Today we’d like to introduce you to Marilyn.
Hi Marilyn, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Alchemizing pain into Power, that is my superpower! I am a licensed Clinical Social Worker and the founder of Resilience Social Work Inc. I entered the entrepreneurial world with the purpose to increase resilience at the individual, community and global level. My journey through life has been my greatest teacher in resilience building and through my career I have witnessed the journey to resilience and the amazing capacity people have to heal.
Leaving El Salvador, my country of birth, at 12 was one of my greatest teachers of grief and loss. Arriving in the Bronx in 1987, in the middle of the crack epidemic, with all the added responsibilities I didn’t ask for (like caring for my younger siblings,) and yearning for my previous life, my friends, my family, my dog, my tropical climate, and freedom, was terrifying and an emotionally painful adjustment. Now, I can look back and see it as a teaching ground for resilience, adaptation, multicultural awareness, independent living skills and sense of community. It has also helped me understand, empathize and guide clients through their grief.
Like most of us, there has been plenty of ups and downs in my life, and learning to navigate between the bitter and the sweet has been part of my resilience and where my superpowers were put to the test. This past year alone has been a great example of navigating the in-between to find balance. There is so much chaos in the world and is easy to get lost in the negative and the enraging oppressive tactics being utilized against the immigrant community, as I am an immigrant myself. Just like during covid, we have then collective experience of fear, anger, grief and loss, but also a sense of hope, community and reconnecting with the simple things in life.
In order to alchemize all the heavy emotions being provoked through the chaos around us, I decided to use my knowledge to help others navigate their emotions through social media wellness campaigns and through sharing my poems. Yes, you heard right, I am a poet, the chaos of the world and losing a friend to cancer this year has launched me into publicly sharing my writings. This is also a tool of resilience that helps me alchemize my pain into purpose, through the power of art.
The aftermath of Covid is what pushed me to begin utilizing social media as a tool for healing. Though I was terrified at first to put myself out there not because I feared what people would say, but because personally I was a private person and social media was just not my thing. However, I saw the need, the need people had for guidance in navigating emotions that were new to them or that they had not tapped into but were now fully opened because of the wounds left in the Covid aftermath, the isolation, the fear, the helplessness and hopelessness, the anger, the disconnect, lack of validation and ambivalence on how to navigate this new world.
Today, I see Covid as our resilience training ground, as we face similar emotions and ambivalence about the world we live in today. So, my heart has led me to social media again, now posting Wellness campaigns on Tik Tok, You tube, Instagram and with my own Resilience Social Work Podcast! (on spotify)
Resilience Social Work is heart-led and therefore, we go where the community needs us, and right now it’s being called to community healing practices. The podcast was developed with the intent to reach a wider audience and help others heal by sharing lessons from my own life journey, so they can pull their own lessons and turn them into purpose to help them along their journey.
Alchemizing pain into power has led me to the person I am today, the heart-led human that still has the capacity to love and share kindness with the world. It is easy to become bitter and get lost in the chaos of life’s lessons, but committing to remaining a kind person dispite the trauma and hardships life has placed in our path is the hard work and is what leads us to resilience and love. So, as a mother of 3 sons, a wife, a sibling, a daughter, entrepreneur, therapist, conservationist, activist, creator, poet, and lover of dancing, people and life, I encourage you to look at life as lessons and utilize those to guide you on how to apply the tools learned to transform your own pain into power.
There is beauty, love and kindness in this world, it is up to us to see it and nourish it. Keep on dancing through life!
About resilience social work:
I am the founder of Resilience Social Work Inc. which is the embodiment of my personal and career resilience. I am a licensed clinical social worker and around 2019 as I was waiting at my son’s basketball practice the name, the purpose and even the way I wanted the website to look or Resilience Social Work came flooding into my brain and the seed was planted. I nurtured that seed for about a year and the desire to start my own practice grew stronger every minute.
I wanted everyone to be trauma informed and prove that a business that works in servicing people could be more responsive not just to their client’s needs but also their staff. At that time I had been a social worker for 21 years and had extensive experience in working with families impacted by trauma, including in the role of foster care social worker, positive parenting training facilitator, therapist with victims of crime and survivors of domestic violence and clinical supervisor. Therefore, had witnessed the injustice faced by them due to the way the system was set up and to the lack of cultural and trauma informed service practices. I saw how social workers and therapists were also experiencing burnout and falling victim to the unforgiving nature of non-profit and for-profit businesses.
I saw the need for businesses and individuals to understand trauma in order to provide better services and for employers to take better care of their staff’s needs as well. So I began offering trainings at the Domestic Violence Shelter I was working at that time and saw that as something I could offer to others. 2020 hit and the isolation gave me the time and stillness needed to work and keep nurturing my seedling fully. I took trainings and connected with the SBDC and was assigned a mentor who guided me on starting my business. I felt out of my depth as social worker school does not prepare you for entrepreneurship. I took trainings on anything and everything during covid, from how to build a website, menopause, collective healing, to integrative mental health.
In 2021 I filed to begin doing business as Resilience Social Work and in 2022 I filed to become a corporation and became Social Work Inc. Being a for-profit business was intentional, I wanted to represent as a Latina Woman, and I wanted the freedom to create and operate the business without being tied to funders’ restrictions as non-profits usually are. I was so excited and scared. I applied and was awarded a small grant through the SBDC that allowed me to rent my first space. It was a shared office, where I had an assigned desk and shared with 2 other people and though small, I made it work. I have my own office space in Cypress!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My journey in becoming an entrepreneur has not been easy. As a solopreneur I learned many lessons including having to push through barriers, locating resources and recognizing that my personal goal was just that, personal and if Iwanted it to be successful I had to be the one to make it happen. The journey was extremely lonely and discouraging at times, because others did not see my vision of developing and managing a heart-lead business in which money and profits was not the only goal. Don’t get me wrong, I still want my business to be profitable but I want it to be done in an ethical and heart-lead way and definitely welcome profits which I know will come. Others, including my friends and family questioned why I navegated at such a slow paced and could not understand why with my experience I was not making the expected profits. But no one sees the behind the scenes work that it requires to manage a solo business. Aside from the emotional punch to my pride which humbled me to look at setbacks as learning opportunities and not failures there’s all the work that it requires to run it.
The reality is that I had to learn and create everything I have now, the program, the conracts, the mental health campaigns, the content, the money managment, the website the podcast. Each new endeavor was a new lesson and a skill I had to develop, being broke I had no other choice to do things myself, cause I couldn’t afford to pay anyone else to do it for me. Social work school did not prepare me to be an entrepreneur so I had to learn as I went.
Personal life still goes on as we pursue our goals, and I was not any different. My excitement of getting office space and becoming incorporated came tumbling down a few days after signing the contract for the office space, as my mother fell ill and required 24 hr care. It was a hard lesson on navigating the bitter and the sweet. Being the Latina 1st daughter that I am the sense of responsibility and Marianismo embedded in my veins, took over my decision making. I love my mother and therefore threw myself in caregiving and placed the business on hold for almost a year as my sister and I took 3-day, 24 hr shifts caring for her at home. It was an extremely challenging time in my life as I navigated my roles of daughter, sibling, wife, mother and entrepreneur. However, it added to my resilience and skills as I was offered a couple of years later to do a series of workshops on caregiving. I realized with that lesson that everything in our lives is a lesson and that we gather tools along the way to assist us and even reward us in the future. I developed the podcast and social media campaigns and truly all of my work to support others in their life journey by sharing lessons I learned on transmuting pain into power.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Resilience Social Work Inc.?
Resilience Social Work Inc. (RSW) is a heart lead business and it’s mission is to increase resilience and make wellness accessible to everyone.
We offer:
• mental health therapy services
• professional Consulting
• Capacity building and wellness trainings
• Speaker services
• Collective healing offerings :
o Social media wellness campaigns on Instagram, tiktok, youtube
o Resilience Social Work Podcast on Spotify
o Downloadable wellness tools accessible at https://resiliencesocialwork.com
Shop among them:
30 day self care guide
Guided meditations
Podcast Worksheets to support our listeners’ wellness journey
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I am Resilient, kind, positive, friendly, determined, intelligent and intuitive, empathic, curious, fun, silly and an alchemist.
To make it to where I am today, and bring Resilience Social Work Inc. to life, I had to be determined and trust my instincts and be driven as well as open to learning new skills. Also to be humble and curious to learn from setbacks and go back to the drawing board to see what I could learn or do to improve. I had to stay in a positive mindset and trust that when the obstacles were thrown my way, they were just a pause on the journey, and that I would figure out a way to overcome them, as long as I continued to stay on course and let my heart lead the way. I also needed to accept help, and hired staff to support me and allow the support of my husband not only financially while I pursue my goals but also in sharing the parenting load. Empathy is key in my work and in my mission as I have to be able to empathize with the community needs to offer services that are appropriate and relevant. the alchemist in me turns obstacles and hardship into purpose and opportunity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Resiliencesocialwork.com
- Instagram: @resiliencesocialwork
- Youtube: @resiliencesocialworkinc.1258
- Other: Tiktok @resilience.socialwork
