Tasiyah Hodge

From Heartbreak to Healing

A conversation with Tasiyah Hodge about childhood trauma, breaking cycles, healing, forgiveness and choosing to live fully

Written & Interviewed by Indre Ratkele, Editor-in-Chief
Creative Direction by Indre Ratkele, Editor-in-Chief, I Am Ready Magazine

A Story I Feel Honoured to Tell

There are some interviews you prepare for professionally, and then there are interviews you prepare for emotionally. This was one of those interviews for me.

It is incredibly meaningful, both personally and professionally, to have the opportunity to interview Tasiyah Hodge. I first met her mother, Laziena Hodge, around six months ago, when I interviewed her for a previous edition of the magazine. What began as a professional interview quickly developed into a much deeper personal and professional connection. That relationship eventually brought me to this moment: sitting with her beautiful daughter and hearing the story of the same family from another perspective.

There is something particularly powerful about being trusted with a story that involves an entire family. Behind every difficult experience are people who have lived through it, carried it, and tried to make sense of it in their own way. When Laziena trusted me enough to speak openly about some of the most painful experiences surrounding her family, I understood that interviewing Tasiyah would carry a significant responsibility.

At the same time, I felt that this interview could become something much bigger than a conversation between two people. I believe that families can learn from one another, particularly when difficult experiences are brought into the open with honesty, compassion and care. Stories like Tasiyah’s may speak not only to adults, but also to parents, children and families at different stages of life. Sometimes hearing another family speak openly about pain can help someone else recognize that they are not alone, that their experiences matter, and that difficult chapters do not necessarily have to define the rest of their lives.

I already knew some of what had happened. I knew there had been betrayal, abuse, childhood pain and experiences that no child should ever have to endure. Because of what I had previously learned through my conversation with Laziena, I found myself asking a deeply personal question before I ever sat down with Tasiyah: How could I best honor and support the little girl within this story in the way she deserved?

I spent the week before meeting Tasiyah thinking about the interview and the responsibility that came with it. I then spent weeks writing, returning to our conversation, reflecting on what I had heard and considering every word carefully. I wanted the finished story to be truthful and respectful, while remaining as close as possible to Tasiyah’s own experience and to what I personally witnessed sitting across from her.

So, welcome to this journey.

This is not an easy interview. Some of the experiences Tasiyah shares are deeply painful, and some may be difficult to read. But this is also a story about a young woman who has spent years trying to understand what happened to her, what she carried forward from it, and what she could ultimately choose to do with her life.

As you read, I invite you to meet not only the difficult parts of Tasiyah’s story, but also the woman she has become.

Meeting Tasiyah

Tasiyah Hodge is 25 years old and a very beautiful young woman. She is a first-generation American whose family comes from Guyana in South America and has Indian-Guyanese roots. She speaks openly about her family history, even about the parts she does not know for certain.

But as I sat listening to her, what stayed with me was not where her family came from. It was how much this young woman had already carried in her life.

“I had a very rough upbringing,” Tasiyah told me.

Her mother was only 19 when she had her, and Tasiyah has spent a great deal of time trying to understand the generations before her and how pain can be carried from one generation to another. Her grandmother had experienced an abusive first marriage, and Tasiyah began to recognise how unprocessed pain can shape the people who come after us.

Her biological parents divorced when she was around four years old. She was born in Florida and later moved to Ohio with her mother and stepfather. She has no relationship with her biological father today, but some of her earliest memories of him remain incredibly vivid.

She remembers being only two or three years old, being held by him while hearing screaming and feeling her little body shake. She later understood that her father had been abusive towards her mother.

And then there were the experiences that are almost impossible to hear about as a mother and as a woman.

Tasiyah shared that she experienced sexual abuse when she was around three or four years old. She also described another deeply painful sexual experience involving a girl her own age when she was around ten, something she did not tell her mother about until she was 16.

I found this part of our conversation particularly difficult to sit with. I was not only listening as an Editor-in-Chief. I was listening as a woman and as a mother, and I could not help thinking about the little girl Tasiyah once was.

A child should be worrying about school, friends, playing, laughing and discovering who they are. They should not be trying to understand fear, abuse or the behaviour of adults around them.

As I listened to Tasiyah, I kept thinking about that little girl and wondering how different her childhood might have been if she had been given the safety, protection and understanding every child deserves.

But I was also thinking about the woman who is sitting in front of me today, and about her mother, Laziena, whom I have come to know so well. I have seen how deeply Laziena loves her children, how much she wants to protect them and how openly both mother and daughter now speak about their experiences and support other families.

There is something deeply beautiful about witnessing what they have done with the pain they have lived through. They have not allowed it to be the end of their story. In different ways, both women have turned their experiences into a purpose: to speak, to support, to create understanding and, hopefully, to help other children, mothers and families feel less alone.

I cannot know how many people their stories will reach or how many lives they may touch, but I believe that when two women are willing to speak openly about what happened to them, something changes. Perhaps somewhere, another mother will listen. Perhaps another child will find the courage to speak. Perhaps another family will realize that they do not have to suffer in silence.

That is one of the reasons this interview felt so important to me. Behind every story of childhood trauma is a child who once needed someone to notice, to listen and to say, you are safe, you are believed, and none of this is your fault.

And sitting across from Tasiyah now, I could see that little girl was still somewhere within the woman in front of me.

Becoming the Protector

And yet, when Tasiyah talked about her childhood, she was not sitting in front of me as the frightened little girl I had imagined from the story. I was sitting opposite a 25-year-old woman who, in my experience, had developed an extraordinary ability to speak about difficult experiences with calmness, honesty and reflection.

Tasiyah was academically successful and describes herself as one of the smartest students in her class. She graduated eighth in her class, which she recalls being made up of roughly 300 to 400 students.

She was also the oldest of three children. Her younger brother and sister are twins, nine years younger than she is. For the first several years of her life, she was effectively an only child, but when the twins were born, her role changed dramatically.

She became what she describes as a “second mom.”

As I listened to her, I found myself thinking about how beautiful it can be for an older sister or brother to learn to care for younger siblings. There is something very special about children learning to love, support and protect one another. In many families, being the older child naturally comes with a sense of responsibility, and I do not see that responsibility as something negative. In fact, I think it can teach children some of the most beautiful qualities we carry into adulthood.

But there is also a line.

Children can help one another, but they should never have to carry responsibilities that belong to the adults around them. Sometimes, without anyone intending for it to happen, that line can become blurred.

For Tasiyah, it was more than simply being a protective older sister. At an age when she should have been allowed to simply grow up alongside her younger siblings, she felt responsible for protecting them from some of the things she herself had experienced.

Looking back now, she can see how much responsibility she had taken on and how deeply it shaped the way she understood herself.

She became the person who comforted others. The person who listened. The person who tried to keep everyone together.

In many ways, she was learning to become the safe person she herself had needed.

When Survival Became Anger

By around 16, the emotional weight Tasiyah had been carrying began to turn into anger. She describes herself as angry, avoidant and increasingly isolated, moving in and out of online relationships and struggling to understand what to do with everything she was feeling.

Around 17, she says her stepfather pushed her into a sexual relationship that lasted approximately a year and a half. The relationship became deeply complicated. Tasiyah describes herself as effectively becoming his emotional wife, carrying his emotional needs while also being pulled into adult family problems. She was asked to read her mother’s messages and gather evidence relating to her mother’s alleged infidelity.

Once again, Tasiyah became the person carrying everyone else’s emotional world.

This part of her story was particularly difficult for me to hear because, in a different way, I recognized something in it. I grew up in a family with a stepfather and a complicated environment, and I remember what it felt like to believe that I had to fight for my place within my own family. I know that feeling of disappointment, confusion and wondering where you belong.

Of course, our experiences are not the same, and I would never want to compare them. But listening to Tasiyah touched something very personal in me. I could feel the pain of that little girl who had been asked to carry things that were never hers to carry. I found myself wanting to protect her.

And yet, sitting beside the 25-year-old woman she has become, I realized something beautiful: she has learned to protect herself.

Eventually, Tasiyah moved out just before turning 19, while still in her final year of high school. She initially moved in with a toxic boyfriend, a relationship that would last around seven years. She worked, sometimes holding as many as three jobs, and eventually had her own house, but emotionally she was still struggling. She describes her boyfriend as almost a carbon copy of her father, with the same kind of belittling behavior and patterns she had tried to escape.

People told her she was a strong woman. They told her the past was the past and that she needed to move on. But the past does not simply disappear because other people are ready for you to leave it behind.

During her senior year, her boyfriend began noticing that Tasiyah would suddenly end phone calls whenever her stepfather entered the room. He kept asking questions, and eventually she broke down during her first period at school and told him everything.

The school became involved, as did the police. That same day, her boyfriend picked her up, helped her collect some essential belongings and helped her leave home. There was also a confrontation with her stepfather in the school parking lot, where Tasiyah told him that if he did not tell her mother what had happened, she would.

According to Tasiyah, it took approximately a week before her stepfather finally told her mother.

Then her mother called her crying.

She told Tasiyah that she needed to hear the truth from her daughter because she would rather believe her than him.

That moment stayed with me. As a mother, I felt incredibly moved by Laziena’s decision to stand beside and support her daughter at such a devastating moment. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to hear something so painful about your own family, but in that moment, she chose to support her daughter.

And I think that matters enormously.

For so long, Tasiyah had been trying to protect everyone else. Now, finally, someone was protecting her.

Looking at her today, I could see how much that little girl had survived. But I could also see the woman she had become — a woman who had found her voice, who was learning to protect herself, and who was beginning to understand that her past could be part of her story without becoming the whole of it.

Finding Her Way Back

When the truth about her stepfather finally came out, Tasiyah’s mother supported her and helped the family enter therapy. For mother and daughter, it became the beginning of finding their way back to each other.

There had been another difficult moment several years earlier, when Tasiyah was 16 and told her mother about the sexual experience she had had at ten. Her mother stopped speaking to her for around a month. Later, she explained that she had been devastated and simply did not know how to support her daughter after the thing she had feared most had happened.

It did not erase the hurt, but it helped Tasiyah understand her mother differently. When her mother later stood beside her through the disclosure about her stepfather, something between them began to soften.

Therapy itself was complicated. Tasiyah had already seen around 18 therapists within a year, as her stepfather repeatedly changed them. She says he also wanted to listen to her sessions and read her journals, leaving her without the privacy and safety she needed. Therapy became associated with being watched rather than being heard.

The real turning point came around 2021, when her mother found a personal-development and experiential course and spent almost two years encouraging Tasiyah to attend. Eventually, she went with her sister.

For the first time, Tasiyah began looking not only at what had happened to her, but at the meaning she had given those experiences and the patterns she was carrying into adulthood. She realized that, in some ways, she had recreated relationships that reflected her childhood.

“Holy shit, I recreated my father’s relationship,” she remembers thinking.

It was a painful realization, but also a powerful one. She began to understand that she was not broken. She had been using the tools she had learned as a child to try to protect herself as an adult.

One sentence she shared with me stayed with me long after our conversation:

For Tasiyah, healing has meant learning to feel grief, sadness, anger and fear without allowing those emotions to control her life. She has learned to listen differently, to stay present in difficult conversations and to build relationships with her family that are different from the patterns she grew up with.

As she spoke about this, I noticed a calmness in her that was difficult to reconcile with some of the experiences she was describing.

I remember sitting across from her and thinking about the difference between the little girl contained within those stories and the young woman sitting in front of me.

She had not erased her past. She had learned to understand it — and, perhaps most importantly, to stop letting it decide who she would become.

Returning to the Places That Shaped Her

Recently, Tasiyah undertook another deeply personal exercise. She began working through what she describes as “becoming my dad” — recognizing the anger that surfaced when, as the oldest daughter, she found herself carrying responsibilities she associated with the father she did not have, even simple things like changing tyres.

There was a voice inside her saying, “If you were here, I wouldn’t have to do this. If I actually had a dad, I wouldn’t have to do this.”

Her uncle, who was only 16 when Tasiyah was born and has remained close to her throughout her life, suggested that she return to places connected to her childhood and create different memories there.

So she did.

She drove through the places where she had grown up, thinking about the different versions of herself who had lived there — the 13-year-old who was hurting, the 15-year-old who had become quiet and the 17-year-old who carried so much anger.

Eventually, she found herself sitting at a pier beside a beautiful lake near where she had grown up. It was sunset.

She began writing a letter, but after three lines, she tore it up. She realized she had done versions of this work many times before. Perhaps another letter was not what she needed.

What she needed was simply to sit with the 17-year-old version of herself and allow that girl to exist.

She did not cry. She did not become overwhelmed with anger. She did not dissociate. Instead, something quieter happened. She realized she was no longer the person she had been seven years ago, or even the person she had been yesterday.

For me, this was one of the most profound parts of our conversation. I have spoken with many people who have lived through painful experiences, and I have come to understand how easy it can be to believe that moving forward means forgetting.

Tasiyah made me think about it differently. Perhaps moving forward can also mean becoming willing to listen to the parts of ourselves that have been asking to be heard.

She speaks about her inner child and inner teenager, and about learning to give those younger versions of herself the love, compassion and understanding they needed.

She is not pretending that what happened did not happen. She is learning to acknowledge it without allowing those experiences to define who she is today.

From Who She Was to Who She Is Becoming

As I listened to Tasiyah talk about the life she is building now, I began to see another part of her story: the little girl who once needed protection has grown into a young woman whose work is increasingly centered around caring for others.

Shortly before our interview, Tasiyah completed her esthetics training and became a licensed esthetician. She is also studying massage therapy and expects to complete the program around December or January, depending on her required hours.

Her vision goes far beyond having a treatment room. She wants to bring aesthetics, massage and other forms of wellbeing together, creating spaces where people can begin to understand themselves differently.

Tasiyah believes the body can sometimes reflect what we carry emotionally. She speaks about things such as skin, scars, eating habits, exercise and even the way we move as possible expressions of what someone has experienced. Her goal is to help people explore what “survival mode” means for them personally and, ultimately, to create spaces where people can feel safe enough to begin that work.

Alongside her studies, Tasiyah has worked as a CNA since she was 19, spending weekends caring for disabled clients and someone living with dementia. She speaks about this work with genuine warmth. She told me about sitting with an elderly woman over breakfast, simply talking about life and listening to her experiences.

For Tasiyah, care giving is more than employment. It is connection.

She has learned to meet people where they are, to offer patience and presence, and to understand that sometimes care begins simply by making another person feel seen.

As she spoke, I could not help noticing the connection to the little girl we had been talking about throughout our conversation. The child who once needed someone to protect her has grown into a woman who wants to create safety and care for others.

Her long-term dream is to build her own studio after completing massage school and, eventually, a wellness retreat where people can access different forms of support and well-being in one place. She also hopes to continue her education in areas connected to dermatology and psychology.

When I asked whether she believed her childhood experiences had influenced the path she is on today, her answer was immediate.

“One hundred per cent.”

As a child, Tasiyah imagined becoming a veterinarian or pediatrician. By the time she was 18, however, university was financially difficult, and after leaving home she was responsible for supporting herself.

Her path changed, but her desire to care for people did not.

Instead of following the future she had imagined as a child, she began building something through practical work, education and experience — and, perhaps without realizing it at first, turning some of the pain she had carried into a desire to help other people feel cared for, understood and safe.

Watching her now, I found myself thinking about the distance between the little girl she once was and the woman she is becoming. Her story has not simply been about surviving what happened to her. It has also been about deciding what she wants to do with the life that came afterwards.

I listened and found myself thinking: this girl has all my heart and soul. I am so proud of the woman she has become and of the love, capacity and compassion she has for other people.

Breaking the Cycles and Finding the Courage to Be Seen

The idea of breaking cycles is also at the heart of the podcast Tasiyah created with her mother, Breaking the Cycles.

The podcast provides a space for people to talk openly about the cycles they have experienced and, in some cases, broken. The conversations touch on difficult subjects including sexual abuse, financial abuse and domestic violence.

But I also know that the podcast became something deeply meaningful for Tasiyah and Laziena themselves. It gave mother and daughter a safe space to open up, speak about their experiences and have conversations that may not always have been easy to have elsewhere. In many ways, it became another part of the journey of rebuilding their relationship.

The purpose is not to sensationalize people’s experiences, but to create a space where people can be witnessed, heard, loved and cared for.

Laziena suggested the podcast after Tasiyah turned 19 and after some of the abuse had come to light. Her message was simple: people also need to hear your story.

I spoke with Laziena about this when I interviewed her, and I already understood how important the idea of the podcast was to both of them. Sitting with Tasiyah and hearing her speak about it made me even more aware of what they had created together.

I am incredibly proud of both mother and daughter for finding the strength to turn something so painful into a space that supports not only each other, but other people too.

At first, Tasiyah was not ready. The trauma was still too fresh. But over time, she became increasingly comfortable with being vulnerable in public and sharing more of her story.

That journey became particularly significant when she decided to participate in this interview.

Tasiyah told me that being in front of a camera has not always been easy for her. She has struggled with body positivity and with being seen, particularly when the podcast moved from audio into video.

Then she read the magazine feature about her mother.

Something about seeing Laziena’s story written down made her consider whether she might be ready to step outside her own comfort zone.

So she did.

As I sat across from her, I found myself thinking that courage does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it is simply sitting in front of another person and telling the truth.

And that is what Tasiyah did.

She allowed herself to be seen — not only as the daughter whose story had been shaped by what happened to her, but as the woman she has become and the woman she is still becoming.

Forgiveness and Moving Forward

Our conversation eventually came back to forgiveness.

Tasiyah has reached a place where she can speak about forgiving the people who hurt her, not because what happened was acceptable, but because she no longer wants those experiences to control the rest of her life.

For her, forgiveness does not mean forgetting or pretending. It means choosing what she wants to do with her life now.

This stayed with me because, as I listened to her, I kept thinking about the woman sitting across from me. She was confident, beautiful, thoughtful and calm, speaking about experiences that could easily have defined her entire life, yet she was also speaking about education, work, family, business, wellness, creativity and the future.

I did not feel that I was sitting opposite someone who had simply forgotten the past. I felt I was sitting opposite someone who had worked hard to change her relationship with it.

And that distinction matters.

A Mother, a Daughter and a Family Finding Their Way

Having already interviewed Laziena, I found myself in the unusual position of hearing the story of one family from two different perspectives.

There is something incredibly powerful about that.

Families can experience the same tragedy from completely different places. Parents can carry guilt, fear and responsibility, while children carry experiences they may not have the words to explain. Sometimes everyone is hurting at the same time, yet nobody knows how to reach the other person.

What moved me most was seeing that Tasiyah and her mother had found their way back to one another.

It did not happen because everything suddenly became easy. It happened through difficult conversations, therapy, support and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to understand one another.

As a mother myself, that stayed with me.

I have thought a great deal about what it means for a parent to hear that their child has been hurt, particularly when the truth involves people and circumstances within the family. There is no simple way through something like that. But what I witnessed in Tasiyah and Laziena was a mother and daughter who, despite everything they had been through, chose not to remain separated by it.

And perhaps that is one of the most important parts of this story.

This is not a story about a perfect recovery, nor is it a story in which everything painful simply disappeared. It is a story about a young woman learning that her past does not have to dictate every part of her future.

Tasiyah is 25, and there is still so much ahead of her.

She is studying, working, creating and building a future that reflects the things she cares about. She wants to develop her own wellness space and, eventually, create a retreat where people can access different forms of care and support. She continues to learn, to work on herself and to understand the person she wants to become.

But beyond the plans and ambitions, what stayed with me was the woman sitting in front of me.

She was open. She was compassionate. She was thoughtful. She had an extraordinary capacity to speak about difficult things while still making room for love, family, hope and possibility.

I found myself thinking about the little girl we had spoken about throughout our conversation.

That little girl could not have known what her life would become. She could not have imagined the relationships she would build, the work she would do, the people she would care for, or the woman she would grow into.

And yet, sitting across from Tasiyah, I felt that little girl was still there — not as someone who needed to be defined by what happened to her, but as someone who deserved to be loved, heard and protected.

Perhaps that is what touched me most.

Tasiyah’s story is not important simply because of what happened to her. It is important because of what she has chosen to do with her life afterwards.

She is still becoming.

And I believe there is something deeply beautiful in that.

The Story Is Not the End

As I look at Tasiyah now, I see a young woman who has chosen to keep living fully.

She is still learning. She is still growing. She is still working through different layers of her story. But she has developed an understanding that the past does not have to dictate her future.

I also see the connection between mother and daughter.

Having had the privilege of hearing both women speak, I feel incredibly grateful to have witnessed their journey from both sides. Laziena trusted me with her story, and now Tasiyah has trusted me with hers.

That is a privilege I do not take lightly.

I hope readers receive this story with the same care with which it was shared. I hope anyone who has experienced abuse, trauma, family dysfunction, or deep emotional pain understands that they are not alone. I hope parents are reminded of how important it is for their children to know that they can be heard, believed and loved.

And I hope anyone living through a difficult chapter remembers that it is still only a chapter.

But most of all, I hope people remember Tasiyah herself.

Because the most powerful part of her story is not simply what happened to her. It is the person she has chosen to become.

Tasiyah shared a message that stayed with me: you are worth loving, no matter what stage of life you are in, even if you are living through what feels like the worst stage of your life.

Your past may explain parts of you, but it does not have to define you.

Your story matters. Your feelings matter. And the younger versions of you matter too.

You are allowed to become someone different from the person you had to be in order to survive.

For Tasiyah, the journey continues. She is not pretending that the past did not happen, and she is not saying that every day is easy. She is choosing to have a say in where her story goes next.

As I sat across from her, I found myself thinking about the little girl we had spoken about throughout our conversation and the woman sitting in front of me today.

I could see the strength, but I could also see the softness. I could see the compassion, the love she has for her family and the genuine desire she has to help other people.

And I found myself thinking:

This girl has all my heart and soul.

I am so proud of the woman she has become.

Not because her life has been perfect. Not because she has forgotten what happened. But because she has continued to choose love, growth, connection and life.

I hope that when you finish reading her story, you do not only remember what happened to Tasiyah.

I hope you remember who she has chosen to become.

Because the story is not the end.

It is still being written.

Connect with Tasiyah

Facebook: tasiyah.hodge

Instagram: the_entity_you_seek

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