When Your Greatest Wounds Become Your Greatest Strength | Eliza Young

What happens when your life begins with overwhelming adversity?

Imagine enduring more than 20 surgeries before adulthood, surviving childhood trauma, navigating a bitter custody battle, living through emotional abuse, witnessing the events of 9/11 from just blocks away, and later facing breast cancer.

Many people would allow those experiences to define them.

Eliza Young chose a different path.

In this powerful and deeply personal conversation, Eliza shares how she transformed pain into purpose, creativity into healing, and adversity into a life built on hope, resilience, and possibility.

Together, Frank and Eliza explore:

• Why positivity is not wishful thinking, it's a skill that can be developed.
• The hidden emotional scars that often hurt more than the physical ones.
• How creativity can become a powerful tool for healing from trauma.
• Why high achievement can sometimes mask deep emotional pain.
• The healing power of telling your story.
• How reinvention is really about rediscovering who you were always meant to be.
• Why it's never too late to begin your next chapter.

Eliza also discusses her upcoming memoir, Life in Captivity: Moving from a Life in Captivity to a Captivating Life, and explains how writing the book helped her finally close one chapter of her life so she could begin another, including an exciting move to Spain with her daughter.

One of the most powerful reminders from this conversation is simple:

Your past may shape your story...but it never has to write your ending.

If you've ever questioned whether it's possible to heal, reinvent yourself, or find purpose after profound hardship, this episode will remind you that resilience isn't about pretending life is easy, it's about choosing to keep moving forward.

Connect with Eliza Young

🌐 Website: https://acaptivatinglife.com

📰 Substack: Available through her website, where she shares updates on her move to Spain, her upcoming book, and her continuing journey toward a captivating life.

#BounceBackInBusinessAndLife #FrankZaccari #ElizaYoung #Resilience #OvercomingAdversity #PersonalGrowth #MentalHealth #Healing #TraumaRecovery #Leadership #Reinvention #Positivity #Purpose #Inspiration #Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Have you ever felt stuck in pain, loss, or failure? Wondering how to rise when life knocks you down again, then bounce back is for you. So gather your resilience, hold tight to hope, and get ready to reimagine what's possible in your life. So here's your host, Frank Sakari.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life. Now we all know this, but every great story asks the same question. And that question is what happened next year. For Eliza Young, that question is shaped an extraordinary life journey. One with significant health challenges enduring more than 20 surgeries. Navigating childhood trial, parental conflict, and years of uncertainty, Eliza could have allowed her circumstances to define her future. Instead, she chose another path. Today Eliza describes positivity. I love that positivity as her superpower and is committed to helping others understand that while you can't always control what happens, we can't control what we become because of what happens. That's me. Eliza, welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03 1:31

It's a pleasure. Tell us about the background and the experience that shaped your lives through the years, your early years.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Well, I mean, some of it is just kind of extraordinary series of events. I was born in the end of 1967, and a few months later, the Hong Kong flu was a pandemic at the time, and uh I ended up getting sick from that. And my mother was kind of on her own because both my parents were artists. My dad was kind of just doing his art thing, not really parenting. And so she was like, What do I do about this sick baby? And she read this book by a popular nutritionist at the time, Adele Davis. And, you know, we have these health trends, and at the time, vitamins was the thing. And everybody was like, vitamins is the cure, all just take a vitamin. And nobody realized that vitamins could build up to toxic levels. And at the time, vitamin A was sold in a form that could build up, not like today. Today it's beta-carotene. If you took a whole bottle of vitamin A, you just pee it all out. But back then it could accumulate and it became incredibly toxic. For me, it calcified all the bones and caused a lot of pain. But I was the first case that young people didn't even know that could happen. And so I went into the hospital, they didn't know what to do, they got all the vitamins out of my system. And then when I started to get to the age of being able to walk, my bones didn't have enough strength to hold my body weight up. And that's when it is triggered a whole bunch of other stuff. But at the same time, my parents turned on each other. So there was this massive custody battle with kidnapping back and forth, mostly by my father. And at the same time, all these surgeries are happening. You know, not everyone was paying attention. I got a lot of extra surgeries, and I probably needed to. And so the one thing that was consistent growing up was chaos, was change. And but the one gift I did have was that both my parents were artists, and creativity was like my go-to, and it helped me process my feelings and it helped me kind of create this world where life was better, you know, and get through it. And then that led, as I got older, to things like manifestation and visualization, right? And positivity for me was I mean, I say it's a superpower because you have to actively focus on it. You can't just be like, oh, maybe today will be a good day. You know, maybe the sun will be out, but there could always be something that could trigger you negatively. And for me, because there was so much negative, and my father was an extremely negative person, I just felt like the negativity could just swallow me up. And I just didn't want to stay there. I just was like, no, this is not who I want to be. So I developed little techniques to kind of pull myself out of negativity, focusing on anything positive, trying to amplify it, trying to just like you're turning up the saturation on the TV kind of thing, and just try to let the negative flow through me. And those are all things that I use today, and I use while writing my book and about my story, and so yeah, that's some of the background.

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Let's go back to these 20 surgeries before the age of 18. Did you have this positivity mindset? You were a child, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, but I always was able to compare things, and like I'd be in the hospital and I'd see a kid next to me in the hospital bed. I remember this vividly. She was dwarfed, and she would not be living past, you know, like eight or nine years old. And I when I met her, I was like five or something. And I remember thinking, well, I'm better off than that. So I always saw myself what I had, you know, I don't I don't know how I got that skill, but I always saw like the negative of it was that I didn't always give myself grace to have a hard time, to acknowledge that things were difficult. Sometimes I'd I'd want to move right past into the positive that I never just said, yeah, that was difficult. And yes, I am strong for going through that. So I'm getting better at that. But I yeah, I always kind of just I saw what I had that others didn't have. And and also economically, when I was young, my father took me to Haiti. He loved to go to Haiti and paint there, and I would see these kids that were starving, and they thought my blonde hair was magic, and so I'm like, how can I feel bad about my circumstance? So I think I've always had that, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:40

Wow. Now, your parents, when you told me the issue you've been kidnapped back and forth, what impact does that have on you? And when you you're you're with your mom, then your dad takes you away, and then your mom's gonna go to Did you go to court back and forth on this?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Yeah, and the real hard part was my father was very manipulative, and so the last time he kidnapped me, he basically made it sound like it was my decision because I had gone on a trip with him, and the whole time he was like, Wouldn't it be better if you live with me? And so he made it sound like I had chosen it, but I hadn't. I was a kid, you know, and I even had to go in front of a judge and choose which parent. But by then I was living with my father, and he was so he controlled everything, and he had a real strong anger, and I just thought, how am I gonna say I want to live with my mother and then go back to my father's loft and pack up my stuff? I knew he would just have taken me away again, so it's left me as an adult not trusting anything good, not feeling it like anything can last, and and also being wanting to control my own destiny and not depend on anyone else. So, you know, we all everything is a positive and negative. It's made me very strong and resilient, but it's also made me it's made it harder for me to allow other people to support me in my life and you know, to accept that the good things can last.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

Having trust in somebody is so important. And many people have been through what you've been through, internal scars, physical wounds, surgeries, it's difficult for for the average individual to navigate through that, through those hardships. Okay. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yes. And when I was in art school, my thesis, I did it on my childhood, and one of the things that I really wanted to compare was internal scars versus external. This might sound weird, but I was grateful for my external scars because I was always very high functioning in other ways. I was a really good student, and I was very capable in a lot of areas, and so that the psychological and emotional trauma would have easily gotten hidden, and nobody would have thought I had gone through anything if they hadn't seen the physical scars. So everyone thought that was the tough part, but honestly, it wasn't the hospitalizations, it was the emotional trauma between my parents and myself, you know. But the physical scars allowed that story to at least be accessible to people because they could see I had gone through something.

SPEAKER_03 9:38

They could see the disability.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

I hear that interview people who externally but internally they're going through a great deal of and it's hard when you present as everything is great and you're capable and you you can do, you know, and for me, I was always like a super good student, so everybody'd be like, Oh, well, you're just handling everything fine, but being an overachiever is also a way that you can process trauma because you're always seeking the positive reinforcement, you're always seeking, you know, that's as the dopamine, and we get it in whatever way. And for me, it was getting good grades and having the teacher say, You're so smart, Eliza. And so we seek that, but it's a way to mask sometimes it's something deeper. That's why you have comedians suffering from depression because we show the flip side, and so it would have been very hard for anyone to understand that I had gone through anything if I didn't have those physical scars, even those for me were not the worst things, at least it told some of my story.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

Right. Did you ever share those internal scars, or did you say that's in the past and I'm gonna bury it?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Well, that's most of what my creative expression all throughout art school. I actually double majored in graphic design and photography, and I did tons of self-portraits, and I've been writing poetry. I mean, just so much of my creative expression has been me kind of regurgitating what I went through and trying to process it, culminating with this book that I'm you know getting published. It's even in that, and I thought that wouldn't be any surprise, but I learned so much just from that process because it just was so chaotic, it's almost like trying to fit the pieces in the right order in the right place.

SPEAKER_03 11:37

Understood. Understood. Let's talk about the book for a second here.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

So you have an upcoming book, and I believe the working title at the moment is Life in Captivity: Moving from a Life in Captivity to a Captivating Life. Love the title. Without giving too much away, tell us about this book.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

It basically I had wanted to write my autobiography from a very young age. I had started when I was like 12 writing because I knew I had gone through this. Every one times I would tell people my story, they'd be like, Oh, that's remarkable. You gotta write it down. But I didn't want to write it down because I didn't want it to be about, you know, poor me. But I had some life-changing events, specifically when my father passed away, I went to New York, and that was in 2001, and I was a mile away from 9-11. So I witnessed the whole thing and I had to evacuate and everything. And and yet, even though that was traumatic, for me personally, it wasn't any more traumatic than things I had already gone through. I just was sharing that experience with the world. I remember kind of thinking about that at the time. And then fast forward 17 years later, I became diagnosed with breast cancer. And I was like, what the heck? After all those hospitalizations and all that medical trauma, I'm like, because I believe things happen for a reason. Like, what the heck is this happening now? Haven't I paid my dues? And then in the process of kind of figuring it out because my cancer was an odd behaving one, I traced it to being president 9-11. And I was president 9-11 because my father had passed away, and that was the big kind of elephant in the room of my life that I had not wanted to deal with, which was my relationship with him and the trauma of my past. And I had just avoided it. And after that, I was like, okay, I'm gonna write this, I'm gonna tell this story. And it's really a story of survival, it's also a story of a unique time historically. I mean, I would go into the hospital for months at a time. I would be admitted two days before my surgery. Now think about the way it is today. You're admitted, you know, the morning of, you do all the prep at home. You know, it was a different psychology. Also, the medical records weren't kept track of in the same way, and custody laws were different. You know, you could take a child from one state to another and switch custody. All these things have changed. The communication. What I went through was a unique set of circumstances that would not be duplicated. I didn't want it to just be look at what happened to me. I wanted to be an interesting story and one that ends on an inspirational note. Because when I came up with the title of A Life in Captivity, I was like, okay, this makes sense because I was captive in the hospital, I was captive through the judicial system and being physically limited and so forth. But now in my current life, I've always been seeking the dream, the joy that in many ways I felt like I didn't get as a kid. And I'm finally doing that. I'm going to that captivated life by making this big move to Spain with my daughter. And it's such a fantastic thing, but that book had to happen to open that door because I had to close that part of my life. You know, I had to tell that story to move on to my next one.

SPEAKER_03 15:30

Now, I I've written nine books and we work with a lot of authors, and there's always one chapter that they struggle with that is the most difficult for them emotionally. Did you have one chapter like that?

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Oh, yeah. There's a chapter called Captivity, and that's when my father took me for the last time. He had it convinced me, quote, you know, it air quotes, that I should be living with him, and I was to stay in the same state as my mother with this grandmother figure who I adored. And I thought, okay, yeah, this is good. My mom has a break because she had my brothers take care of, great. But then my father had a fight and abruptly took me from Maine to New York City, and I was cut off from all communication. I couldn't talk to my mom. I, you know, this is before internet and cell phones, there was no communication, I couldn't even mail a letter. And that's like the core of the story. And that was, yes, it's the longest chapter, and it was the hardest one for me to come together because I found myself going in circles, like saying the same things over and over.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

Right. Right. And then once you're through that, it's almost ectartic. Okay. I said it, I wrote it down. Yes. You cry when you look at it, and let's move on.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Exactly. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Wow. Tell us about this adventure in Spain. Why are you going to Spain?

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Well, I can't explain it, but all my life I've wanted to live in Europe. I've just always felt that. I don't know why. And part of it is I've been raised in a very atypical way for an American. My father took me to Haiti a lot as a child, and I grew up in New York City, and then all this chaos. And I've always felt more comfortable around other cultures. They really accept the disability is not a factor. You're just, you know, you're tall, you're short, you walk this way, you walk that way. It's no big deal. And so my original goal was to move to France, and I tried for many, many years to do that, including uh leading up to 9-11. And it just was too difficult. And right after 9-11, I got an opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic. And I moved there for eight years and learned Spanish, and that's where my kids were born, and then came back and all that. And the last couple of years, things have been difficult. A lot of people are struggling. This is a big shift, right? You know, people are figuring out how to make things financially easier and where they want to be. And I had a friend that moved to Spain and she was just kind of living her life, just partying around. And I thought, great, good for her. It's not my thing. But then I started to see once she settled down how financially affordable. And then I started to realize this is something I could do, and my daughter wants to do it with me. And then everything just connected. I mean, she needs me to help get her there, both financially, and she's lost her Spanish, but she has a benefit as being born from the Dominican Republic, become a citizen. So as a parent, I can give her this gift. And with my physical issues, I need the help to be able to do it. So it all kind of came together last August, and it was in the process of writing the book, and it just was like this giant light bulb. Like, this is it. This is what I've been leading to. Like everything just kind of fell into place. My daughter had just graduated from high school. They was ready to sell my house. It was like everything. So it's a fantastic, you know, adventure. And that's why it's exciting to be able to leave that past part. I've said it, it's out there, and I can leave that behind and go to the next adventure.

SPEAKER_03 19:18

Given all the political issues, how difficult is it to get through to get to get a visa to move to Spain? Is it on the US side?

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Is it on the Spain side?

SPEAKER_00 19:29

The politics here don't really affect it. The US and Spain have a tax agreement. If you have Social Security or you know, disability or anything like that, you can collect it there and you don't get double tax. But the visa process through Spain is no laughing matter. It took us nine months. I did it myself because I was trying to keep it economical. And it's just so many layers of paperwork and stamps and translation. But it's like anything, like writing a book, it's a process, and you have to be committed to it, and you have to look at what do I want to get out of it. And that's what I keep telling my daughter. I'm like, once we're there, life will be easy. Yeah, we might not understand everything, and you know, there'll be little frustrations or confusion, but compared to what we're doing now, this is the birthing process of the next chapter.

SPEAKER_03 20:27

We talk a lot when we spoke before about reinvention. What's reinvention mean to you at this stage in your life?

SPEAKER_00 20:34

I feel like it's never too late to be who you want to be. And like I think we can also lose our way. And I think about how I was in art school and how I had a funky fashion style, and I was exploring my creative of pushing the boundaries, and then life took over after I graduated school, and I just kind of, you know, you're paying your bills and you're raising your family and you're doing what you got to do. But now it's like I'm ready, maybe not even reinvent, rediscover or uncover those dreams that have always been there, but I just kind of set them aside because you know I had to deal with other things.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

Right. That's wild. What last words do you want to leave with the listeners around the world, Eliza?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

So this is a little technique I do when I'm dealing with like intense changes or especially big changes, is I think about where I was a year before, and then I see where I want to be a year from now. Because it's a manageable time, at least as an adult, you know, to think about. And like a year ago, I hadn't decided to move to Spain yet. And that is like intense to think about. A year ago, I didn't I I was so much farther behind this journey. So even though I don't know exactly where I'll be a year from now, but I'm pretty sure I'll be settled and feel comfortable navigating my area. It's just a manageable little way to kind of give yourself a boost when you feel like you're drowning in a challenge or a long-term project that you don't see end in sight. That's my little technique, and it works well for me.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

You're saying uh if you're going through hell, don't stop to smell the roses, keep moving.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You got to keep going. But if you also look back, you'll see how far you've come, and we forget that. We think, like, oh, Priscilla. I mean, I I meet people all the time, they're like, you haven't moved yet. And I'm like, you understand this process. Like, you know, I have to wait right now for the consulate to say yay or nay. Like, I can't, you know, this isn't just like get a ticket and go. And so, you know, it sometimes it can be frustrating if people question your progress. So you were look back and then you go, Oh, yeah, I have done a lot.

SPEAKER_03 23:00

But celebrating these small victories, which seems that you've mastered that. Celebrate the small victory to give you the encouragement or the impetus to continue to go forward.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 23:12

I love it. That's terrific. How can people reach you?

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Okay, so my website, a captivatinglife.com, I have a Substack uh newsletter. It's free, and that's where I'm kind of documenting the next chapter of moving to Spain and also updates on the publication of the book and so forth. So that would be the best. A captivatinglife.com.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Captivatinglife.com. Write that down, folks.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 23:40

Just about out of time. I want to thank my guest, Eliza Young, again, who showed us that life isn't defined by what happens to us. It's defined by what we choose to do next. Her story reminds us that resilience isn't about denying pain. It's not denying the hurt, it's about refusing to let that pain have the final word and to keep moving forward, as she just said. Now let me leave you all with this. None of us are in this alone. And the secret to walking underwater is to know where the rocks are. Today Eliza showed us where many of those rocks are, and together, through this podcast, we're gonna find more of those rocks and bounce back better than ever. If you enjoy this, share it with a friend. Please subscribe. Eliza again, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Thank you. So that's it for today's episode of Bounce Back. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a ten thousand dollar private VIP day with Frank himself. Be sure to head on over to BouncebackPodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Frank's gift. And join us on the next episode.