Yoxana Serpa’s Story: How a Migrant Mother’s Mental Health Protects Her Children’s Future

Like almost three million Venezuelans, Yoxana Serpa arrived in Colombia in search of a better future. Leaving her homeland, her job and her family, drained many emotions and involved falling and getting up on her feet to keep moving forward. However, the challenges she faced do not begin with migration; they begin long before, with the relationship she had with her father and the memories of her childhood, which marked her life.

“As a child, I experienced a lack of love and attention. Throughout my life, I normalized violence. I believed that beatings were affection, and it was hard to discover that many decisions I had made in my life had a cause, and that cause was my past, my family,” says Yoxana.

A Program to Care for the Mental Health of Adults and Children

Sitting in a circle, in front of 20 other mothers, fathers and caregivers from her community in Barranquilla (Atlántico), Yoxana opened her emotional world and discovered that she carried not only the burden of migration, but also unresolved wounds and traumas from her childhood; she understood that her story was not unique and that the people around her in that space also carried with them stories marked by other adversities, such as the armed conflict that has left more than nine million victims in Colombia and more than eight million people displaced by the horrors of war.

The reflections born from this meeting with caregivers also led her to recognize something shocking: unconsciously, she was replicating patterns of violence with her children. “I was terrified, because without realizing it, I was doing the same as my father did,” Yoxana recounts. “I was yelling at my two-year-old because I was focused on the younger one. He was expressing his needs, and I didn’t see them.”

Yoxana’s journey of introspection and healing is the same experience that more than 5,000 people in Colombia have gone through as part of Semillas de Apego. This is a community-based psychosocial and group implementation program that seeks, through 15 sessions, to promote the mental health of mothers, fathers and caregivers, with the objective of protecting the development of children between the ages of 0 and 5 who are born and grow up in the midst of conflict, displacement, forced migration and other adverse environments.

Today, the experience that Yoxana lived in Semillas de Apego is replicated in seven territories in Colombia: Atlántico, Córdoba, Norte de Santander, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca, Bogotá and Nariño. In each territory, a supervisor, a professional in psychology, leads a team of facilitators who are part of the communities where the program is implemented. These women, who are also caregivers, participated in the program before assuming their current role. In this way, the Semillas de Apego teams understand and share the challenges of their environment, which creates a genuine connection between the facilitators and those who participate. This connection allows them to see their own life stories reflected, recognizing that there is a path to meaningful change.

Transforming One’s Own History to Improve Parenting

“In the group experience, we learned to set our own rules. The main one: not to judge. We listened to each other, we seemed like psychologists, but we weren’t. We didn’t give advice; we just shared our experiences. It was my place to vent, my refuge, my shoulder, my cloth for tears,” says Yoxana.

This community essence has also been crucial in impacting and scaling the program through a process that has spanned several stages over 10 years:

1. Curriculum development based on two programs developed by the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
2. Adaptation of the curriculum with the integration of displaced women’s voices.
3. A pilot with mothers in displacement conditions.
4. An implementation of the program in Tumaco (Nariño), where the impact of the program was measured, observing a reduction in the incidence of problems such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress in caregivers and children.

Through dialogue, reflection, listening, art, music, mindfulness and breathing, Semillas de Apego has led people to think about themselves. The program does not seek to teach anyone how to care, but it does seek to provide tools for those adults who carry the weight of their history and environment to recognize the importance of being well in order to care well. “I understood that sometimes small things, have a meaning and can have an impact on a child’s upbringing,” Yoxana reflects. “I learned not to give what I received. I focused on healing my wounds. If I held on to those feelings and passed them on to my children, I was going to create insecure children, as I was. I transformed that and, thanks to the program, I first learned to value my emotions in order to understand theirs. If we as caregivers don’t heal, we can’t bring wellness, security or trust to our children.

This program was supported by the Early Childhood Development Innovation Fund (DIT, an effort coordinated by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in partnership with the FEMSA Foundation, the María Cecilia Souto Vidigal Foundation, Porticus and the Bernard van Leer Foundation.