029 – Move Beyond Surviving 
to Thriving 
with Author W/ Tina Djurretic

Kelli Russell | 00:03.188

Welcome to the Radical Enlightenment podcast. I’m so excited for our author and guest today, Tina Juretik. She has just published a memoir about surviving childhood abuse, a Christian cult, and three toxic relationships. And this episode is for anyone who wants to understand toxic relationships, healing, and how to thrive after abuse. And before we got on this call, you gifted me with a copy of your book. And I’m about 28 pages in and I’m so hooked. It’s only because of the holidays. I couldn’t finish reading. I was wrapping presents and my mom was visiting and, you know, but it’s amazing. So I would love you to give, you know, a little bit of background on your story so that people can understand what you have survived. And then I’d love us to talk about how we can help others. break free of some of these patterns that you were able to break free from.

Tina Djuretic | 01:01.757

Wonderful. That sounds great.

Kelli Russell | 01:03.638

Welcome to the show.

Tina Djuretic | 01:05.339

Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for, for taking a look at my, at my memoir. I know it’s a super busy time of the year, right? So it’s not a good time to be reading, but they, they, I put this book out just a few months ago in September. So it’s all still rather new and But I started writing it about four years ago. And I even kick off the book this way. So you would have read this part. But what started me to do this, because this was not on my list of things to do, you know, even in my life, let alone, you know, now when I’m still in my working years. But I had a really difficult breakup with a partner, which often sort of, you know, sets these things in motion. It was a breakup and why this one was so significant. I haven’t had many partners in my life, three really significant ones with a lot of years in between them, right? I was always that person that needed years in between. I wasn’t a serial dater or any of, any of those things, but this last one, I’m well into my forties. I really thought he was. the one, right? Like this is the one I’m going to, I’m not even necessarily Mary, that was never a thing for me. But you know, that’s what it felt like this one was permanent. And so when it started to turn sour, I did what a lot of people do desperately tried to save it. But I really didn’t spend too long doing that. Because I started to see things that were familiar to me. And red flags, you know, we’re just going off warning bells were going off and going off. And so I dove into those warning bells and it took a few months for me to sort it out. But I finally understood that my partner was bipolar, which is, so I’m ruining the book for you, was bipolar like my mother. And that really, that really brought me to my knees. I didn’t see it coming. And yet once I stepped out of it, the warning signs were there from day one. So they were there. I just didn’t recognize them or maybe want to recognize them. I was, um, I, I was not anymore, very good at making excuses for other people’s bad behavior, right? We do that when we’re in relationships and just in life. So, um, this is how you allow people to get away with bad behavior and then you go, I didn’t see it coming, but yeah, the warning signs were there. So.

Kelli Russell | 03:51.488

Let’s take it back even further. So let’s go to like your childhood, your mother, your father, what happened in your household, what led to becoming part of a Christian cult that then led to these subsequent patterns relationships?

Tina Djuretic | 04:08.016

Yes. So when this relationship ended, I went to seek help in the form of a channeler. And that’s when I went backwards and started to see exactly this, where did this start? Why did this start? And I’ll preface it by saying that I’ve I blocked childhood. And even to this day, you can ask me details about childhood. And I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know the details. I knew the broad strokes of the things that had happened because they’re hard to forget. But I couldn’t tell you what the house looked like, what kind of what names of friends, anyone even in that church. I can barely come up with a name. You know, I really blocked it out. That should have been my first clue that there was something wrong, but. I saw it as this, my sisters remembered everything. Wow. And they struggled with those memories. And. We always joked that I was better off forgetting.

Kelli Russell | 05:04.084

Yeah.

Tina Djuretic | 05:04.725

And yet I still have this pattern of toxic relationships. So even though I didn’t remember it in the forefront of my mind, my subconscious sure as heck did and was living out that pattern. So the home I grew up in was incredibly abusive. Again, with a bipolar mother, she was not only physically abusive, she was incredibly mentally abusive. I mean, playing games was really her thing. She loved to play games and manipulate us and-Hitting the sisters against each other,

Kelli Russell | 05:38.802

getting in trouble with your father so that you would get beat and then smile as you’re getting beat. Your writing, I was just, wow. I was feeling your experience through your writing. It was very visceral, very vivid.

Tina Djuretic | 05:53.386

Yeah, good. Thank you because I wanted it to be like that one. Yes. Read it, right? To really- feel that because we are feeling that’s what we are right and that’s also later how we’re going to heal is through feeling right so the feeling is really important but yes it was the the extreme manipulation um is the power play right so being able to manipulate the children me and my sisters so that we would fight with each other so that she had reason to punish us i mean how do you even uh you sort that out as a child. You don’t, right? My older sister was the only one who really sorted that out, you know, as she got into like 12, 13 years old. But as little children, of course, we didn’t understand that, right? You love your parents unconditionally. It doesn’t matter what they do to you. You don’t stop loving your parents. You stop loving yourself.

Kelli Russell | 06:46.323

Yeah.

Tina Djuretic | 06:47.523

Right. This is the trauma that comes to you because you always think what’s wrong with me that I can’t please them, right? But also manipulating my father as we got older and she wasn’t able to physically abuse us as much. He was stronger. Right. So then but then also the game became now I’m going to do things so that you get in trouble. And then I’m going to watch him beat you when he gets home. And now I get to watch. And isn’t that fun? And that was when I really just understood just how sick. sick my mother was. Mental illness, absolutely. But it went further than that. It was evil. And I felt that evilness, you know, always. So it was a really toxic environment, mentally, physically, emotionally abusive. And then when I’m 10 years old, they join a cult, right? So it gets even worse because now the cult gives them permission to be even more abusive. Not that they use those words, obviously, but, you know, just constantly preaching, spare the rod, spoil the child. Well, that’s just giving an abusive person just like now you have God behind you telling you to be that way. Right. Like it only gets worse from there. But also because the church itself was such such a first of all, what makes it a cult, in my opinion, is the separate. separation and isolation, right? The minute they tell you you’re not allowed to congregate with the outside world because they’re all sinners and they’re going straight to hell.

Kelli Russell | 08:28.322

And you couldn’t do extracurricular activities as a kid. Everything had to be separated.

Tina Djuretic | 08:33.307

Oh my God. We were pulled out of public school. We had to go to the church’s school. So now seven days a week, you’re being like literally brainwashed with their teachings. Even the books they were teaching us from were homeschooling books made by Christians. So every lesson had God in it and had, you know, and those things. But on top of that, you also have the fear mongering, right? This wasn’t a church that preached love. It was a church that preached punishment. And oof, give that to abusive parents. Well, my God, it’s not just parents who are punishing you. It’s God.

Kelli Russell | 09:10.283

Right.

Tina Djuretic | 09:10.583

The fear that they poured into us every single day of going to hell, burning in hell. We’re going to church four nights a week. We’re going to school seven days a week. Wow. All of our friends belong to this church. So there was no outside world. We weren’t allowed to have a television. We weren’t allowed to listen to any music that wasn’t Christian. We weren’t allowed to obviously go to the theater or plays or anything, anything like that. We weren’t allowed to wear pants as women. So we weren’t even allowed to play sports. And I was. super athletic growing up. I was a dancer when I was a child. So those things were all stripped away. So not only did we change who we were overnight and then get rid of our TV and our radio and our, like everything that was our life, but we were also stripped of our friend, our school. And then the things that we loved most in the world, for me, that would have been ballet. All those things, life changed in a moment. And we weren’t given any time to even process it. It was like, we’re Christians now. We’re like,

Kelli Russell | 10:17.102

what?

Tina Djuretic | 10:17.563

We never even went to church before, but it was that, that, you know, that drastic. So the abuse continued from there. Only now it wasn’t just our parents punishing us. It was also like, what’s God going to do to punish you? Right. So it was just an added layer of someone else that wasn’t loving us. God wasn’t love. He was punishment. Right. The message was so twisted. So, yeah. And then I left home pretty early. I left when I was just barely after I turned 17. I was halfway through wealth. So I. I had to, I already had jobs since I was 10 years old. So I knew how to work. I knew how to save money. I knew how to buy my own things. We were quite impoverished.

Kelli Russell | 11:01.997

You lived with your sister for a little while? Your older sister? Yeah.

Tina Djuretic | 11:05.719

Yes. My sister left home maybe six months before I did. And she’s a year older than me. So she would have just been 18. And she was living with her then boyfriend and his mother at the time. And so they cleared out a room for me. I paid rent. I lived there until I graduated. And then my sister and her boyfriend and myself, after I graduated high school, we went and got an apartment together. And I did that until I moved to Italy and began this other side of myself that loved to travel. I’m a Sagittarius, so I’m very like explore, explore, explore, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, and wanderlust. Not a lot of commitments. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had nothing. I didn’t want children. I didn’t want to get married. So I didn’t have these things I was working towards. I wanted to see the world. That was the extreme upside of my life, right? Because there’s usually, you know, it’s a pendulum, right? When you have these, as you also have these extreme lows, the idea is to have a balanced, a little bit more balance in your life, right? So my extreme highs were traveling and my extreme lows were my personal life. buried childhood trauma or not, I was reliving it over and over and over again without understanding that I was doing that because I buried my childhood.

Kelli Russell | 12:34.131

So when you saw this channeler,

Tina Djuretic | 12:36.712

right, you’re like, I’m going to just bury that too.

Kelli Russell | 12:39.693

And when you saw this channeler, what was uncovered?

Tina Djuretic | 12:44.255

So what I loved about her, and I’ve heard this before, is that, cause you know, I even said to her, do I need to go to hypnotherapy or something to uncover my memories in order to heal them? And she said, absolutely not. Spirit and your soul will reveal to you the parts that need to be healed. The rest doesn’t need to be remembered. Why? What does it serve you? Does it serve you to really just dive in and go back and remember the whole thing? What you need to remember is the pain it caused, what changed in you at that moment, because something nothing changes when you have huge pain, right? You, you either go within, you stop talking, you become mute, you stop, you know, there’s so many, you start gaining weight, you start comfort eating. We have reactions to our pain. And so she helped me really to go back. And so she said, no, I don’t need you to do this. She’s like, let’s walk through. What was interesting is that she started with past lives because I went to her. And basically was like, I had my last breakup and I feel so deceived and I’m so angry at the universe. And she kind of went, whoa, because I came in like on fire. And I want an explanation from the universe. Why does it keep punishing me? Because that’s what it feels like. When bad things keep happening to you, it’s like, gosh, I’m a good person. Why do you keep punishing me? Right.

Kelli Russell | 14:13.702

And then you start to believe that that is the God, that it is a vengeful, spiteful fear, you know, a God that you should be afraid of that wishes, you know, strikes down upon you, right?

Tina Djuretic | 14:25.510

Right. That favors those and doesn’t favor you for some reason. And it becomes your environment because, of course, this is what you’re manifesting now. If you’re living in your pain, well, you’re just manifesting more and more of what energy goes where focus flows, right? Energy flows where focus goes. So if you’re focusing on only the bad things that are happening to you, well, that’s where your energy is going. So, boom, more bad things are coming your way because that’s what the universe understands that you want. Right. That’s your frequency. So she first took me back into. past lives to where my biggest issue was abandonment. Sorry, not abandonment, betrayal. Betrayal by men. And so we walked to that lifetime. We just went straight to that one. She’s like, let’s go to the one where it started. All the lifetimes that followed after that are irrelevant. We don’t need to walk through every betrayal you’ve ever had. Let’s go find the one that stuck. Because Things are happening to us all the time, but when they’re really, really traumatic, that’s when they actually penetrate our soul. Once it becomes an imprint on the soul, now it becomes karma. So you can have lots of little bad things that happen. You drop a vase and you’re like, oh, damn, I broke the vase. I don’t, I’m not having an emotional response to this. So therefore it’s not so strong. If you follow what I’m saying, that actually like makes it makes an imprint on your soul. So we went back to that moment. We walked through it. And then sitting right there in this busy cafe with all these people around us, she had put us in a bubble, of course, but, but I was good at this. I was like, I’m always with so many people when we’re going to walk through some weird healing, like deep stuff for me. Right. It was odd, but really it was like, picture this picture that now let it go. Now say this you’re done. And I’m like, it’s that it’s that easy. And she’s like, This one is because we’re talking about a past life, right? But we’re also now going to pull that in and show you how you’re manifesting that now.

Kelli Russell | 16:24.371

And how were you?

Tina Djuretic | 16:25.692

Childhood. Yeah, great. That was great. It made so much sense to me. This life was back in Mongolia, you know, and 100 years ago or more. And I saw how this life had similarities. Same strong mother, same father that was very… educated smart my father wasn’t educated but he read a lot he loved history educated himself yeah um and i saw all the similarities and she’s like do you even see how the circumstances of this life that you’re in now are mimicking that one in order for you to know that that pain is still there so you can heal it so we did we got rid of it now it won’t repeat itself which i love i love that diving into childhood took a little more effort right because this is present in this lifetime. And there was a lot, a lot to unpack. So we went through a little bit of the things that happened in childhood, but not really. She did not bring up exact moments. It was more pivotal moments like, here’s where your soul went. Yeah, I’m not taking this anymore. Here’s where your soul went. It’s time for me to leave. Here’s where your soul went. this isn’t right. So it was more that it wasn’t your hero’s journey. Yeah, exactly. And then it was what really helped me. And this is really important, I think, for anyone that needs to forgive because we do need to forgive, right? Forgiveness is a poison that you drink, not them. You drink the poison and you wonder why they’re not suffering. Forgiveness is not about them. It is about you letting go of that burden that you’re carrying. So What I loved about this channeler is that after we went through my childhood, she took me to my parents.

Kelli Russell | 18:16.458

Wow.

Tina Djuretic | 18:18.019

And that was really important. And I’m so pleased she did that. And now this is what I tell people all the time. Generational trauma is a very, very real thing. And most of us, especially if you have families with severe trauma, it’s very often generational. Broken people raise. broken people. Sometimes they try to go so to the opposite of what happened to them that they just create a whole new set of problems. Again, there’s that balance, right? If you go from one extreme to the other, this does not balance. And so they might not want to raise broken people, but unless they’ve healed, broken people raise broken people. That’s it. So generational trauma goes on for years and years and years by walking me through. my parents’trauma, it didn’t make it okay. It’s not okay that they did those things, but it does give you the understanding that they suffered those things too, and then raised you in a way, the only way they knew how. That helped me to understand in order to lead me to forgiveness.

Kelli Russell | 19:32.744

And compassion.

Tina Djuretic | 19:34.225

And compassion. Absolutely. And just because I forgave them and found compassion doesn’t mean that I didn’t put boundaries down. My father’s not with us anymore, so he’s not a thing. But my mother is. I have 100% forgiven her. Truly. I hold no ill will towards my mother. Which is huge. And let me tell you, I spent 20 years trying to do that. And I couldn’t.

Kelli Russell | 20:01.588

What do you think was the reason you were able to do it after 20 years of trying?

Tina Djuretic | 20:07.673

Two things. Understanding where she came from. Because my parents never talked about their past. Not ever. And we never met their parents or any of their families. So they weren’t even in the picture. So we had zero understanding of their history. So once I understood it, that gave me compassion. But the other thing that she said to me that just clicked in my head when she said it was, we are all souls in these earthly bodies having a human experience. Your mother’s soul is pure and innocent, just like everybody else’s. So the things that she did in her human avatar while she’s here living on this planet, yeah, they were. They were lousy. You don’t even have to forgive those. You’re allowed to go. It is not okay that you did that to me, but you have to forgive her soul because this is the avatar is also going to die away once this lifetime is over. Right. But the soul is what remains that just a little bit of separation that gave me permission to go good, still mad at you, but I forgive your soul.

Kelli Russell | 21:18.715

Wow. Why do you think this soul’s journey chose to explore evilness?

Tina Djuretic | 21:23.958

Oh, yes. So that is another really big part of it is that if, and this is also what was explained to me, but I’d say this explanation came maybe a little bit later. It was at the same time. I don’t remember now, but this really helped me as well. Before we come to this planet, before our souls incarnate into this human form. We sit with our soul family and we decide what this lifetime is going to look at. Like we sit there and we go, okay, because this is a school. Earth is a school. Our souls come here to learn, right? So if our soul has already gone, I want to know what love feels like. Cool. We did that. I want to know what success feels like. Cool. We come and we do that. I want to know what fame feels like. Cool. We come and we do that. When we start running out of fun things. Our soul has been around for a really long time. Now it goes, cool. I want to know what pain feels like. I’d like to know what cancer feels like.

Kelli Russell | 22:24.651

Wow.

Tina Djuretic | 22:26.371

Right? Like, and we go, why would you do that? That’s the innocence of our soul. Our soul is just this nonjudgmental. They don’t go good experience, bad experience. The soul goes experience. I learn from this experience. Now to truly understand any experience, you have to live both sides of it.

Kelli Russell | 22:47.388

I do understand that, you know, this world is filled with so many polarities and every color of rainbow in between. I believe that God is expressing itself through these infinite fractals, ourselves. And because it is the all, the total, totality, that every possibility must be expressed. So that is just part of that expression of the rainbow of dark to light.

Tina Djuretic | 23:14.504

Yes, exactly. And so we, without judgment, our soul wants to experience everything. Well, you can’t truly experience something until you’ve done both sides of it. So that was something she explained as well that day. Whatever’s been done to you, you’ve done it to someone else. That is a really, when you look at people that have suffered things like sexual abuse, it’s hard for them to take that. But it is. the truth of our souls. If you are the victim in one lifetime, you are the perpetrator in the next one. And that is where you’re able to find forgiveness because the judgment you’re putting on the person that hurt you, you have to think, oh my God, how many lifetimes was I the abuser? And that’s where you realize the soul deserves to be forgiven.

Kelli Russell | 24:11.284

There’s a story called The Egg that my husband brings up quite a bit. And it’s kind of like a cartoon with different images that shows this very thing. The soul’s journey. It’s like, I was this person and that person too. And you were this and you were that. And it shows the whole entire journey of being every part of that gamut. I’ll link to it in our show notes as well for those that want to see it because it’s a visual representation of what you’re sharing. So that helps you get that. understanding and awareness and compassion. And it’s like letting go of being hypocritical. If I’ve done this at some point, then I can be at peace or at ease with the whole experience of the human capacity.

Tina Djuretic | 24:53.848

Yeah. And And if you don’t forgive in this lifetime, and if you don’t heal that pain, well, guess what? You’re just going to do it again in this lifetime. So you’re benefiting yourself. You’re benefiting the other person by forgiving them. And you’re doing what we came here to do, to experience. The first person I needed to forgive was myself for choosing these lousy things to experience in the first place. I chose my parents. I chose my sisters. I chose.

Kelli Russell | 25:20.671

Did I do this?

Tina Djuretic | 25:21.912

Why did I do this? Right. But. I say, you know, think of an actor choosing a script. You’re going to play this super juicy role that every actor in their lifetime would love to play. You’re going to play this woman who loses her child in a car accident. You know, OK, so great on paper. It looks great when that actor has to embody that actual in actuality and live through it for months of filming. They often walk out of that quite traumatized. Right. So that’s what our soul does. Our soul goes, ooh, let’s try this juicy thing that we’re going to do. Oh, also, we have to put in a whole bunch of karma from these past lives and a bunch of lessons we need you to learn. And I need you to ascend. So we’re going to put this in your recipe box as well. We’re going to program that onto your root chakra and voila, new life is born. But then the new life is born, not remembering any of it. So it just has to live the experience and go, this is lousy, right? So you have to forgive yourself. first your soul for even choosing these lessons, but your soul doesn’t want to harm you. Your soul doesn’t work against you. It is only there to help you grow. So you forgive your soul and then you learn to trust it explicitly.

Kelli Russell | 26:39.484

I’m assuming the toxic relationships that you found yourself in were patterned after your upbringing. How did you learn to break free of those patterns so they don’t keep? repeating and you find the same partner again and again and again what will be different now and how did you do that and what will you be looking for as you’re finding the next person part of the healing um

Tina Djuretic | 27:10.122

but well okay when i was very young and still broken probably around oh gosh maybe 12 or so years old when i started babysitting and things like that I knew that I needed to break this pattern. Of course, I didn’t have the understanding I have now, but somewhere my subconscious mind understood. I knew that my father was beaten by his father and I knew that my mother’s mother was evil. Those are the only things that I really knew about them. So I had enough understanding to understand that this was in fact being passed on. So personally, I made the decision not to have children. I don’t think that’s the only answer. I don’t think it has to be that extreme. I have no regrets that I don’t have children. For me, I needed that. I needed to make that. But the other way to make sure you’re not passing it on is to heal it. When you heal, you heal your entire bloodline. So not only are you going to parent your children differently, but then they’re going to parent their children differently as well. But as well. Not only do our souls choose the life that we’re going to be born into, but we’re often choose the same bloodline over and over. Because if we’ve come into that bloodline, and we were supposed to heal something, and we couldn’t do it in that lifetime, because we, you know, we’ve had many, many lifetimes where we didn’t succeed, because it was so dark on this planet was so dense, it was really hard to heal. So, but then our soul comes out of that lifetime knows exactly what happened. It goes, Yeah, I’m going back in. Let’s do it again. Let’s see if we can do it again. Right. So we get invested in that bloodline to help heal it, which means that other souls in our life, in our bloodline are doing the same thing. So by healing myself in this one, not only do I then heal my offspring, et cetera, et cetera, but those souls that are sitting there waiting to reincarnate, waiting for someone in my family and my bloodline to have another baby so they can come and reincarnate. They’re now born into a bloodline. where that healing has been done. So we are helping future generations. It is the least selfish thing that you can do. Heal yourself. You heal your entire bloodline. That is a beautiful mission for your soul. If that is the only thing that you accomplish in this world is to bring healing to your bloodline. Why not? Why not, right? They deserve it. My parents deserve healing. They deserve peace. My mother’s never known peace in her life. She’s never known love. She’s never known fulfillment. I don’t wish that for anybody, even my abuser.

Kelli Russell | 29:53.414

So from your perspective, how does one heal that family generational trauma? And some people have tried therapy and they go, yeah, it’s nice to be heard and, you know, witnessed and have a sounding board. But I have insight. The patterns still keep going on. So how does one break the pattern?

Tina Djuretic | 30:14.000

So I think therapy is amazing. I certainly don’t diss the therapy at all. But I have seen people who talk about it for 20 years and they’re no.

Kelli Russell | 30:23.835

I see that as well.

Tina Djuretic | 30:25.575

Yeah. And that’s because we are mind, body, and spirit, right? Whether you’re spiritual or not, you’re still a mind, a body, and a soul. So mind, body, and spirit. You need to work on all things, all of these things to truly come into healing. And it’s not going to happen overnight either. It is hard because the hard. if I can say that, the difficulty, I guess that’s a better word, is going to be reflective of how much trauma you’ve been through, right? Because you do need to go back to those moments and not relive them, but journal or dive into them enough to get the feelings, right? Again, it’s about feeling. Once you can get those feelings out, then you can start to heal them, but you do need to do one thing at a time. So Right now I’m writing, I’m totally engulfed in writing my second book, which is going to be exactly that because I didn’t want to leave people hanging at the end of my memoir, like, yay, she found healing after this difficult life. How, how did you find it? So I always knew the next book would be, you know, how I did it. So the entire four years that I was writing, editing, you know, working on this, I was going through my own healing and I didn’t have any teachers to help or to show me the way I was like. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do here. So I took copious notes. And thank God that I did, because I don’t know that I would be able to remember everything I did, but it’s all right there. And so now I’m writing this. So I’m diving into this as we speak. So there are a couple of things to do. First of all, again, forgive yourself. Start there. Start by understanding your situation. Try to, it’s really hard to do when you’re in it, but try to take a little bit of a step back enough that you can journal your situation. Journaling is so powerful. I’ve heard that, you know, from therapists my whole life journal, la la la la la, never did it, man. I get it now. I get why it’s powerful. There’s something as soon as you intend to heal, first of all, I’m going to say this as soon as you intend to heal, your soul takes over. It’s huge. Your soul goes, Oh God, finally. Cause our souls cannot jump in unless we ask for help, but we have a team around us just waiting for the moment where we ask for help. Otherwise we get to make our own decisions in life, right? So soon as we ask for help, it’s activated. A great place to start is with your root chakra because we are energy systems in our body. right? This is the computer chip that’s running our avatar. If you will, they get computed with trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, your, your base chakra or your root chakra down by your tailbone. There is the first one that comes online. So first of all, your soul has already programmed things into it before you were born, right? The, the Karmic wants you to heal the lessons, the things that are, you know, from past lives. And then until you’re about seven years old, you’re just a sponge, just absorbing your environment. And that’s all going into your root chakra. So now you have this energy center holding all of this trauma, if that’s what happened to you, whether that’s big trauma or little trauma. A lot of people feel like if I didn’t have the great big traumas happen to me, then what’s the problem? Well, what if even something as simple as a parent died when you were five or six, say your mother dies, you’re five or six years old, your father is falling apart. part, you’re the oldest child. So who steps up? You do. You become an adult when you’re not ready to be an adult. You’re still supposed to be a child. This is trauma. Trauma isn’t always people doing bad things to you. Sometimes it’s very salivation, right? Trauma is trauma. We all have trauma.

Kelli Russell | 34:25.651

The safety, security, survival must have that basic need met before you can self-actualize anything farther than that. So finding ways to feel safe and secure in your own body. You mentioned to me grounding practices. What do you do for grounding?

Tina Djuretic | 34:46.414

So your root chakra is also your grounding chakra, right? It’s literally what grounds you. So, you know, you meet people who are very, I don’t know, they’re all over the place. You meet people that are very grounded. You’re very grounded, right? Just sitting here talking to you, I feel how grounded you are. So you feel that from people. So there’s a couple of things that I learned to do for the root chakra. One was journaling, journaling it all out. You can’t hide when it’s in front of you in black and white. The second one was meditation. And man, I struggled with this one. I have a monkey mind. It goes a thousand miles a minute. I really, and people really struggle with this, but we don’t have to be so defined either. There’s no one right way to heal, right? There are many modalities. So find what works for you. So meditation can be walking through the forest. The trees are literally grounded into the earth by walking amongst them and in their energy and take that. you know, the music out of your ears for a minute to like, just walk through the forest, feel the feels, earthing, grounding, literally putting your feet in the sand or in the dirt is also really, really just it’s literally earthing and grounding. Meditation is really good for this. And for me, there needs to be movement as well, because your movement, your energy inside of you gets really blocked and stagnant, and it doesn’t have anywhere to go. That’s why people do yoga. Yoga isn’t about exercise. It’s about moving the energy, grounding you and flowing what needs to go out so that the rest of it can also flow within you. So for me, some movement is important. If yoga is not your thing, Tai Chi, you know, Tai Chi, any of these things.

Kelli Russell | 36:32.698

Dance party in your living room.

Tina Djuretic | 36:34.460

Thank you. That dance party. If you’re a jogger, a biker, it doesn’t matter. Just do some movement, right? Um, any movement and it’s better to do five minutes a day than once a week for an hour as well. It’s making these things a daily practice that really, um, solidify them and just really ground us. Uh,

Kelli Russell | 36:51.786

so grounding heel drops or getting on a trampoline to move the, you know, the lymph system, anything where we’re moving multidimensionally.

Tina Djuretic | 37:00.210

Sometimes I just sit there and just shake. Like if I just had a really good healing session and I’m like, shake this off, I’ll just stand up and just shake. Movement is super important. So that’s body, right? So mind, body, spirit, we’re grounding by writing, we’re kind of our mind is being engaged by grounding our soul and our spirit is being anchored into Gaia, into Mother Earth, because she’s the one that’s going to help us to heal, right? And, and then the movement is your is your body. So these things are really good place to start, because it’s not going to happen in five minutes either. Right? Like, Past stuff, past lives. Yeah. Heal that in five minutes. No problem. But the things that are really cemented into you. So once you do all of those things and you’re starting to remove your old computer chip that was programmed into you, now you need a new one. So this goes hand in hand with reprogramming and reprogramming.

Kelli Russell | 37:56.830

That’s what I do. I don’t know if you knew that about me, but that’s my work. Yeah. Oh,

Tina Djuretic | 38:00.971

lovely. Okay. So then, you know, this side, reprogram yourself. Yeah. I listened to 30 days of positive affirmations. Never thought I would get an ounce of sleep if I did that. I did. After like five days, I started to sleep through it. And man, what a difference that made. I had sticky notes all over my apartment with positive affirmations. Every time I had a negative thought about myself, because of course, my mother was very mentally abusive. So I mean, every day of my life, I was told, you’re fat. You’ll never be anything. No one will ever love you. I didn’t even want you. You’re nothing but a burden to this family. Like that program was so strong, let it into my relationships, right? Because that’s what I thought about myself. I didn’t outwardly think that about myself, but my subconscious mind did. So I had to reprogram that. So if I looked in the mirror and put on an outfit and went, Oh God, you’re fat in this. I immediately caught it and went, Nope. And I would write like 10. you are beautiful. I love my body. Like I would make sure that whatever the programming, I was starting to catch it because I was starting to become aware.

Kelli Russell | 39:13.503

Yeah. I wanted to ask you too about the spirit. You know, you went from an extreme Christian background in a cult to, I hear you talking about Mother Gaia and the chocolate system and spirit. So I, you know, just for a few minutes, how did you make that transition? What awakened you to that shift?

Tina Djuretic | 39:32.834

This happened in stages for me. It didn’t happen all at once. I’ll assume I wasn’t ready, but I was mid-20s. I’d say 20. even I can probably pinpoint it 26 or so 27 somewhere in there when I met my first spiritual person uh she was a white witch that’s what she used to call her yeah so uh and and when she was even coming to my apartment it was a friend of mine that wanted to date her and he said I met this girl she’s really out there like really woo woo I don’t understand half of what she’s saying the other half like at first I thought she was crazy, but she’s starting to grow on me. Can I bring her to your house for dinner? Because you have a really good like bullshit detector. And I was like, yeah, bring her over. And within five minutes, and I had never met anyone like this ever before, because obviously going to a church, this is not. Oh,

Kelli Russell | 40:31.712

right.

Tina Djuretic | 40:32.073

Is she Wiccan?

Kelli Russell | 40:35.154

A Wiccan?

Tina Djuretic | 40:37.235

She was, she just called herself a white witch. This would have been like 1996, right? So language again, also has changed maybe Wiccan, but I, I don’t ever remember here that word.

Kelli Russell | 40:48.220

Yeah.