Cynthia is a writer, meditation teacher, somatic psychotherapist, musician, and mother. Her passion is helping survivors of relationship violence and attachment trauma come home to themselves, embrace their wounded parts, and embody their aliveness.
These episodes offer practical guidance for surviving real-world challenges. Listeners are welcome to call in with their stories and questions, and Cynthia will respond with applicable mindfulness practices, tips, and somatic tools for healing attachment trauma, soothing your heart, loving the skin you are in, and awakening your soul’s purpose.
Free Spirit
Cynthia was adopted at the age of 18 months, after being relinquished from her birthmother’s care due to unstable living conditions and abusive relationship with her biological father.
Raised by loving adoptive parents, with no information about her birth family, Cynthia grew up carving out her own unique identity and writing her own story. Always a free spirit, she loved to travel, explore, and create new identities for herself in far-away corners of the world.
With an adopted brother and sister who arrived from El Salvador when she was seven, she learned to respond with care to traumatic stress and mental illness at an early age.
With each year of her childhood, Cynthia felt less like she belonged in her body, and the world around her confirmed this story. Despite having more freckles and body fat than anyone she knew, she was determined to keep a smile on her face, and to keep singing her own song, even when it meant that she was teased, called names, or left out of playground games.
During this time, she was criticized for gaining weight. Her brother and sister continued to deal with severe emotional and mental upheaval due to their early experiences in war-torn El Salvador. The household was frequently explosive and loud, and her nervous system learned that quiet was always disrupted by fighting, and rare moments of peace quickly dissolved into threats of violence. It often felt safest for her to be alone, and her feelings seemed to take up too much space for her family.
Most of the recognition she received was for doing well in school, and for staying out of trouble. Academics, inner awareness, journaling, and singing were a refuge for her, and though she enjoyed music and theatre, she was happiest and most at peace when she was alone.
Freckles and Folds
Cynthia graduated as an anthropologist, archaeologist, and Fulbright Scholar from Franklin and Marshall College, and did field work throughout the Eastern U.S., Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica, and Guatemala. Never interested in staying in one place for long, she carried everything she needed in the trunk of her car, and spent her free time caving, kayaking, camping, and enjoying the freedom of the open road.
While she was in Guatemala, where she lived in the small Mayan village of San Pedro la Laguna for five years, she was struck by lightning while climbing an active volcano, and a tourist in her group was killed. She was the last person to talk to him alive, and was standing next to him only seconds before the lightning struck.
The lightning strike experience rattled her free of her Methodist upbringing, haunted her dreams, and sparked an existential search for meaning that led her down a lonely path of experimenting with drugs, unsafe sex, and self-discovery. She wrote about this in her self-published memoir: Out of Grace: An Extraordinary Journey through Guatemala’s Haunted Highlands, and earned an MFA in writing narrative nonfiction at Goucher College.
A Life of Adventure
Married to Depression, but a Mom at Last
Because of her low sense of self-worth, Cynthia married a man who actively rejected her many times, and who suffered from severe depression. She became absorbed in this co-dependent relationship because she was often able to use her resilience and skills to help him feel better, and this gave her the validation and belonging that she needed. However, in the year after their daughter was born, the stressors of parenting, her husband’s worsening mental health, and making ends meet without stable employment resulted in relational conflict, over-use of alcohol, excessive weight gain, and ultimately ended in divorce.
As an adoptee, Cynthia had always wanted to be the mom she didn’t get to have and stepped into single motherhood with all of her heart. Amidst the difficulties of co-parenting with an ex who continuously harassed her via text messages and email, blamed her for his suffering, and threatened to harm himself, she began having panic attacks and crippling anxiety. During this time, she worked as a middle and high school teacher, a job that she loved dearly and needed in order to pay the bills. Her final year of teaching brought her to a breaking point and she suffered from a string of debilitating illnesses, moral outrage, a back injury that put her in a wheelchair for months, and the devastation of no longer able to pick up her 2-year-old daughter.
Turning Poison Into Medicine
There were times when I believed my ex-husband to be the greatest threat to my existence and to my soul’s purpose - motherhood. I frequently told myself that he was the great villain in my life’s tragedy, just as he often blamed me for being the great villain in his. Each of us was deeply entrenched in the role of victim to the others’ rage, caught in a snarl of perceived manipulation, emotional abuse, rumination, debilitating anxiety, depression, depletion, mental illness, terror, physical pain, and immense relational suffering.
Mindfulness practice and the body-based practices of somatic psychotherapy allowed me to pull back and disentangle myself from this vicious cycle, and gave me resources to center myself. By training to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and studying counseling and somatic psychotherapy, I finally had the opportunity to support others with the very practices that helped me to resource myself in the midst of traumatic arousal. I learned to turn attention towards my inner landscape and my relationship with myself, and to allow myself to grieve, (not just my divorce but the loss of my own mother when I was one, when she put me up for adoption). With each breath, and each moment of loving awareness and caring for my own wellbeing, my family and I started to heal wounds that had been created generations before.
Reunion and Repair
In the Spring of 2022, a friend convinced me to submit my DNA to Ancestry.com. I agreed to do this because after so much meditation practice and therapy, I finally felt as if I had arrived at a place in my life where I could handle whatever I found. Within three weeks, I had found my birth family and started to build connections between my lived experience and my early attachment wounds and experiences of domestic violence. In reconnecting with my birth mother, I learned dark, painful truths about my family history, and that many of my own behaviors and fears were rooted in generations of abuse, alcoholism, and betrayal, and that historical events that I never personally witnessed but were playing out in my body, and in my adult relationships and daily life.
I approached my birth family with a spirit of curiosity, non-judgment, and compassion, knowing how powerful these attitudes has been in healing my own relationship with myself, and with a toolbox of therapeutic skills that I could offer to them. The result was a transformational healing process for all of us, that I documented in my upcoming memoir, Thrown from the Nest.
So here, I offer you this podcast, as an act of compassion and forgiveness to my wounded ancestors and to generations of traumatized fathers and mothers who struggle to find their way in a toxic world. I am here both to make peace with my own experience, and also so that others who are suffering might see a path forward that interrupts the patterns laid down by previous generations.
You are not alone, and what you are experiencing is not your fault. Perhaps some of what supported my journey will help you navigate your way home to yourself. Perhaps these episodes can be a trail guide for healing attachment trauma, and offer you practical skills you can incorporate into your day-to-day interactions and relationships, because our nervous systems are contagious. I invite you and your children, and your children’s children, to welcome yourselves into a life lived with greater awareness, compassion, effectiveness, connection, safety, wellbeing, and belonging.
Are you feeling like you’ve lost yourself?
Ask Dr. Cindy… and start your journey home.
So many of us are struggling in our inter-personal relationships. Your call helps others know they aren’t alone.
If you would like for your question or relationship challenge to be aired on a podcast episode, you can submit to Dr. Cindy by leaving a voicemail at (719) 759-9471. Your recording time will be limited to three minutes on this line, and you are welcome to use the entire time to share any relevant background or context that will help listeners connect to your story. Please remain anonymous, or use only a first name in this recording.
You are also welcome to submit questions or longer voice recordings via email to help@askdoctorcindy.com. I’ll make every effort to respond to every inquiry, either by email, in the blog, or during an episode. Please be patient, as it may take me a few weeks to get back to you.
Thank you so much for being willing to share your story and to ask for help. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be able to reach out in times of distress, and your willingness to do this helps other survivors know they are not alone.
For now, please know that you are worthy of care and attention and that you deserve kindness and compassion. If your safety is in danger, please call 911, or the domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE. For resources to regulate your nervous system and help you manage fear and grief, please visit SafeWithinWellness.com, where you can find guided mindfulness meditations, and a free guide to instantly reduce your anxiety.
Remember to breathe, and to give yourself permission to rest in the present moment, and to be here with what is arising. Whatever you are feeling, whatever your experience, your emotions are valid. It is worthy of your time and care to give yourself the gift of your attention.