say that hindrances in that dynamic that lived beyond that early therapy meant that I had no choice but to impact my relationship with my daughter.

I’m not saying that I caused her to have a mental illness. I am saying that hindrances and constraints that I had been living with my entire life that I did not understand certainly played into how we communicated with one another because I communicated with her the same way that I was communicated with even after I had some initial therapy and some of these things.

I’m sharing that to reiterate why it became clear to me when she received her diagnosis that I still had more work to do, and the only work we can do is our own, but also because I want people to know that the amount of compassion that you can have for yourself. I was equally as shocked by how much more compassion I had for myself as I was for how much I had for my parents.

As all of this started becoming clearer to me over the years, it has taken away. I had blamed. I think that was part of my relationship with my mother and why it was troubling me for so long. It is because there was blame, pointing the finger, and a lack of understanding on all sides. That played into the difficulty between us and why maybe she could never say I love you, with all three words unless she was drunk. She could write it to me in cards after she passed away. I found a stack of cards. She wrote, “I love you.” In many of them, she could never express it.

There’s so much that goes into all of this, but when you are able to take it away, we’re all judging ourselves. We’re all judging each other so much in this society. It feels like more ever now than before. It was a lot before. Maybe not everybody judges everything the way I do. Not everyone does the ruminating. When you are able to lift the veil on that dynamic, there are many changes. That’s where the gold is. That’s what we get into therapy for. That’s what we do this work for. We can have this liberation and this lightness of feeling and spirit, not only inside of ourselves but to your point, most specifically in our relationships with other people, because that is where we thrive.

That’s an excellent point about judgment. There are many good levels of research that talk about how every time I judge, I’m causing tightness, tension, and restriction within myself. If I can learn the difference between discerning and judging, I’ve got some good options to stay awake, observe, and notice differences without having to go into tightness, tension, or upset, which happens every time I judge. If I can discern, be an observer, and go with the flow, it’s conducive to connection, relationship, and communication. When I go into judgment, it shuts down connection, communication, and relationships.

That played out in our family. From my perspective, I may be conflating two things that don’t necessarily go together, but part of that was that I’m close to my daughter. Enmeshed is the word that maybe people are most familiar with. As she became upset, I became upset because that’s how it always was. I didn’t know any different. If she was upset about something, I was upset. I had to fix it.

I’m using my hands here because I’m trying to make a point that’s slightly overdone, but it’s also true, especially when she became ill. Her illness was threatening her life. Her illness had upended the entire working of the family and all of our lives. I felt like I had to fix this. I’m her mom. That’s my job. If she became angry, I was all of that stuff.

I’d have to think some more to be 100% sure, but it feels like a precursor to being able to even begin to do that work of judging less was that dynamic because I had to create a little bit of distance between me and the other people in my life. Emotional distance, I mean, not physical distance that happened in the course of treatment.

I had to understand that, as simple as it sounds, I am my own person, and my daughter is her own person. She’s allowed to have thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and so am I. I don’t have to take those on. They’re not mine. I have now learned to say to myself, “This isn’t yours. This isn’t mine.” This is a reaction and history that comes from before me.

To be my own person and say to myself, “I’m okay,” even if she’s not okay right now, I can be calm. I’m all right. I can be here for her. I can be present without getting swept away, which was a precursor for me to be able to have rational thoughts about what I am judging or how I am coming across. Next was to wrench us apart a little bit and become two individual people who were living our own lives.

It’s huge. It’s what goes against what most of us in the culture have been taught when we hear, “You hurt my feelings. You’re making me angry. You’re scaring me. You’re confusing me. You’re offending me.” The culture has that dynamic in its language and perceptual field that says, “People and things outside of me cause my emotions.”

What you’re talking about in the separation is the awareness that I’m the one who creates my emotions, and other people create their emotions. When she’s upset, I can choose to be upset or choose a different interpretation of this and generate a different upset, calm, centeredness, or a strong feeling of support and compassion I can offer that person. If I’m in the dynamic, in my belief, if I’ve been trained into the pattern of believing that I’m causing their emotions and/or their causing mine, there isn’t any choice but to go on the rollercoaster every time it happens.

I recognize that we’re getting close to the end of our time here. I wonder if you could get centered, take a breath, and think about everything we’ve talked about so far related to the book and the message you were hoping to get out there. Do you want to go back and highlight something we’ve already talked about? Is there an aspect of this we haven’t even mentioned yet you’d like to bring up?

One thing I’d like to say after this wonderful conversation is that one thing I had to learn that took me a long time was about self-care. As a society, we have a poor understanding of what that means. My therapist had asked me for several years, as we were going through this journey, what I could do to take care of myself.

I kept looking at her like she was the most unskilled, ridiculous person I have ever met in my life. I was like, “I can’t do that. I have no right to do that. My daughter is not well.” How could I put all the things completely missing that she was asking me to do what I wanted my daughter to do? She was asking me to take care of myself. There was so much shame and self-loathing under all of that I came around to. I’m getting it now.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that if anyone reading this who is going through mental illness with their child, a loved one, a family member, a friend, or anything is to reevaluate your relationship with self-care, I love a good mani-pedi and a massage as much as the next person. There’s an aspect in terms of taking care of ourselves by healing these patterns and looking at our own intentions, thoughts, compassion, and behavior. Are we trusting ourselves? Are we tuned into ourselves? Are we recognizing what we need? Are we taking care of those things? We cannot be the person we want to be for the people we love most if we’re not willing to give ourselves these things first.

It took me so long to understand that, and it took me longer to believe it. I hope that I’ll shorten that time for people because I know how hard it is. We have not been taught to look at it that way. It is such an important skill. Most of these things are skills. Self-care is also a skill. It’s critical whether times are good or bad. We can’t always take care of ourselves the same way if things are going on or if people are in crisis. The point is having that foundation laid ahead gives you wherewithal. It gives you the ability to be there for the people that you care about. That’s one thing that felt important to add at the end of this wonderful conversation.

Thank you for spending the time with us and for writing this book, as well as for all of the benefits it’s going to have for a variety of people. The book is Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing, and it’s available wherever you get your books. Do you have a personal website that you point people to if they want to connect with you?

It’s TraceyYokasCreates.com. I have all kinds of information on there. We are a community. I hope you’ll come and check us out.

Thank you so much. It’s been a delight.

Thank you so much, Dr. Hayes.

 

Important links:

• Tracey Yokas
• Tracey Yokas Creates – Facebook
• @Tracey Yokas – Instagram
• Bloodlines
• Dr. Lila Massoumi – Past Episode
• What My Bones Know

About Tracey Yokas

Tracey Yokas creates stuff. When she isn’t writing about mental health and wellness, she can be found playing with paint, glitter, and glue. She shares about her family’s journey with mental illness so others will know they are not alone. She is dedicated to supporting women in the journey towards authenticity, and fulfills her mission by creating safe spaces where art, words, and vulnerability meet in dynamic community. Tracey earned her master’s degree in counseling psychology from California Lutheran University and lives in Newbury Park, CA, with her family. You can find her on Facebook (@traceyyokascreates) and Instagram (@traceyyokas) or on her website, www.traceyyokascreates.com.

 

 

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