How My Healing Became My Calling
The BrightSky Community invited Happy Marlo founder, Rebekah Clark, to discuss her early childhood experiences, and the healing journey she embarked upon as a young adult in order to overcome the trauma she lived with. In conversation with Thea May, this interview explores themes of race, identity, emotional wellbeing, isolation, and finding purpose through pain.
Image: Rebekah Clark and her Whippet, Marlo
[Abridged and edited transcript taken from live recording in the UK on Monday 15th March 2021]
Rebekah Clark intimately understands what it is to overcome childhood trauma. She came up through the British foster care system, and was adopted by a white family as a mixed-race child, which came with layers of complexities.
In 2019, Rebekah founded Happy Marlo, based on the idea that we need better tools for young people to use to support their emotional wellbeing. Since the pandemic, children’s wellbeing issues have only become more important, so it couldn’t be a better time for tools like Happy Marlo to come into the world. Made for and with children, Happy Marlo empowers them to look after their own mental health.
Thea May: Rebekah, tell us a little about your relationship to your healing journey. Where did it start for you?
Rebekah Clark: I was born in 1978 in North London, to a single young white mother, and an unknown father. She wasn’t really able to look after me, and at ten-months old, I was taken into emergency foster care. I stayed with that same foster family, who went on to adopt me when I was three years old.
My family are a loving, kind, white working-class family. My parents were always very open about my adoption, and very proud. There was no secret around my adoption, but I became aware very early about layers upon layers of my being ‘different’ and ‘other’: being adopted, being a mixed-race child in a white family, and having much older parents than my peers. I grew up happy enough, but not happy because I had so many unanswered questions. My parents’ approach was to be ‘colour blind’ about it, which wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, but back then, they weren’t provided with the support or resources that they needed.
There was a sense of “here’s this child, she needs a family that loves her, we won’t really worry about the fact that she’s brown and everyone around her is white. Goodbye and good luck!”
This feeling of being other and different was very challenging growing up, and unfortunately there was a lot of shame around my ethnicity, and I believe some of that was tied to the fact that we didn’t know who my birth father was. I grew up with many people asking “Where do you come from?” when in fact they meant was “Where is your father from?”.
To grow up not being able to answer that question directly was very painful. As I grew up, and eventually went to university, there was this feeling of a void, an emptiness, a sense of not being good enough, and feeling ashamed of myself.
I have always been interested in alternative thinking, approaches, and holistic therapies. During my 20s and 30s I was proactively on a healing journey and tried all kinds of modalities. I was almost trying to ‘fix’ myself, and one of the things that I’ve acknowledged and have come to embrace, is that it’s not about ‘fixing’, and indeed healing is a lifelong journey. There are things that have happened which you are able to reconcile with more, or come to deal with, with more of a positive frame.
One of the most powerful things that I have experienced is a sense of ownership of my story, and what happened. A sense of agency, and tying that to Happy Marlo, that is one of the things I am most passionate about. As children, so much is outside of your control. Children don’t have a lot of agency within their lives, and at Happy Marlo we are really excited about providing tools and resources which give some agency back to young people.
TM: Can we lean into the shame piece you touched upon? Where and how did you notice the shame, and when did you start to unpack that?
RC: I noticed the shame really early, and I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it as a child, but it’s that feeling in the pit of your stomach. As early as infant school I would get questioned by other children as to why I was brown and my mummy was white, and the hush hush, quieting by their parents. I also remember being aged 11 at a dental appointment with my father, and once he left me to go to the shops, the receptionist asking “What’s your relationship to that man?” and when I responded he was my dad, she asked aghast “Is your mum Black??”.
As time passes you clock these frequent interactions, storing them away, and they start to build up towards this belief that the brown part of my identity isn’t acceptable, or good enough, and certainly not something to be proud of. It was the racial elements of my trauma which took the longest to come to terms with.
When I became pregnant with my daughter, I decided it was time to make some decisions around my ethnicity story. I had been told in my early 20s that my birth father was from Jamaica, and that was news, but for some reason at that time I didn’t quite believe it, and didn’t engage with Jamaica as part of my cultural heritage, or identify with it. But whilst pregnant I revisited this information, and decided that I was going to own it, to leave no doubt for myself and my yet-to-be-born child, about where we came from.
The other incredibly significant event that affected me was the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matters movement last year. I had been quietly getting on with lockdown at home, and generally keeping my head down. After George Floyd was murdered, and everything that happened after that, that was the reckoning and I didn’t see it coming. I really felt like the rug had been pulled from beneath me, and with all the dialogue that was rightly being had in the UK at that time, I understood that this was mine to deal with.
I could no longer pretend that I was a white person, because I kind of had been, and that’s what my family had encouraged me to do.
At the ripe old age of 42, that really felt like the last big piece of the puzzle. I now feel this great sense of pride, which had been lacking for so long. When I think of my ancestors, and what went before, that has been very painful, but in the end, really healing too.
TM: I can really hear the integration of your black history, into your sense of self, and how empowering and fulfilling that has been.
The owning of your full identity, and your full history, all the complexities, is a huge part of how you got to this point where you can sit in yourself with all of that and feel like you are enough.
There is so much congruence between the [lack of] agency that people of colour have, and the [lack of] agency which children have. Your story having both of those is something you have really explored. How did that play out in the creation of Happy Marlo?
RC: The idea for Happy Marlo came about when I was in a coaching cohort run by Peter Opperman, based on his Future Self Methodology. Having experienced various therapies and holistic treatments in my past, I realised that this work with Peter was the first time I had explored shadow and inner child work, on a deep level. That was really powerful, and was one of the first times I realised that the shame I felt wasn’t mine, and it never was. But I hadn’t known that before, or understood that it had been passed on to me and I had taken it in, because children do.
TM: It’s quite a radical idea to imagine that you have someone else’s shame in your being. It’s quite a mindset and perception shift for the rational mind.
RC: You live with beliefs for so long, and they become part of your foundation in terms of how understand yourself. To be able to create that distance and recognise that you know exactly who the shame belongs to was such a relief and an opportunity to reframe things. Going through that inner child process with Peter, I had this insight, which isn’t news, but I recognised that all of the other adults in the cohort were going through the same thing.
Everybody is trying to proactively heal, or numb, or suppress the feelings and consequences of early childhood trauma.
The word ‘trauma’ can feel quite charged, and some might think unless something significantly bad has happened to them, then they haven’t experienced trauma, but I believe the opposite to be true. While exploring this idea of universal trauma, I began to wonder ‘What might happen, if we were able to interrupt childhood, if we acknowledge and accept that growing up is difficult?’. The stories are different, as are the characters, but if we don’t come out of childhood unscathed, how can we put the tools and support directly in the hands of children, so they are better equipped to cope with these things when they inevitably come up? And that marked the germ of an idea for Happy Marlo.
How could we take some of these gorgeous healing modalities, that I had found such benefit from, and continue to do so, and tailor them in a way that children can use them, and we can start changing some stories.
The big idea I am really excited about is: What type of adults might those children become, and in turn, what type of parents might they become? To me, that is a gamechanger. What might that world look like?
TM: There is a minimisation of trauma that we experience as children, and a lack of recognition. Perhaps your parents got divorced, and whilst it wasn’t a really bad divorce, it changed your life significantly. That experience remains in your system and there are many ways it shows up. You’re lucky if you get any tools along the way. It is better than when we were growing up, there is change, and support like meditating in schools.
There is now a context in which Happy Marlo can sit as a culture of healing modalities for children, when they are children. There is also a strong digital element to Happy Marlo, and the beauty of the way that technology allows this to scale very easily, and can sit in every parent’s pocket.
What I love about what I’ve seen of Happy Marlo is that you’ve made it child friendly but not childish, which is a really powerful choice, and a subtle difference. There’s something empowering about that as it doesn’t patronise children. Was that a conscious decision?
RC: Yes! I’m really pleased you mentioned that. When speaking to my designers I always had a very clear vision (my background is in marketing and communications) about the design of Happy Marlo in terms of the visual language, and the colour palette. I wanted it to be sophisticated, because kids are sophisticated, and I didn’t want to use primary colours, or bring a goofiness to it, because it didn’t feel right to me.
Children are front and centre for Happy Marlo. This isn’t meant to be top-down. This is all about the children, and they get it. We saw this very clearly in our pilot. They told us “I tried it, I slept well” or “I tried it, I felt better”.
TM: It’s not a complicated thing. “I tried it, I felt better, it was good, I’d do it again”. It was so tangible when I saw the video of some of the children from your pilot. There was a wonderful cause and effect relationship. It’s empowering for them.
RC: It’s really empowering and really exciting. We’re initially targeting children aged 6 to 11, but we have a few younger siblings too. They have expressed a real sense of ownership in what we’re doing with them.
TM: Coming back to the title of this conversation, how healing is a route to your own calling, I wonder how you made that connection?
RC: When I hit 40, it was a real turning point. I was very excited but I felt incredibly unfilled with my work. I felt that something was missing, and really importantly what hurt was this sense that I wasn’t fulfilling my potential. I then got pregnant, and had my baby, and at the same time my work disappeared, and that wasn’t a choice. It was almost as though the universe was forcing me to see, that now was the time to be with my new baby, and that was healing in its own way. For the first time in my life I had a blood relation. For the first time in my life I had someone who looks like me, and people commented “she’s your mini me!” which was incredible. But I was also examining what my contribution to the world was going to be moving forward.
Working with Peter Opperman, as I mentioned before, he told me very early on, “I just want you to follow the breadcrumbs”. He encouraged me to take the pressure off, to relax, to develop my personal meditation practice, and to keep following the breadcrumbs. And that’s how it happened. I started to have these insights, and ask questions — What if? What if?
As I was exploring that, it dawned on me that the idea of Happy Marlo is speaking to me, because I wish I had had this as a child. That’s why it felt important, and why it was resonating so strongly with me. Many people have asked me when I talk about Happy Marlo whether it is my gift to my daughter, and the answer is yes, sort of, but if I am completely honest it is a gift to my inner child. That young girl who wasn’t very happy, and was struggling, and I wish she could have used these tools then.
That’s when I realised, it is that thing of ‘your mess is your message’ and ‘your healing is your calling’ and I felt like I had come full circle to this place of being grown up, content, and confident in who I am, as woman, as a mixed-race woman, as a mother and healing the mother wound, to finding ‘ah, this is the work I’m meant to be doing’ and that’s been a really powerful realisation.
Happy Marlo is all about ‘children first’, when they are never first. Their voices are not heard, they are overlooked, they are not thought about, and that has to change.
Happy Marlo is supporting a new generation of resilient and mindful children by providing them with tools to understand their emotions and feel prepared for whatever lies ahead. A digital platform and a community for 6–11 year olds and their families.
Instagram & Facebook: @happymarlolife