On Episode 7: The Weight We Were Born With, and the Wisdom to Let It Go
Dr. Mariel Buqué was a little girl walking over a mile with her abuela to collect water in the Dominican Republic when she first felt what she would spend her career giving language to. She just knew her grandmother’s world, which carried a ton of weight, love, and a sense of scarcity woven through everything. But it wasn’t until she became a Columbia-trained psychologist sitting across from patients who carried the same unnameable heaviness that she understood: the pain she had witnessed hadn’t started with her grandmother either.
In this episode, Ana and Cristy sit down with Dra. Mariel, Afro-Dominican holistic psychologist and author of Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma, one of the most important voices reshaping how we understand mental health in communities of color. She is, by her own joyful account, 40 years old, engaged, living in a multigenerational home with her parents, her sister, co-parenting her nephew, and a garden she tends with the devotion of someone who finally understands what it means to be rooted.
What this means for those of us in midlife who are finally old enough to look back at what was handed to us is both a reckoning and a profound relief.
Dr. Mariel starts where other practitioners often don’t: the body. She offers an image that’s hard to shake once you’ve heard it: “You were once a microscopic cell inside your mother’s reproductive organs as she was a five-month embryo inside your grandmother, three generations sharing one body, absorbing the same sensations, the same stress hormones, the same fear. When the world felt unsafe for one of you, all of you learned it. The body adapted. And you were born already primed. What this means for those of us in midlife who are finally old enough to look back at what was handed to us is both a reckoning and a profound relief. Because you have to face the patterns until you feel a sense of relief, because those patterns are not your fault and they are not your destiny.
Nobody planned what happened in the middle of this conversation. Ana announced, live, for the first time, that she is moving back to El Salvador. You’ll want to hear what Dr. Mariel says is the one sign that tells you (and Ana) the healing is actually working.
She defines her own wisdom era as reinvention and returning to the simple things before the pressure to always be on took over. For her, reinventing herself meant becoming exactly who she wants to be. The guidance, she says, has always been there. Silence is just how we finally hear it.
This one is for every woman who is only now beginning to understand where her patterns came from and why they have followed her for so long, because she was born with wisdom too, right alongside everything else that was passed down. The work of this season of life is finally learning to hear it. And to heal it!
FAVORITE MOMENTS:
00:00 - 02:54 Intro: The trauma we called something else
02:54 - 08:26 Defining intergenerational trauma: biology + psychology
08:26 - 13:00 “Calladita te ves más bonita”
16:13 - 20:14 How trauma lives in biology
20:14 - 22:53 Postpartum and the nervous system
28:58 - 35:35 “40 years of survival mode”: the rocking chair reset
38:58 - 42:05 Ana’s announcement
42:05 - 47:02 The intergenerational higher self & a love rekindled
47:02 - 52:54 Breaking cycles in micro-moments
52:54 - 58:12 How do we know we broke the cycle?
58:12 - 1:01:39 The Tía stories
1:03:12 - 1:05:06 “Entre Sabias”: rapid-fire questions
1:05:06 - Rocking chairs & the ripple effect of healing
Follow Dr. Mariel Buqué
Dr. Mariel’s Book: Break the Cycle
Our podcast is bilingual, so episodes will be in English, Spanish, or Spanglish depending on our guests. You’ll find them labeled in our feed, or you can use YouTube’s dubbing feature to listen your way.
A few recommendations (no pressure!):
Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube
Hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and leave a review so more sabias can find us.
Follow us on Instagram: @her.wisdomera | @anaflores_me | @mcristymmarrero
Watch us on YouTube: @herwisdomera
Gracias por escucharnos.
Ana + Cristy
Episode Credits
Her Wisdom Era is hosted by Ana Flores and Cristy Marrero
Our producer and editorial coach is Laura Ubaté. La gran Lau.
Theme music and sound engineering by Stephen Hermann for Explosion Robinson AKA El Santo.
Social media by Team Belu, the best.
Branding by la diosa Leticia Vidaurri.
Our Executive Producers are Ana Flores and Cristy Marrero.
