When Yemi Penn realises her unresolved childhood trauma is affecting her ability to parent her own daughter, it catalyses her mission for healing and a deep dive into exploring traditional and non-traditional modalities. Wanting to confront her uncle who sexually abused her at the age of seven, Yemi travels back to Lagos, Nigeria. While there, she also sets out to speak to elders to understand her culture’s taboo around sexual abuse and its traditional ways of healing. She then revisits The UK and Japan, places which had held the allure of providing some escape for her as a traumatised young woman. But instead, became scenes for more painful experiences: broken relationships and a short failed marriage to a man she met online. Alongside the work of facing her past, Yemi speaks to psychologists, psychotherapists, alternative healers and those who have thrived after trauma. She starts to see that it’s possible to transmute pain into power. What would happen if we all did the work?
In this feature length documentary we also speak to the war veteran who struggled to assimilate back into civilian life, the cancer patient who has survived death numerous times and to the descendant who is still dealing with the aftermath, coming from a stolen generation.