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Berenice is a mother, advocate, educator + poet who has built a career working with leading companies while navigating motherhood, generational trauma + her own health challenges. After becoming a mother at fifteen, facing judgment + experiencing years of medical dismissal, she began confronting the patterns she wanted to break + the systems that failed her. Read on to learn how Berenice is breaking generational cycles through motherhood, accountability + advocacy while creating a different legacy for her daughter + the generations to come.
How do you define a "Cycle Breaker?"
Someone who is courageous enough to take the first step to not only become an observer, but to also identify systems, behaviors, or patterns that are harmful not only for themselves but for their community and future generations.
They are the ones who decided to take the most difficult journey which is changing, regulating, and loving themselves in-order to teach others to do so. That is often not viewed as a courageous endeavor but a disruptive one given the oppressive systems we are living under.
What adversities or experiences have you lived through?
I wouldn't even know where to begin, so I'll begin at the beginning.
My father was a loving man and an explosive one, and one that confused me. He lived with infidelity, lies, and alcohol, and the message I absorbed as a child was simple: I couldn't have love without fear. That's how my disorganized attachment style was born. My mother was the first person in our family to leave her abuser, and I'm proud of her for that. But the scars of watching what he did to her and to our family still surface when someone's tone shifts, or when I see people confuse love with domination, coercion, and humiliation.
I also grew up not belonging anywhere. I'm a first-gen, with a Guatemalan father and a Salvadoran mother, raised in a predominantly Mexican American community. People talk about being "ni de aquí, ni de allá," but my experience was even more specific. I wasn't Salvadoran enough for the Salvadorans, not Guatemalan enough for the Guatemalans, and not American enough for the gringos. My Spanish was different, and Mexican kids bullied me for it. Later I worked in West Hollywood, in a predominantly white and Jewish community, and I felt like a visitor there, too. Everywhere I went, I was the outsider.
Then, at fifteen, I became pregnant, and the shame landed hard. The deepest wound was abandonment. I was raised in a multigenerational home, and my grandmother, who was my mother in every way that counts, stopped speaking to me for over a year and moved out of our home. My favorite cousin's family no longer allowed her to see me. I didn't have the words for what was happening. It just felt like heartbreak after heartbreak.
At the hospital, a white nurse (who still works there) told me my life would be "ruined" if I kept my child. I didn't know how to respond, but I knew it was wrong. That moment planted a seed for the advocacy work I would later do in the medical field. At school, two of my best friends started a rumor that my daughter's father wasn't her father. The bullying escalated until someone tried to push me down the stairs while I was pregnant. My father pulled me out, and I was sent to McAlister High School, an all-girls pregnancy school that my own mother had attended sixteen years earlier, when she was pregnant with me. I remember thinking, Is this really it? Am I going to continue this cycle, or am I going to give my daughter a different life?
Everything happens for a reason, because that's where I discovered how smart I was. The school was independent study, and I could finish at my own pace. I had always been the kid asking questions teachers couldn't answer, and I was bored. In one year I completed two years of coursework, had my daughter, and returned to LA High as a junior taking senior classes. I was working, breastfeeding, navigating a turbulent teen relationship, and afraid of being physically hurt at school every day. I still graduated with a 3.8 UC GPA. I wish I had known then how remarkable that was. I went on to navigate the academic world with no real guidance.
During all of this, my body was fighting me. Starting at thirteen, I had severe abdominal pain that put me in the hospital almost every month. It wasn't until I was twenty-four that I was diagnosed with endometriosis. These weren't cramps. They were pains worse than labor: cold sweats, fainting, hot, stabbing pain in my uterus and ovaries, and bleeding that sometimes lasted weeks. Many nights I cried myself to sleep, using a towel to muffle my screams, because at one point even my mother believed the doctors who said I was lying. I was living with an incurable disease that behaves like cancer, causing internal bleeding every month and a leading cause of infertility, and I had already been blessed with a beautiful daughter.
I was dismissed over and over, including by women doctors who told me I "needed attention" or that I should have my ovaries removed to end the pain. I watched how little humanity there was in the system. I didn't choose advocacy. I was forced to learn it, because I refused to be called a liar and I refused to keep watching unfair systems crush people. Advocacy found me.
And there's more than I could fit into one interview. I've struggled with self-harm, internalized shame, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, high-functioning depression, and situational amnesia. Given what I've lived through and how close I've come to death, I shouldn't be here. But I am, and I'm grateful. There is purpose in pain. I see myself as a vessel to liberate others, and I take that responsibility seriously.
What is a cycle, belief or pattern you’ve worked to break or challenge in your life?
I've learn to break seeing other people as competition or with distrust. My mothers are from El Salvador and one thing we don't discuss enough from countries with recent wars is the hyper-individualism and inability to learn conflict resolution. They often mocked me for always wanting to make friends or considering everyone family, but when I began working on my family tree to find my roots everything change.
What helped you begin healing, growing, or changing that cycle?
Oh that's easy, I have to thank my daughter.
When she was nine, I was looking for a therapist because of my depression and inability to be alone, and she told me she wanted one too, so she wouldn't be intimidated by me anymore. What she said, sent chills up my spine and time stopped. In that moment, I knew I had to change. If it weren't for my daughter, I wouldn't be alive today. She has taught me lessons no one else could. She taught me what true love means. Questioning, unlearning, relearning, adapting, understanding that most of the time I was actually wrong and not her. She taught me advocacy at a whole new level: when I had to fight the doctors during her mental health crisis, her school for an IEP, my mothers when they wanted to instill their marianismo of her dads side of the family for their machismo. My entire life prepared me to be her mom.
So technically, she's the cycle breaker. I just followed her lead.
I love you, Heidy.
What are your proudest accomplishments?
Not just surviving these systems which killed or consumed many people that I grew up with but the fact that I thrive despite them! That young girl who was abused and became pregnant at fifteen ended up working for Youtube Space in LA, Netflix, learning skills there to now serving her community. My proudest accomplishment is breaking free from climbing the "corporate ladder" and dedicated now to climbing the ladder of love and morality for her people.
Is there a message, quote, lesson, or reminder you’d like to share with others who may be struggling along their healing journey?
I'd like to share three things that have shaped me.
First, you need to learn how to take accountability for the role you play in your own suffering.
Secondly, learn to have a good relationship with making mistakes because if you are not making mistakes it means you are not trying. In order to become successful, make mistakes faster and learn from them.
Lastly, is a quote from Marianne Williamson that I have tattooed on my ribs to explain why sharing your story is vital to our resistance and evolution.
"As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others."
So know, when you choose to heal and liberate yourself you will automatically liberate those who get to witness and be part of your breakthrough. Stop holding yourself back, you've arrived. You are the adult you always wanted around you as a child, so act like it.
Do you have any projects you're working on that you'd like to highlight?
Currently working on publishing my first poetry collection and working on a social media/editing class. Both will be available by the end of this year.
Connect with Berenice:
- Instagram: @berenice_dolls