 I know a lot of you out there struggle with having a broken relationship with one or both of your parents. And that's why today I brought over a very special guest to discuss how she deals with that healing process. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. If you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and typically what I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being. But this week, while I'm out of town, I've brought over a bunch of guests to do guest videos and share their experience. So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. So today I have the wonderful Jazz Brown here to share her story and it really connects with me. So she's going to talk to you a little bit about her experience and the relationship with her mother which led to a lot of issues with self-love, depression, weight gain and all sorts of things and I can definitely relate to this as the son of an alcoholic mom. So when I listened to Jazz share her story, it really resonated with me. So I was like, you need to come share this video over on my channel with my audience because I know a lot of you can relate as well. So without further ado, here is the wonderful Jazz Brown. Greetings and salutations Rewired Soldiers. My name is Jazz and I want to thank Chris so much for this collab. I think what he's doing is extremely important. I think that he is helping breaking down the stigma and mental illness and getting help and today I want to share kind of my life story with you guys and share how I got to where I am and how I'm happier and yeah, let's just get into it. So again, my name is Jazz, Jasmine Brown. I was born on November 13th, 1991. I was born to a 16-year-old mother who had another child before me. So just that in itself you can imagine could be difficult. Anyway, when I was a baby, now this part of the story is a little confusing because I don't know all the details sometimes people tell me this, sometimes people tell me that. So I'm just going to tell you kind of best what happened. According to my family, I was born to my mother and three days later I became sick and I wasn't drinking my milk. I was having a hard time breathing and my grandmother took me to the hospital. The hospital found out I had all these medical issues. First they found out I needed a breathing tube which is this, which is a trach which is basically a third airway. They also found out that I had dwarfism and a few other orthopedic problems and that I could not go back home thinking to get me well. Once they got me well and stabilized, my biological mother was nowhere to be found. My grandma kept coming to the hospital but because of her own sickness and health issues, she couldn't take care of me and every time they would reach out to my mom she wasn't anywhere to be found. Anyway, if you can believe it, the first two years of my life were spent in a hospital because they did not have a group home for children with medical issues. So in 93, the first medical group home for children was to be opened and I was going to be the first resident because by this point the hospital had no choice but to put me in foster care because of my mom not being anywhere around. When as I was about to be the first resident at this group home, one of the respiratory therapists who had been taking care of me in the hospital decided that she would become a foster parent so that I wouldn't have to be in a group home. In her words, I had too much potential and being in a group home was not the answer. So she and her husband and their kids, because by this point they had three grown kids that were in their late teens and early 20s. Everybody got trained with my disability, had a handle on my breathing tube and like all of that and they brought me into their home and the cool thing is they never treated me like I was any different. Even though I was still a foster child, they loved me, they cared for me like I was their kid. But then around age five my biological mom came back into the picture. She said she wanted me. She said she wanted to start fighting for me and the courts had no option but to listen to her so the court ordered visitation rights. I never lived with her but she would come to my foster parent's house and she would learn how to care for me and things like that. So when the time came for me to live with her she would know how to do everything. But here's the problem. Here's where things started going kind of crazy. She never showed up. She would call, she would get my hoax up, she told me she'd come, she said she would love me and she never came. Week after week she would never come. She was supposed to come I think two or three times out of the month every weekend on a Saturday to learn how to take care of me and maybe once a month she would actually show up. And that is when, even though I didn't know it at the time, that is when the depression and self-loathing started because I remember thinking well damn if my own lover doesn't want me why would anyone else want me? But again I was only five and I didn't know what these emotions were but I knew that I would get really sad and I was just heartbroken and I just didn't understand even though I had a loving foster family I still wanted her to love me and I couldn't understand why she didn't. I couldn't understand why she would tell me she was going to come knowing full well that she had no intentions of coming. So I guess let's say about five or six she had met her requirements. I don't know how and I was able to start going to her house twice a month for a few hours so she could take care of me and do all the necessary things for my health and I would go with someone so they could observe how she was caring for me and here's where the next problem came in. When I would go to her house she wasn't there either, either she would come maybe a half an hour before it was time for me to leave or she would be there and then leave maybe a half an hour into it. Now line Jew, I went to her house twice a month on a Saturday for four hours, eight hours a month was a struggle for her to want to spend time with me and learn how to take care of me with my disabilities and everything. The self-loathing and depression became deeper and deeper and because I still wanted to live with my mom because I still didn't understand this rejection from the time I was five years old until age 11 I would go to these visits twice a month and maybe out of that five years span maybe she showed up maybe ten times and every time I would come home from a visit my mom said I would act out I would get angry and it was just because I was depressed I felt rejected I had no other way to express how I was feeling now during this time my first foster family was going to move away they were going to move to Ohio and they were going to adopt me and take me with them but what wound up happening is my biological mother blocked it so that I would stay in Philadelphia she told the courts that she still wanted me and they had no choice but to place me in another foster home which was extremely devastating to me because these people were all I knew and now you're telling me at age seven I had to go someplace else. Now the good news is when I was in my first foster home there was a nurse who would take care of me and she decided to take me in so it's not like it was so bad that I didn't know anybody but still the heartbreak and the separation was really tough on me and again I started acting out I couldn't express myself I didn't know what was going on there that was just a lot of pain and rejection and I did not handle it well once I went to my new foster home luckily she did adopt me it took some time because there was some issues but she was able to adopt me she fought for me she had to tell my mother off my biological mother off a few times because she found out how much she wasn't doing for me and that wasn't going to fly with her but the point is there was a lot of pain and rejection and separation and I did not know how to handle it my adopted mom put me in therapy because she felt as though if you're a foster child you need to be in therapy just to talk to someone to someone but I never talked to anybody I had so much pain and anger inside I didn't want to deal with it and on top of just not liking myself I didn't like that I was disabled because I felt as though being disabled is why my mom didn't want me she even told me one day that she might have wanted me more if I wasn't disabled so for many years I buried those emotions way down deep and I just didn't think about it didn't talk about it stop calling the therapy the whole shebang anyway when I entered college and I had to start fending for myself it's almost like all those emotions and everything all those things that I suppressed for all those years just started coming out and when they came out it started a five year span of self-destruction depression and just I ruined my life for five years it started with just crying then I didn't want to go anywhere and then within a year or two it evolved into me gaining a whole lot of weight uh I wouldn't shower for months and it was just I was at the lowest point that I could be um I wasn't paying rent I almost got evicted from my apartment there were just all of these issues and which stemmed from me not dealing with all the issues at hand even though I didn't know it I hated myself I didn't want anything good for myself all I wanted to do was just be sad and be depressed and I felt like no one loved me who cared about me which wasn't true but I always had that voice in the back of my mind saying if your own lover didn't want you why should anybody else five years into my depression that my adopted mom basically told me I was coming home because once I moved down went to college I kind of stopped talking to her I stopped talking to all my friends I isolated myself from other people I just stayed inside I wasn't going to class it got so bad that my roommate had to call the landlord because everyone could smell me and my room from upstairs because of how deep in this depression I was anyway my mom found out she was pissed she picked me up she scooped me up got my clothes and we went back home and that is when she started working with me started working on me and she basically said I don't know what happened but this shit cannot happen anymore you can't you have so much going for you you have so much potential you're just screwing your life up so with the help of my mom I was able to drop the weight I still have 50 pounds to go but I've lost uh 50 in the past year uh my hygiene is better I'm a lot happier and I'm a lot brighter and most important I go to therapy now and I do not try to skirt over the issues I want to deal with them have on I want to deal with the pain and that is mainly what I want to say to you guys if you do not acknowledge the pain or you do not address the trauma that you've been through it will come out you may not know when it's going to come out but it will and it will destroy you because you have not dealt with these issues if it worked for my mom and my faith and God I'd still be in that same depressed state so anybody out there if you are going through something please talk to somebody work through it no matter how painful it may be because it is painful there's still days now where I cry about things that I thought I got over years ago but it's there and you have to deal with it one of the things I'm loading now is that I am beautiful I am loved people do like me no one really looks at my disability no one really looks at the fact that I'm in a chair it's about what comes out of my heart and soul that's what people are looking for and that's what people are looking at and forgive most importantly forgive the people that hurt you because it's not for them it's for you that's the only way you're going to get through it forgiveness is key I forgave my mother for what she's done I've actually reached out to her and asked if we could discuss things she said she doesn't want to do it because it's too painful for her now everyone in my life knows that's a bunch of bbs but it is where it is I am forgiving her and I pray that she can forgive herself and with that being said I'm gonna end my portion of the video here thank you guys so much for watching please continue to watch the rewired soul please continue to want to to get help and be on the road to recovery um yes just be your best selves and get the help that you need if it's presented to you thank you guys for listening and again thank you chris for having me bye dang that was some inspirational stuff right there like I I love that I love that like jazz's mom coming up in there rolling up in there and saying yo yo I land down the tough love and says we're gonna do something about this and now jazz is killing it she's back in therapy taking care of her way like this is why I love listening to other people's stories they give me so much hope and inspiration you know what I mean like we don't have to let our past bring us down and what I absolutely loved that jazz said is like we have to forgive people we have to forgive people like I talk about this all the time it's like we get this in our head like in this part of our pride and ego that forgiveness is letting the other person off the hook I don't look at it that way anymore like forgiveness is letting myself off the hook I have to forgive people who hurt me because if not I will sit I will stew on it and it will destroy me so like it doesn't affect the other person but it affects me that's why I have to let go and the thing is too like I often compare my experience to others and as part of human nature but I'm very mindful of it like was my experience better or worse than this person better or worse better than worse right and like jazz's relationship with her mother and growing up in the foster system like that's something I never dealt with and it always makes me remember of one speaker I heard years ago right and this this guy went through so many things that I had never gone through like we're talking about multiple situations with abuse uh he was kidnapped we're talking physical as well as sexual abuse all these other things and it led him to an addiction to meth and alcohol and then one day his his sponsor which is like a mentor said straight up to him like you guys want to know where my tough love comes from like listen to this his sponsor says to him he says hey I'm sorry for everything that's happened to you in your life but it's no longer an excuse to live the way that you're living and I was like damn right because how many of us use our past as an excuse to not live the best life that we can live right and in turn it affects the relationships around us like for me I was using my past and my relationship with my mom for me to be a bad father for me to be a bad friend for me to be a bad son you know all sorts of different things to be a bad employee but when I heard that and realizing that you know it sucks that I had my past but it's not an excuse to destroy myself or the lives of others it helped me get my budding gear and start working on myself so like when I hear somebody like jazz who's been through like you know this rough relationship with her mom and you know dealing with what she went through like it inspires me on a regular basis when I hear stories like this so I really appreciate jazz coming over to share her story her the link to her channel like please go check it out and subscribe it is going to be linked up in the info card down in the description as well as in the pin comment all over the place all right but let me know down in the comments below share your experience share your experience whether you struggle with like forgiveness or how you forgave somebody and it helps you move forward or how you needed some tough love like jazz got from her mom to kick your butt into gear and go out there and get into the solution all right but anyways that's all I got for this video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on patreon you are amazing and if you would like to go check out jazz's channel what you need to and go subscribe you can click the top right there all right thanks again jazz for doing this guest video and I'll see y'all next time