Trauma Recycled

A Memoir of Adoption, Abuse, and Healing

By: Anne Peshka

Narrated by: Anne Peshka

I was four months old when I was adopted, taken from an orphanage and placed into what was supposed to be a loving family. But love had conditions. Survival had rules. And silence was the price of staying.

By sixteen, I had already learned how to disappear—into alcohol, into drugs, into the arms of men who didn’t care if I made it out alive. By eighteen, I was a mother, barely keeping my head above water, raising a child while still a child myself. When I got pregnant again at twenty-one, I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to drag another innocent life into my chaos.

I gave my second son up for adoption. It was the hardest, most gut-wrenching thing I had ever done—and the first truly selfless choice I had ever made. It was also the moment I began to understand my own worth.

Trauma Recycled is about breaking the cycle. It’s about the people who helped me when I couldn’t help myself. It’s about the ones who failed me, and the ones who saved me. And most of all, it’s about a mother’s love—the kind that lets go so her child can have something better.

This is my story. The unvarnished truth. No pretty endings, no neatly tied-up lessons—just the messy, painful, beautiful process of learning how to live when life never gave you the tools.

©2025 Anne Peshka (P)2025 Anne Peshka