Learning from our youthful innocence

Welcome to Looking for Healing Talk Radio, where pharmaceuticals are not medicine, but love always is. I'm your host, Nicola Burnett, holistic dietician, functional medicine practitioner, and proprietor of Back to Balance Wellness Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. I thank you for joining me today at Looking for Healing Talk Radio. Looking for Healing is an exciting show where you can learn from experts in the practice of natural medicine. Combined, the four show hosts possess more than 100 years of clinical experience as professional healers, and includes myself, Nicola Burnett, Dr.

Henry Ely, Dr. Brian Artis, and Dr. Jana Schmidt. If you're into all things natural when it comes to health and healing, then stick with us. This is the show for you.

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All right. Well, let's get into our show today. I mentioned last week that I started a new podcast series. I was divinely inspired to do this. It's a very kind of interesting process for me because I kind of channeling this a little bit.

I mean, I have some basic concepts, but I don't really have this all planned out. I just got an inspiration and was told to move forward, and I always follow those inspirations and those intuitions. when they come from creator, they come from source. So this is episode two of quote-unquote, my story. Last week we started episode one.

So I'm just going to jump in and continue. And again, this show is about holistic healing and I'm talking a lot about my life experiences, and it may seem to have nothing to do with health and healing, but I assure you this is probably going to be one of the greatest,

most wonderful stories I will ever tell in my lifetime. I'm just going to do it a little bit differently. So, all right, we left off last week. I was talking about a very ugly phone call that I had with my oldest sister, who was five years my elder. I was 14 at the time.

and I guess, having an older sister who goes ahead of you in the same, you know, in the same, runs, in the same neighborhood, the same friends, the same families and the same school. I didn't realize this at the time, but I guess they, you know, they have some tabs on you and they hear things and they know things, and people tell them things and people talk. And my sister had, I'm still to this day, I've never asked, but I'm just putting two and two together. She had found out about the loss of my virginity.

and I'm not really sure if that's what set her off. I really, to this day, really don't know. But all I know is that I have a vivid, vivid memory, as if it was yesterday, of the phone ringing, answering the phone. I was in my parents' bedroom. It was a rotary phone and she was on the other end and I picked up the phone and she just lost it on me.

and it was my first example in life of viciousness, cruelty, intention to harm, mean-spiritedness, anger, rage, all those things all wrapped up together. And I think I understand now she was probably experiencing all those things within herself. I was only 14.. She was 19 at the time, so she was just outside of high school, starting to get into some not-so-great things, starting messing around with some more, how would I say,

more, what would I call them? Intense drugs, I guess, is a good word for it. And so she was not in a good place and I think she was just keeping onto me lots of her issues, unresolved issues. So as we do unto others, we typically do unto ourselves. So if you're very critical or judgmental of others, then that means you're probably doing that as well to yourself, and that's just the law of human nature and it's just the way that it works.

But this experience was this phone conversation, which came out of nowhere, as I described as all of this verbal abuse and lashing was coming out, and I was just, I went into a state of shock because I had never witnessed anything like this. I had a pretty wonderful, innocent childhood and I'm only 14.. What did I know? Just trying to kind of navigate the world. and you know, when you're 14, you still got one foot in kind of being a child, and you got one foot in playing adult, and you really don't have a clue what's going on in the world or in your body or with other people or all those things.

It's such a difficult time, and so I just remember being frozen. I just froze. I went into shock and I couldn't remember, I couldn't move and the thought never even dawned on me to hang up the phone or to comment back. I literally was frozen and just in shock, and if anyone's ever experienced that, I'm sure everybody has. who's listening.

You know, kind of that feeling where you almost get in a car accident or you walk into your house one day, into your bedroom and find your spouse in bed with somebody else. or you know, those kinds of experiences where you literally just, they're too emotionally painful and you just go into shock and you can't really move or breathe or think. I think we've all had that happen and this was my first experience of that and I was too young to have any kind of wherewithal about me to say this is inappropriate and I'm going to hang up now and you can't speak to me that way. You know, drawing boundaries? Huh?

What's that? At 14?? Didn't know anything about that. And so, and plus, she was my older sister. So whenever you have an older sibling, for those who have or had not, you would probably all agree with me when I say that I don't care who your older siblings are, just the fact that they are older, they have an influence over you.

Whether you like them or you don't like them, whether you interact or don't interact, it's fascinating, at least it was for me, as a younger person to see A, what's coming, you know, what's it like to be 16 and go to a prom and watching that process of the shopping for the dress and the giggles and the excitement, and the boy coming over and putting the, what was it called, where they pinned the flower to you or put the flower around your wrist. I can't think of the word right now. Anyways, all those things and like leaving the house and getting into a limousine and, you know, it's just, it's so fascinating, just like your older siblings represent, you know, what life holds ahead and what it's like, and you're studying and watching the behaviors, and,

you know, like, wow, you know, what's it gonna be like when I'm 16 and 17 and 21 and have a boyfriend and date, and, you know, all these things, it's just, it's, you know, your older siblings are, represent that world of what's coming. So they're, in a lot of ways, they're way more influential than even your parents are, because, you know, your parents are just old. and what do they know?

Well, they know a lot, but when you're young, you just think they're old and don't know anything, but your older siblings. and that's, that's where it's at. That's, that's, that's the interesting stuff.

So that was a very bizarre phone call for me and that, from that moment of that phone call, literally from that moment of that phone call, that set off a series of, gosh, how should I say, issues, problems for me, issues and problems of experiences of anxiety, experiences of depression, not even knowing what any of this is. I mean, I have a language now for it, looking back, but at the time just, I didn't. The panic attacks started.

So all kinds of health issues started as well. And I remember, so this is ninth grade and the way things went down in my family was that my father, I was mentioned last time that my parents were going through a divorce, and by the time I was 14, my father took over full-time legal custody. And so of us, poor man, three teenage daughters, didn't even know how to boil water, or more than boil water or cook toast. I can't even imagine. God bless him.

God bless him.

That, that was another interesting thing, having him as the full-time parent in the household. And I would still see my mother quite frequently, but one of the things that I remember, and this is probably my first introduction to natural medicine in my life that I can recall, I would go into these panic attacks. And this is throughout high school, but it started at 14 and I didn't know what they were. I didn't know they were panic attacks. I just knew that I just couldn't breathe and I just went into a state of overwhelm and I just felt like I couldn't navigate and couldn't manage and there were too many things and I can't breathe.

And, oh my God, then there's this and there's that, and I've got this assignment due and then this and that. And, you know, just all the things. And I just remember, I just, I couldn't breathe. And my mother was a nurse and I have no idea to this day who turned on to this practice, but somebody did. And I remember she would come up to me and this might be after school and she might've picked me up.

My father worked in the aerospace engineer, as an aerospace engineer, and he kind of worked the, you know, nine to five thing and living in LA and having, you know, one hour commute to work and back, you wouldn't be home till 5.30, six o'clock. So sometimes I just remember being with my mother. So I'm assuming that she picked me up and I would just go into this state and she would obviously witness it and see it. She wouldn't say anything. She would just say, it's okay.

Everything's gonna be okay. It's okay. And she would leave the room and come back with a glass of water, but it wasn't a full glass. It was always just a small amount of water, two ounces, four ounces. And she said, here, just drink some water.

Everything will be okay. And she'd always have me lie down. She'd always just have me just come and lie down a minute and everything's gonna be okay. And I would drink this water. and I didn't know for years what she was doing, but she was putting a homeopathic remedy in the water.

It's called to this day, it's one of my favorite things to recommend. It's called Rescue Remedy and it's a homeopathic tincture and you can buy it anywhere. You can buy it in sprouts. You can buy it in Whole Foods. I think it's probably the number one homeopathic tincture of all time.

So I didn't know that's what she was giving me, and it always, I would always start to just get a little sleepy and tired and I would just drop in to my body and start calming down and breathing normal. and I'd get sleepy and I'd fall asleep and then I'd wake up maybe 20 minutes, half an hour, whatever it was, and I was fine.

So anyways, just a little plug for Rescue Remedy. It's awesome.

Okay, so, moving into, I mentioned that I started to have health issues. So, moving into ninth grade, and back then that was the first year of high school. Now that's typically not. People are still in middle school, but when it was my time in the world, ninth grade was the, at 14 years old, was your first year of high school.

And one of the first health issues that I had was in the summer, between ninth grade and 10th grade, we had just gotten out of school. Maybe it was one week into the summer. My father had made a lovely dinner. We were sitting at the table and I reached across to grab a dish which had some kind of food in it, and there's four or five people at the table.

and I knocked over a glass of milk. innocently enough and I will never forget this either. I just started crying hysterically. I started crying and crying and crying, and that never stopped. I couldn't stop crying.

Now, maybe some of you have never experienced this before, or maybe some of you have, and it wasn't even like something that was in my control. I just started crying and I didn't stop. for weeks. For weeks, I didn't stop crying. I couldn't stop.

And I remember after about three weeks, I was just in my room and I was sobbing all the time, and I understand now that was like the dam had broken and that was just the straw that broke the camel's back from a lot of stress and things from growing up. Mainly, I think, from my mother having her issues with drugs and alcohol and my parents' divorce and really not understanding how to verbalize and voice and get things off your chest and express. And I certainly didn't have any adults sitting me down saying, well, how do you feel about this? And what are you experiencing and what's going on? It was like you just kind of put your head down and shut up and your parents went through a divorce and you just bottled everything up.

And so I remember my father coming into my room after three weeks and he was very angry. And I understand now, he wasn't angry, he was scared. He was a man who just had all of a sudden, was a full-time parent of three teenage girls. And he had one girl, me, who was crying incessantly for weeks. So I understand now he was just scared because he didn't know what to say, he didn't know what to do, and I think it really scared him.

And he just came into my room and he just got angry. It means, that's enough, that's enough, stop this behavior, stop this crying, get up out of bed, leave your room, go, do normal stuff.

So that, and essentially what happened is that I had a nervous breakdown. I had a full-blown, that's a real thing, folks, by the way, I had a full-blown nervous breakdown. What's a nervous breakdown? Well, I'm gonna run to a break and I will talk about that when I get back after these short messages.

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This is Nicola Burnett, coming back from our short break on Looking for Healing Radio. And real quick, I just want to mention that if you're not able to catch any of our shows live, just know that all of our shows go to podcast, typically a day or two after the live broadcast is complete. You can listen to any of the podcasts on Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, iHeart, Podcast, America Out Loud, and many, many more. If you like what you're hearing, make sure to subscribe and rate the show for us. Okay, we're going to come back to the episode 2 of my story series, and I left off talking about health issues that I started to develop when I was 14 years old.

And I had mentioned that I had a nervous breakdown, and that is a literal thing. So what is a nervous breakdown? Well, come to find out decades later,

it's really a failure of your, oh gosh, failure of so many things, but a failure of your adrenals, where you, just, you, can't handle life. and it was like the tiniest little thing, spilling a glass of milk, just hit my nervous system and just was so, got so blown out of proportion. But it wasn't me thinking that. I mean, I was fine. I was just sitting down to dinner, and it's just the result of carrying so much, internalizing so much and carrying so much stress.

Another thing that was in particular to me is that I don't think I had any vitamin C in my body. And this is all things that I discovered and found out later.

And I know I was very malnourished. I had a horrific diet. I've talked about this before. I lived on sugary cereals and quesadillas with Tillamook cheese.

Gosh, what else? Oh, just boxes of Chef Boyardee and macaroni and cheese.

Now, my father cooked good meals. We always had a good meal. It's always, you know, some kind of a starch potato or some meat and a vegetable. And that started when I was 14.. But on the weekends and when you got home from school or when we got home from school and there wasn't any adult there because my father worked, you know, 530, 630, depending on traffic.

You know, we would just pig out and eat anything we wanted. And I had no concept, none, zero, of food and health and diet and how they all affect each other. Like, that did not exist at all, at all. That wasn't even a thing. It wasn't like.

I heard about it and just wasn't interested in it. I just did, I just, that just didn't exist. And one of the other things that happened with me is that I remember, again, being in class and being in school and I think somebody, they used to get a lot of attention because I had a perfectly,

perfectly gray colored strip right at the hairline, like, you know, where you would have bangs. Right, you know, right at that hairline, right on my forehead, that it was maybe an inch thick and I grew in this strip of gray hair. I didn't know this at the time. Neither did any of the adults around me. But that indicated thyroid issues, early graying.

So I literally had a thyroid and adrenal glands that just,

they weren't working.

I know that now. And a lot of malnourishment.

So, and how did I get this way? Well, a lot of stress. I mentioned the, my mother was very challenged with alcohol and prescription drugs. There was a lot of discord in the household when I, starting, like maybe around nine or 10, between my parents and my older sister, I think oldest sister, really got the bad end of the stick with all of that. And she had a horrible relationship.

As far as back as I can remember, she had a horrible relationship with my mother and they would fight constantly and they were vicious. They were screaming matches and, you know, they were violent, but not violent like physical violent. They were very violent, with raised voices and loud words and, oh, you could just, you know, it's toxic. Their relationship was very toxic. And that's what I mean by violent and being a very, very, very sensitive, intuitive child.

This hurt probably more than if somebody, you know, slashed me with a knife, literally. And for all those empaths out there and all those sensitive indigo children out there who are adults now, you know exactly, you could probably relate very well to that, to that statement.

So, another thing I'll mention in regards to my oldest sister.

You know, one of the things that I observed from her, she was very,

her emotional needs had not been met. We'll just put it that way. Of course, I didn't understand that then, but I understand that now. And she just lived her whole life seeking healing from men. And she was absolutely stunningly gorgeous.

And literally, if there's such thing, had a perfect figure and was outgoing. And, you know, she lived her whole life just going from relationship to relationship to relationship. And I understand now she was trying to seek and find emotional nurturing and comfort and trying to make up for what she did not receive growing up. And again, I think I had mentioned in the last episode that my father is an amazing man, amazing father. He just wasn't that kind of guy who was comfortable with intimacy, who knew how to be intimate.

And I'm talking about intimate, just, you know, conversations and hugs and saying, I love you. He felt that a man's role was to bring home, you know, the bacon and put a roof over your head, and that the mother was, you know, the one with the bedside manner and the one that did that kind of nourishing. And I think that was probably just what was modeled by his parents. And he just thought that that's how it works.

So relationships for my sister, my oldest sister, became, and again, this is me talking as an adult now, I didn't understand any of this at the time, but relationships were nothing more than basically a manipulation. And it was about getting the man, getting their attention and getting them to do things and getting them, you know, through being over-sexualized. And then it was getting the man and then it was keeping the man. And, you know, you get two choices here. The person she was with was either healthy, you know, mentally and emotionally, and realized, you know, rather quickly that she was not healthy mentally or emotionally.

And so they weren't able to cultivate a healthy dynamic and it would end. Or the person she would attract was extremely unhealthy mentally and emotionally. And the relation was based on everything it, you know, it shouldn't be, you know, manipulation, anger, sex, violence, fear, all of the things in my whole life. I just watched her go from man to man. And I saw similar patterns that were similar for me, because that's what was modeled for me.

I grew up with the same father, so I had a lot of the same kind of needs that were not met. And once again, my father is in heaven, and I mean nothing bad by this at all. He did the best he could with what he knew and what he understood, and he was an amazing father. And I'm so lucky that he was my father, because I think things would have been a lot worse if he wasn't. But anyways, so it was a lot of looking for love to make up for what was missing.

And I think, in that father-daughter dynamic for both my sister and I. And, you know, we were looking for nourishment, and nourishment we didn't receive. And the establishment of healthy, respectful dynamic, of interacting with the male energy. And again, that use of sexual prowess to ensnare a man, which is what was modeled for me all around me. Not just by my friends, commercials, society.

Anywhere you looked. And it's a thousand times worse today. That was, you know, sex always sells, right? It's a number one marketing campaign and that's always been all around. And so, I just thought that that was normal.

I'm sure my sister did too. So, but the one thing about me, I'm really very grateful that I have never experienced violence with men.

I just never, I had a lot of issues with not liking myself when I was younger. But I was able to pull myself out of that, thank goodness.

And I think a lot of it had to do with me not having anything to do with drugs. I never went down that drugs and alcohol route. As a matter of fact, I was always the wild one. Wild as in really fun and outgoing, a Leo, the center of attention, that kind of thing. I didn't need drugs and alcohol.

I pretty much would do anything. It's always about attention seeking. And so, I really, I really, I just never went down that route, thank God. And I think that things just got a lot more uglier for my older sister because she did head down that route, unfortunately.

And I would say that a lot of that, not liking myself, and those types of things. when I'd see my older sister and they'd say, oh, you're so pretty, you're so pretty. No, I'm not, I'm fat, I'm ugly. And watching that kind of behavior with her or her friends, or, I mainly remember that coming from her. And I think that I picked up on a lot of that.

And so, a lot of the not liking myself had to do with that. That's what was modeled. And also, I think, the other piece was just all of this rage and anger and repressed feelings that were stuffed down, that were very low vibration.

So, I think that's where both those things came from.

So, I'm just very, very grateful that I never degraded down to a space or a point where I allowed any kind of violence, whether it be physical or verbal. I just really never had an experience with that. And I'm not sure if I was just protected. or I'm an old soul and I was pulling from just some wisdom from past lives. But I always had a boundary with that.

And so, I'm very, very grateful for that. And I think my oldest sister being the firstborn, she was closer to my mother and looking towards my mother more as a mother figure, because there wasn't anybody else. I had two older siblings to look at as models. So, it wasn't just my parents. And so, I think that, because that was the only modeling that she had, I think there were a lot of things that she experienced being that firstborn.

that is very, very different from being the lastborn, which is me and the third child. By the time the second and third child come around, the parents are more relaxed or less restrictive, all of those types of things. So, I think whatever happened to my mother and with my mother really had such a profound effect on my sister. So, one of the things that I remember around this time, we'll say eighth grade, ninth grade, was discovering the Ouija board. And I don't remember, it was probably a neighbor kid, I'm guessing, that busted it out sometime and talked about it and showed us how to use it, me and my sister's other neighbor kids.

I don't really remember, but that's what I'm thinking. Probably happened. And then I remember as kids, especially in the summer, we'd be out playing and playing tag and playing games and it would get dark and we'd come inside and we would have dinner. And then afterwards, maybe a bunch of the neighbor kids were over. And I don't know how this got started, but we started doing seances.

And now let me just say that we didn't, I know, for a fact, nobody knew what these were. It was like playing a game. It's like, oh, let's have a seance. Ooh, yeah. Not knowing what we're doing, probably something we saw from television, I guess.

I have no idea where this came from, but I do remember sitting around in the living room around the glass coffee table. We'd take all the things off the table and somebody would sit at the head of the table. And I don't even remember what was said or what was done.

It was a game. We didn't know any better. And another thing that we would do is my sister would hypnotize me and make me bark like a dog or do funny stuff for her friends. Remember, she was five years older. So this is all for fun and games.

However, I don't remember how much time, maybe it was a year, again, around eighth, ninth grade of using a Ouija board. And it was just simply for entertainment. It was a fun thing to do. But I do have a memory of a friend of mine spending the night. I think we were in eighth grade or ninth grade, somewhere in there.

And it was like, hey, let's do the Ouija board. Okay, so we were doing the Ouija board. Now, I don't remember what happened. All I remember was that we got so spooked and so scared and we just stopped. And I punched out, opened my window and pushed out my screen and we chucked it outside.

And I never touched it again. And that's the last thing that I remember. with that. And as a young child, I mean, pretty much my whole life, again, being a Leo and being an attractive woman, I was always wanting to be in the center of attention. So whatever it was my older sister wanted to do and thought would be fun, hey, let's have a seance.

Hey, let's do the Ouija board. Hey, let's go play tag, whatever it was. You know, I just listened, right? There's that older siblings being very influential simply because they're just older. So they really did kind of lead, you know, lead, whatever it was, the activities or their direction, or whatever it was that we did.

All right. It is time to go to a quick break. So hang tight and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Okay, we are getting back into, coming back from break and I'm continuing on with kind of wrapping up the high school years. And again, all these pieces of information. I'm sharing for a specific reason. Lots of other things that happened, of course, just like in everybody else's life. I'm really highlighting some specific pieces, and I'm doing that for a reason.

So again, this series is gonna kind of make a come around full circle. And so I'm gonna carry on and continue with this last segment here. Okay, so, one of the things that I wanted to mention, I think I mentioned this in the last segment, but I was, I went to a Catholic school, Catholic high school.

And at this school, I started my first job. My first job was working at the rectory. And for some of you who may not know what a rectory is, a rectory is actually the place where the priests live. So it's the priest's house. So this was a Catholic school and Catholic church.

And the priests had, it was a two-story building and they had offices on the bottom where they met with people and did marriage counseling and all the things that they do. And it was functional rooms. They obviously had a front door waiting room area and they had a big office, a kitchen, a dining room, all the things, right? All the things somebody would need for where they live. And obviously upstairs were all the bedrooms.

So the main secretary who ran the place would work from eight to four and then they would have somebody just cover from 4 p.m. until 9 p.m. And this was a job that was handed down. My sister, both my older sisters, had this job and worked at this job. So when they left high school, then the next sibling would step in.

And so this was my job. I believe I worked there for four years while I was in college. I can't quite remember, but just a part-time job. And that was my first experience of working and getting a paycheck and making money and just all of that, what that is all about.

And through this job,

one of the things that I did was I got a fake ID.

Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this, but it was a long time ago.

Back at that time, you could use either a baptismal certificate or a birth certificate to take to the DMV to establish your age, because the baptismal certificate had the date of birth on it. And you could go to the DMV and get an ID. And that was what I did when I was 14,.

ninth grade, which actually turned out to be a really good thing because, again, going back to, I never did drugs, barely drank, really disliked drinking. I mean, heavy drinking was two drinks for me. Usually it was one, and a lot of times it was none. So I was the designated driver most of the time, much of the time. And I think that actually turned out to be a really good thing.

So anyways, there's my confession, speaking of Catholicism. But it was an interesting experience because I had a close-up view of how a church operated as a business. So I wasn't just seeing the church on Sunday, you know, sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, and all of that. But I got to see the church, other aspects of the church, and how the priests lived, and what they were like, just as people behind the scenes. And for any of you wondering out there, if this is going to go to an ugly place, no, it absolutely is not.

I had no experiences that were disgusting and sexual in nature, as clearly many people did in the Catholic church, with priests and nuns and whoever else. When I heard about that, I thought it was just shocking, because I was in the church. I was in a Catholic school. I went to church every Sunday. I was in CCD.

I worked for four years in the rectory. And nothing, nothing at all. Nothing bizarre, weird, abnormal. Not. even when I think back, and think, oh, well, this guy was kind of weird, or he'd look at me funny, or one time he said something that was inappropriate.

Nope, nothing. So that's not where I'm going with this, thank God. And one of the things that I remember was that across the street, there was a park. So we had the school, we had the church, and it was all a big campus. And then there was also a nunnery there as well, but I never even went in that building.

I think there was a community center and just all the types of things that would be at a church.

And there was an auditorium, whatever it might be. There was all kinds of church events that would go on during the year. So that was a very interesting thing for me to see. But again, across the street was a park, and there was a lot of homeless that would hang out in the park. And one of the things that I remember in my training, and also observation of the church, was that if ever a homeless person came and knocked on the door or rang the doorbell, I was advised not to open the door at night.

But sometimes I worked on Saturdays as well. And so during the morning or the afternoon, people coming and going, activity going on around the church, I could, I was allowed to, the cook would make sack lunches for anybody who was homeless who happened to come to the door. So it wasn't a lot, but it was here and there, and it was pretty much at least one every day. So I witnessed that. And the church I was a part of was very influential in the middle and upper class audience at that time.

So that was an interesting thing for me to see. And just like all kids raised in the, well, I can't say all kids raised in the Catholic church, I guess in a middle class neighborhood, with being involved with the church, I went through all of the sacraments. So obviously I know I was baptized because my parents told me that, and there was photographs, and I knew who my godparents were. So that was one of the sacraments. And the other sacrament that I had experienced was Holy Communion or First Communion.

And that I think happened when you were in first or second grade, if memory serves me well. And then the next sacrament I had was either seventh or eighth grade, and that was confirmation.

And I don't even know that I could tell you what these sacraments were, or the purpose of them, or what they represented. Because for me, it was my family fussing over me. It was getting attention. It was getting to wear a pretty dress. Honestly, this is my memory.

Getting to wear a pretty dress and getting cards, getting money, kind of like a birthday, and big celebration, and we all went out to dinner afterwards. And that's kind of all I really remember.

And the other thing that I can recall is going to confession, or I think sometimes they called it penance. And I used to think that that was weird. And for those of you who don't know what that is, there had these along the side walls of the church, they had these rooms. I mean, it was a door. You'd open the door, and it was a room.

It was just large enough for somebody to stand or to sit or to kneel, almost like a phone booth, but not quite that small. And there was a wooden separation between the box the priest was in and the box that I was in. And the priest would sit in the chair and would slide the, almost like a speakeasy,

would slide the screen or open the little window. And I remember they would say something like, what are your confessions? Or I don't remember what they said. And basically, as a small child, it was like anything bad you had done, you confessed your sins. Now, as a small child, who knows what confess means and who knows what sin is?

You really don't understand those types of things. And then they would give you something to do, which would relieve you. You got forgiveness, or you didn't carry that around with you. It got released. The priest had the power to release that for you.

And you might have to say 10. Hail Marys and to our fathers, or light a candle, or, I don't know, go apologize to your sister or something like that. And as a kid, I thought it was a little weird, for sure. But they tell you that's what you're supposed to do and that's what you do. So, moving forward, in my basic high school years, I would just say that I'm definitely an old soul and I was always ahead of my time my whole life.

I still have that experience. It was kind of one of the themes of my life. So I was always hanging out with people who are much older than me. I remember the summer between ninth and 10th grade, I fell madly in love with this young man at the beach. He was a USC student studying architecture.

He was an architecture major, raised by a single mom, and this was my first time of falling in love. And it wasn't too long, maybe two months, before my father found out, again, I think, through my oldest sister riding me out, that I was seeing somebody who was 21 when I was 14.. And yeah, maybe that was weird and maybe it was totally inappropriate, but, you know, I was a 14-year-old at the time. He seemed to be a nice kid and always treated me really well and no bad experiences there, but I understand why his mother freaked out and my father, what brought to his attention, freaked out, and I get that. So that was...

I kind of ended that and killed that relationship, which was really hard for me and very devastating. But by the time I was in 10th grade, I couldn't handle the boys who were my age, and so I was always going to, growing up in L.A., we were always going to dressing up and sneaking into UCLA parties, frat parties, things of that nature.

And I was very much the popular pretty girl in school. I was very confident, or at least I gave off that air in a lot of ways. I was. Again, I was a Leo, and Leos like to be the center of attention and they're very, you know, can be very in-your-face and look at me and, you know, all those things. So that was, I was very, you know, fun and very popular and would do wild things, and, again, not wild, anything bad, like breaking into shops or something like that, just being silly in public and those types of things.

But when I got to 11th grade, I remember lots of pressure, feeling lots of pressure. I was the straight-A student.

I took a bunch of AP classes, and that started right, I think, when I got into school, if I remember correctly. And I, you know, they always told, oh, you have to do extracurricular activities, like be on the yearbook team that puts the yearbook together and takes pictures and plays sports, and get into theater, and, you know, do all these things, all these extracurricular activities, so that you would look well-rounded and you would probably, your name would, or your application would shoot to the top. You know, it was the impression I had and what the adults would say when you were trying to get into college. So, you know, just like everybody else out there, I was groomed and conditioned, you know, into societal norms. I was groomed to be, you know, the expression goes, a yes man or a yes woman.

And I did what I was told and folded my hands and, you know, sat in the front and got straight As and was, you know, teacher's pet and always did what, you know, the authority figures said. But actually I was riddled with, you know, panic attacks, which were much worse, anxiety, all that became so out of control. And out of control, I felt so pressured by society. And this is what, at 16 years old?

So the themes, if you will, was just using sexual prowess as manipulation, right? Being very over-sexualized for attention. I was very dramatic in the sense of, you know, getting, seeking attention. I was depressed. I didn't know what that was.

Nobody talked about that, never really heard about that. But looking back, I was clinically depressed, lots of anxiety, as I said.

And that's kind of what I was left with as a younger person. Just, you know, not nice, not pretty, and it shouldn't have been the way that it was.

All right, well, time is up. So I just want to say thank you for spending this hour with me. I hope you're finding this kind of fun and entertaining. And again, I am going somewhere with this. And this will roll back around to probably the biggest message I'm ever going to share about health and healing.

So thank you for being here. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for listening. And if you'd like to learn more about Back to Balance, our Healing Center, Holistic Healing Center, just go to www.backtobalance, all words spelled out, LV, as in Las Vegas. And until then, blessings and abundance with your health and your life.

This is Nicola Burnett signing off from Looking for Healing Radio.