Foster Care Success: Homeless to Professor with Katie Nall

Jason Palmer 0:00
Foster Care nation. Listen, this is foster care

Unknown Speaker 0:04
and

Jason Palmer 0:10
string for the powerless courage for the fearful hope and healing for wounded hearts.

Welcome back to foster care. And I’m parallel with Jason and Amanda. We’ve got a special guest with us here today we have a miss Katie now, maybe even Dr. Katie now, how about that?

Katie left home in high school. She was homeless for a while. She was placed in foster home until she graduated from high school and then hitchhiked 20 miles to college. And now she’s helping others dissolve their waffles.

dissolving waffles at first glance is not what it sounds like. There’s no milk involved here. waffles is worries, anxiety, fear, frustration, lethargy, lethargy, exhaustion and stress. And apparently I have some mouth lethargy going on, because English is leaving me. Katie, how are you doing today?

Katie Nall 1:15
I’m doing great. Thank you so much. Both Jason and Amanda. I’m thrilled to be here today.

Jason Palmer 1:20
Oh, it’s great to have you know, Amanda and I were watching your TED Talk. And then of course, YouTube doesn’t spy on you or know everything you’re thinking about, but it just keeps you out of playing things that have you in it they can find and so we watched and saw a lot of the story especially of where you’re at today. You know, we watch you talking about dissolving waffles and the EFT which is Emotional Freedom Technique, right.

Katie Nall 1:43
I’m so impressed.

Jason Palmer 1:46
I’m impressed too, because I’ve been trying to remember that for like a day and a half. And it just, it should be electromagnetic frequency for in my head. There’s something I couldn’t remember it. So I’m just proud. I remembered it.

Amanda Palmer 1:57
Two bonus points for you. Yeah.

Jason Palmer 2:00
So so we’re talking, you know, we were listening to all that really well. And an interesting stuff. We you know, we listened to your to a lot of the stuff you’re talking about with the tapping, which honestly, I have never heard before. And when you said it’s been something been used since like, what, 30 years ago, and I’m like 40. Okay. I’ve been around that long and then a little bit, and I’ve never heard of it before. until just recently, we had Gina human on on one of the episodes. And Gina tells her story as she dealt with a kid who, who was came from Bolivia, Bulgaria, somewhere that started with a B, and other country. And it was a kid who was diagnosed with rad Yeah, diagnosed with rad he had a really rough backstory, and had reactive attachment disorder and her and her husband went through the wringer trying to help us get and eventually found the right therapies. And on a really good pathway. It’s one of the few really, really positive rad stories I’ve heard. But she left the whole situation with some pretty serious PTSD from it all.

Amanda Palmer 3:00
That was one thing that the therapist taught her was tapping, had wild success with her child with that.

Jason Palmer 3:08
And she said, that wasn’t one of the things that gave her one of the only things it gave her her big success. So that was one of the things that I was like, Oh, this, here’s some some correlation to some things I’ve heard in the past. And I see you’re doing all this stuff and helping all these people. But that’s an amazing story for anybody. But go back to that backstory. You know, you left home in high school, you were homeless, you’re in foster care. And when you ended up in college, you hitchhiked to get there. I mean, look, that’s a reference. Yeah, it is. So So what made you leave home back at the beginning?

Katie Nall 3:48
So Jason and Amanda, you know, it’s funny going back, and now that I’m getting older and trying to still make sense of all of that, right. It’s been an interesting journey.

My parents divorced before I was born. And what’s interesting is that my mother, this was in 1950s.

said she wanted to borrow their one car that they had, my father was stationed in San Francisco at the time. She wanted to borrow the one car to go out and get, I think cigarettes or something. And she took the one car they had and drove from San Francisco, to Pittsburgh, Kansas. Now think about this. This was a single woman in the 1950s. She did not have a credit card. I am sure she had no cash. And how did she get from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, Kansas. Now? Why would she leave? Well, my father was I’ve been told excited when he found out that his new wife was pregnant and until he had called his mother to say Guess what, we’re going to have a child

My father was an only child and his mother had decided that she wasn’t keen about being a mother. So when my father was five years old, he placed she placed him in a boarding school. Imagine a five year old in a boarding school. He was in the Navy at the time when my mother when he met my mother, and they they married. And so when he told his mother that she was going to be a grandma, her response was, I’m too young to be a grandmother, you’ve got to abort the baby. My mother, who was raised as a strict Roman Catholic, didn’t like the sound of that. And borrow the car drove from San Francisco to Southeast Kansas, where she gave birth to me while she was living with her parents who were in their 60s at the time. And she got a full time job. And actually, you know, it’s really interesting.

I was pretty much raised by my grandparents, right, because my mother was working. And my nearby aunt who lives in Arma, Kansas, we’re talking about all these small towns in southeast Kansas. And, and they really gave me the difference, I believe, that made the difference in my life. Because as I’ve done my research, as I’ve done the studies, it’s the first 12 months of life that can really make a difference. After I was born, my mother met married, her second husband had two more children. When I was about 10 years old, they got a divorce, she married a third husband, I got a divorce, and she met married a fourth husband. Throughout all of this, we basically were pretty much living in poverty, from time to time, when the new husband would come in, and they’d have a new job. There would be lots of money for a while, but then it would go back, I ended up attending 12 different schools in five different states. As I was growing up, we never moved in the summer, we always moved, you know, sometime mid state. The one thing that was constant in my education was math. Because that’s pretty consistent, right? All the way through. You know, there’s something interesting that happened between World War One and World War Two. But when I left one school, they were starting the study of World War One. And when I transferred to the other school, they would finish this world war two studies. So whenever I have questions about that, I just asked my husband because it’s just too much dream.

Amanda Palmer 7:38
That’s a lot of instability for our kid, though.

Katie Nall 7:41
Well, not only Amanda was an instability, but I had two siblings, that, you know, you mentioned that you grew up fast. I grow fast, too. I remember taking my first real job with a paycheck, I’m so proud of myself, I had been taking jobs along the way, you know, babysitting jobs. I’m really gonna date myself, collecting pop models and taking to the store for five cents apiece, and my little wagon. And I would crochet, you know, little potholders that I mean, I would do anything to generate income, so that there would be things that we could buy, I used to write plays, and force my siblings to be in the plays, or we sell tickets to the neighborhood kids for a nickel, I would hand out popcorn for free, extra salted, so that I could sell the Kool Aid at 15 cents. So that, but even then, you know, when you’re growing up in that kind of environment, that’s all you know, right? And so and so you think that this is what everybody’s going through. As we move from place to place I started, I was getting older, I started kind of looking around to see, you know, hey, not everybody else is moving around, like we’re moving around, and hey, they’ve got a really nice house and Wow, look at her clothes. And, gosh, you know, they’re doing different things. And as I got older, I started trying to determine what was the difference? And for me, the difference that I saw, was it the people that were going places and doing things that I wanted to do, their parents had more education. We were pretty much a group that was led by a single mother back when there were not a lot of single mothers. It’s not like it is now right. It was pretty unusual to and and we were attending parochial schools. So the nuns were telling us all the time about how my mother was excommunicated from the church and you know, we were going on through all that. When the when I figured out that education was going to make the difference because my mother really Didn’t she I think she had one year of college and she was studying art. She was very artistic. And so her jobs were all low level jobs. And of course, in the 50s 60s, and 70s, women’s pay was even worse than it is now. So we never had enough money. My first job that I took where I did get a paycheck, and they took out social security and all that stuff, I was 12 years old, and I work at the restaurant that was directly behind our house as a dishwasher for a huge amount of money of 75 cents an hour. And I was thrilled to get it right. Because what I did with the money is I was able to buy winter coats for me and my siblings. And so this kind of continued on. And, you know, it’s just what we thought from time to time we go back and stay with grandparents, we did, we were able to stay close to cousins, which made a huge difference. And they were the they were probably the people I got to observe the most, because I could see their lifestyle. You know, one of my cousin’s had a horse, another cousins, group of cousins belonged to Country Club, you know, other cousins would ask me, have you ever had a bicycle? And I’m like, Well, you know, someday. So watching my cousins is probably where I got the big idea that their education is what got them. So education really became the drive for me. When I was a junior in high school, I think it was in between my summer between my sophomore and junior year. A couple of years before that. All of a sudden, I had the opportunity to meet my father for the first time. Well, as you might imagine, my entire life My father was on this pedestal, he was going to save me from all of this disruption from all this chaos from all this craziness. And so the idea of meeting him with a psych, my heart was going to burst

Jason Palmer 11:59
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Katie Nall 12:26
So I was 14 years old when I first met him. And I just thought he was amazing. He flew in from California where he was living. And we were in Missouri where Missouri at the time sourcewell, Missouri. And he met us it we actually drove to Kansas City and met him at the airport there. I just realized something, huh, that’s the same place I met. I didn’t really put that together for that’s the same place I first met one of the children that my mother gave up for adoption. It was at the Kansas City Airport, just put that together. Anyway. So I met him there. And then between my sophomore and junior year, I was supposed to fly out to California to spend the summer with them. And I couldn’t. I was so disappointed when my father called and said, I’m really sorry, you can’t come out because I’m getting a divorce from my second wife. And she will be in jail because she hired a hitman to kill me. So I couldn’t. I couldn’t go there. So I’m kind of feeling like my options are closing in on me, right. But we had been at the same place for more than a year. And I was starting to make friends. It was small enough town we were in Nebraska then. And, and it was a small enough town that I was people were starting to notice me and I was starting to you know, make friends and and I actually got nominated to win homecoming courts. Well, it wasn’t the big one. You know, it was a basketball homecoming, but still, you know, to be recognized for you

Amanda Palmer 14:09
though.

Katie Nall 14:10
Yeah, it felt really good. It felt really good. So I was very excited. So I told my mom about it. And I asked what my curfew was because I never went out. I really didn’t date. You know, I just didn’t do any of that stuff. And I asked her what my curfew was, and she said we have to be home by nine o’clock. I’m a junior in high school. And and this is the big dance, which really doesn’t start until after the game, which is like 830 or nine o’clock and I was like, clock. So that time I’d kind of gotten mine. You know, I was a teenager and you know, luckily I knew everything.

Amanda Palmer 14:48
Because you were a team you had to know.

Katie Nall 14:51
Yeah, I knew everything. So I decided I was going to show my mother. So um, I had my date. We went to the dance. It was pretty Nothing’s going on. And my date drove up to take dropped me off at 11 o’clock. And I looked at my watch. I said, No, I’m not going in right now. Do you mind sitting in the car with me for another hour? Because I’m not going to go inside until midnight? And he said, Sure. So we set up my car until midnight, and I said, Okay, I’ll go ahead now. So at the time, we were living in a section of town that I called, and others due to welfare Island because it was less expensive place to live. And they were quite nice. They were very nice places. It was a two storey kind of place. And that Saturday, that next day, was my FHA. And education is important to me, right. And I knew that I had to do well on my si t so that I could go to college. I had no idea which college I was going to go to, I had to study I just knew that I needed to get education. So I I went and of course I didn’t have a key because I was a junior in high school and couldn’t be trusted. And so I checked the front door that was locked. I checked the back door that was locked. So I opened the utility room door which was adjacent but separate. And the washer and dryer was there. So I slept on the washer and dryer until they like and it daylight I knew I had to get up and get dressed and and go to get take my shgs so I checked the doors, the doors was still locked. So I started throwing rocks at the windows to wake up my sister, I finally I heard steps coming down. She was like, Oh my god, it’d be great. And sure enough, the door open and it was my mother. I was coming in at 6am when I was supposed to be coming in at nine. It did not.

Amanda Palmer 16:57
I can imagine it did not

Katie Nall 16:59
go well. There was lots of love words, lots of physical stuff going on. And it was at that point that I just said, You know, I really think this is enough. She would not drive me the few miles to the nearby town where the city was going to be on the essay. It was important to me. So I walked I walked those few miles to get to the city. So I could take my LSAT. So I could go to some college somewhere and study something so I can have a different life. That was my goal. pretty specific. Don’t you think?

Amanda Palmer 17:32
It’s at least a goal for

Jason Palmer 17:34
it. Yeah. Okay. That is actually kind of specific for high school kids. I know.

Katie Nall 17:39
Yeah. I think you’re right, Jason. So I took my LSAT walked back home. And when I got home the door, my sister was there. And she’d heard the whole thing. But my mother was not there. So I grabbed a couple outfits. I didn’t grab a suitcase or anything. And I just left. I just laughed, I was like, I’m done. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. We were again, in a new town, there was no support system, there was nobody there. And so I literally slept under the bushes in Nebraska. For a while cuz I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. I still went to high school. Some of my friends figured out that what was going on and they would let me sleep in their place a day or two until their parents found out their parents would flip out and throw me out. And so I just kind of moved around from place to place. And finally I realized I really needed some stability right? And went to my high school counselor. I said I don’t I don’t know, can you help me find a place to live and they’re like foster homes. I’m like, Okay, I have no idea what that is. But let’s do it. And so they placed me in a foster home later I found out that my foster sister within the same grade as my sister I grew up with, and I guess she really lorded it over my younger sister, which I didn’t know at all. So I stayed there for a little over a year graduated from high school on a Friday night. Nobody came. I had made arrangements with my dad that he said he would pay for me to go to college. If I flew out to San Francisco, San Diego. It’s like no another word. I’m Dare you pay for my ticket? Right? I flew out there. He picked me up at the San Diego airport and quickly drove me out of San Diego it shows kind of like I’ve been writing you letters and I know the address was in San Diego. So why are we going out to San Diego and we ended up in the home of his ex wife who was now recently out of jail after a one year trial and ended up in a Holland jury. And so I walked right into there met my his his son and daughter from her And they didn’t know existed until I walked in the door. So that was kind of fun to explain all that. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, you’ll be living here. And at first I was like, I’m just gonna be living with my dad, looking back at it. A 42 year old man with an 18 year old girl in a studio apartment in San Diego. Not a good idea. But at the time, I was all hurt. And I said, Okay, this is great. I’m excited. Where’s the school? It’s a really small town. I’m looking around. I don’t see the college anywhere. I don’t know much about college, but I know it’s gonna have a building here. The college is 20 miles away. I said, Okay. Well, Southern California, doesn’t have a lot of sidewalks doesn’t have a lot of buses. And they have a lot of ways the only way that you get around in Southern California. So in a car, I said, that’s great. Where’s my car? There’s no car. So education has got to be important to me, what am I going to do? So I went, I walked out to the highway and I hitchhiked one way. 20 miles one way and 20 miles back, just to get my education. Wow, that’s my backstory.

Amanda Palmer 21:16
That’s quite a story. I mean, but wow. I mean, obviously, you succeeded. And you made it somewhere.

Katie Nall 21:24
Well, a knight in shining armor period. Oh, yeah. One of those you go, I can tell you got one of those. The knight in shining armor appeared, I ended up meeting a naval officer, who was cuter than all get out. I mean, it was so cute. And he paid attention to me. And he asked me out for a date. So I was like, Yeah, sure. That’s great. So we drove 30 miles out to where we were to get a date. Well, at the time, I didn’t realize that I had the disorder that I have now that I can now control that at the time, I could fall asleep like that. And you could move, you could move me You couldn’t touch me. It was like I weighed 1000 pounds, and you have narcolepsy. Or, yeah, it was a version of that. And, but it was caused by celiac, which I didn’t know at the time. And so he came to pick me up and my younger sister there. said, Oh, she’s asleep. He’s like, five in the sleep. And she’s like, yeah, she’s asleep.

Unknown Speaker 22:29
And she shut the door on.

Jason Palmer 22:31
That sounds like a sister.

Unknown Speaker 22:32
Right?

Katie Nall 22:35
And so, um, I, I’m pretty much a, you know, whatever happens happens. And so it’s like, oh, well, something else to come along. So, about a month later, I went to a different dance. And this guy came up to me, Oh, my gosh, he’s so good looking. And he said, so you’re gonna apologize. And I said, For what? Because I don’t I’m not good with faces, right? Give me some numbers. I’m pretty good. But it’s like, you stood me up. I was like, I didn’t stand you up.

Amanda Palmer 23:05
What are you talking about?

Katie Nall 23:09
So um, he heard my story, found out what I was doing what was going on, he was getting ready to go out to sea and he said, You know what? I mean, I’ve known this guy for like, one week. He said, You know what? I was just getting ready to put my car in storage. Why don’t you drive

Unknown Speaker 23:24
it? Wow.

Katie Nall 23:26
I had never met anyone so kind, so generous, so loving in my life. This next summer, we will be celebrating our 48th wedding anniversary.

Amanda Palmer 23:40
That’s amazing. Congratulations.

Katie Nall 23:42
For somebody who I swore when I was 18 years old. I was never going to get married. Ever. I mean, why would I get married my parents, you know, married, divorced. My grandparents married and divorced. my great grandparents married doors.

Amanda Palmer 23:57
Why? Exactly. I know exactly what you’re talking about. You know, my mom, I believe is had four or five marriages. Now I decided to quit counting. You know, but marriage and relationships. Just, you know, they didn’t last. So why would

Jason Palmer 24:14
you bother? Right. Not to mention one of the marriages you had modeled for you how to hit man involved? Yeah.

Amanda Palmer 24:22
That’s a little bit of a deterrent, I would say. But yeah, I do have a question. So um, you were talking about being in high school, and then you know, going into foster care. And then after high school going out to be with your father. Where was your father while you were in foster care? I mean, did he know that you were in foster care that he tried to do anything about that, or?

Katie Nall 24:44
Yeah, well, I you know, when I left home, he was still in the throes of the court case. And, and so he was trying his best to take care of his son and daughter that he had time which turned out Not to be his son. And, but you know, we treat him like he is. And he actually, both my parents died, leaving traces that we followed up, but each of them separately gave up a child for adoption. And what’s interesting is the child my father gave up for adoption was born the same year I was born. I was born in December.

Unknown Speaker 25:29
So

Katie Nall 25:32
that means that my father is probably pretty active.

Amanda Palmer 25:38
That’s a nice way to put it, I suppose.

After after you left home and you were in foster care. Did you continue to have a relationship with your mother at that point, or?

Katie Nall 25:51
Well, Amanda, I continued to have relationships with my brother and sister that I had been raised with it. Biologically, they’re my half siblings, but you know, by every other way, they’re my full siblings. Biologically, I’m an only child. So I continue to have relationships with them. And I did contain relationships with my mother. In the early 90s, I started doing therapy. I am a voracious reader. So I was reading a lot of books, trying to understand trying to figure out trying to trying to first of all, just keep myself balanced, right? I just needed to find my own. Like, how do I make this work kind of thing. So for four years, once a week, I was in therapy, just to try and get myself balance. In the meantime, I did maintain relationships with my mother, looking, I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I think almost anybody would have diagnosed her as a narcissistic, alcoholic. And, you know, I look back and for years, really, literally, until last year, I saw her exclusively as a monster, an absolute monster, and just saw all the lives that I felt like that she had destroyed. My there’s me, there’s my sister, and my brother, and the three, she kind of drugged the three of us, you know, throughout the Midwest, but my brother, she would say to him, you’re just like your father and your father is no good. How many times do you have to hear that before you put those two sentences together?

Jason Palmer 27:36
in the foster care nation, if you’d like to find yourself in a group of like minded people, head over Facebook, and you can find us@facebook.com slash groups slash foster care you j, we’ve got a group over there where we talked about foster care, we talked about adoption, we talked about all the things related, if your podcast player allows it, you can also reach out to hit that subscribe button. So you get notified every week when we put up uploads. Every Tuesday, a new episode comes out. We’d love to see you next week. Now back to the show.

Amanda Palmer 28:07
Yeah, exactly.

Jason Palmer 28:10
Words are powerful.

Katie Nall 28:11
Yeah. And now as it turned out, the three of us turned out to be contributing members of society. My sister, Liz, Mary, for almost 40 years, her husband died of sleep apnea about three years ago, and my brother has been married for over 25 years. So we both all three of us brought a lot of stability into our own personal lives, independent of the way we were raised.

Jason Palmer 28:45
That’s really rare to see because those sorts of problems tend to be generational, right. And, you know, at least us at least one of the siblings can come out of that really, really follow the parents lead. And it sounds like you guys all managed to find your own path to something much better

Katie Nall 29:02
somehow. Now, on the other side, on my father’s side, the oldest who’s someone I’ve never met, he’s the one that was adopted. When my sister on that side went to speak with him. He heard her story and said, I’m happy where I am. Thank you very much and kind of shut the door. Then the next one who actually belongs to my stepmother really struggles with anxiety. I mean, big time. He he, he he struggled with even being able to talk to us for a number of years just because not not anything he had against us but him trying to work out his own issues. And then my sister in a way committed suicide through alcoholism at 49. And both my father and my sister died at 49 And it was pretty much alcoholism, for my father was probably a little bit of cigarettes. tobacco.

Amanda Palmer 30:10
Yeah. So

Jason Palmer 30:12
it sounds like you guys have really independently found a pathway to success. What do you think was the catalyst for you to to find that pathway? What made you go search for something more?

Katie Nall 30:26
Well, Jason, I think that what the research that I found because I questioned that myself and and what what I came up with in therapy is that the two people who probably contributed to my mother’s illness, who probably who probably contributed to her narcissism, because she was she was born and raised when the youngest kid was over 16 years old. So she was known as the accident, right? So she had that growing up. And because she was youngest, and everybody off was off doing their thing, including my grandparents, they pretty much let her do anything she wants. So she got said yes to everything, we can’t help but become self centered, right when that happens. So the two people that kind of created or contributed to my mother’s narcissistic tendencies. And I don’t know, I’m thinking she something traumatic may have happened either in high school or younger, I mean, but besides the fact that her husband said she had to have an abortion, and she didn’t want to have, but something triggered to to cause her to go off. Well, what’s interesting is, those two people are probably what saved me because I spent so much time with my grandparents, as an infant, and even older. And I think that they kind of gave me that stability. I know even going into their little tiny house, which gets smaller and smaller every year to me, I’ve never gone back to old palaces, but it’s like a Hollywood ask is so small, I have such warm and tender memories of that. And the studies show that the first 12 months of life, really can fire up those, those brain dendrites right and and get them going in the right direction. They say that, you know, you can hold an infant at six weeks and tell them whether or not they have self esteem. And I really think that it was my grandparents. That gave me self esteem, self confidence, and allowed me to make a different choice in life.

Jason Palmer 32:35
It’s amazing. I’d mentioned the talking with Gina human A while back. Her story was about a kid who did not have that at a young age. And that’s where as far as they understand it, where they believe rad really comes from. So reactive attachment, I think can actually look a lot like like narcissism in later years, because it has so many wild pieces. I don’t know how much of that you’re familiar with. But it’s it’s one of those things. It’s really scary. But I almost said disease, not disease, it’s a disorder, that you don’t catch it. You know, you don’t get it, you know, the bacteria or virus doesn’t give it to you. It’s something that happens because of what someone did or did not do. When you were a kid.

Amanda Palmer 33:17
Sounds like you have really fond memories of your grandparents though.

Yes, I do. Um,

may I ask Where were your grandparents when you were in foster care?

Katie Nall 33:27
Um, my grandmother died when I was 10. And my grandfather, I think he may have died by then as well.

Jason Palmer 33:37
So when you when you did go into foster care, what was that? Like? I mean, we’ve heard all kinds of stories, everything from wonderful, beautiful homes where people, you know, had met these loving relationships that have lasted a lifetime, right down to violent physical, sexually abusive homes as well. And so did you have a good experience and foster care? Or was it something else?

Katie Nall 34:00
So Jason, I’m very thankful for my foster family. Um, they, they were there when I needed them. That’s the best thing ever, right? I was the oldest, they had two children of their own. And they also the mother was pregnant with the baby. So the baby was born while I was there, outside a farm. So I think it was great to have me there. Because I got to slop the pigs and and, you know, take care of the hay and do things on the farm after school. So I think that it was it was good all the way around. Right. They were generous in the fact that I had my own bedroom, which was the first time in my life. I’d had my own bedroom. So that was a big deal. It was in the basement. I was ecstatic about that. They were reasonable in terms of you know, they didn’t withhold things from

Amanda Palmer 35:01
I,

Katie Nall 35:02
all my life, I’ve kind of felt like I’m separate or I’m kind of a satellite from others. And so it just, it was consistent there.

Jason Palmer 35:14
What almost makes me wonder if being around the the farm, the exposure to animals wasn’t something that was also helpful. We’ve talked with a lot of different people about doing therapy, a lot of equine therapies and things like that with with kids who have their own backstory or trauma, because it’s a, it’s a prey animal. And they identify a lot of times really well with kids who feel like prayers.

Katie Nall 35:40
Hmm. Yeah, I’m not fond of animals.

Amanda Palmer 35:46
I’m not a big animal person, either. But I mean,

Katie Nall 35:48
those cells were big, and you mess with them. So I was up against the fence a lot. Oh, they’re smelly. They’re smelly, and, and the cows were in any friendlier and you know, a horse. So yeah, it wasn’t something I got really excited about. After I in between before I got the foster care. While I was still trying to figure out what to do. I did pick corn for a while. And that was interesting. They pick you up at like, 536 in the morning, and you got in the field, right? And you pick coins I had, I am not afraid to take different jobs. I’m not afraid to take different jobs.

Jason Palmer 36:24
It sounds like you’ve done just about all of them. But as a young man, I did work for a couple farmers. Yeah, I, I have fed the hogs. And I will go ahead and verify those sounds are big in the mean, and they no fun, you know and be around. The horses typically aren’t so bad, but,

Amanda Palmer 36:42
but it’s hard work being on a farm.

Katie Nall 36:44
And those horses have big teeth, and big. I mean, they’re big.

Amanda Palmer 36:48
And if you’ve never been around that before, it can be very intimidating. I’m glad it helps others. I mean, we’ve talked to a few different people about equine therapy and, you know, talking with people about you know, maybe dog support therapy and things like that, you know, for a lot of kids, animals can be comforting, you know, they can they can confide in that animal and and it goes nowhere. Yeah, they’re not telling the kid at school and then everybody knows your business. And you’re being made fun of and, and everything like that.

Jason Palmer 37:24
Yeah, we talked quite a bit with Rebecca Britt about doing the equine therapy and, and how that’s helped a lot of kids over the years. And obviously, not every kid is going to benefit from it the same way because, well, not every kid really wants to hang out with the animals.

Amanda Palmer 37:42
I wouldn’t have wanted to either when I was a young girl, we did have a small kind of little, I don’t know, I guess you would call it like a hobby farm when a couple of our kids were younger, but yeah, as a as a young teenage girl. Yeah, I wouldn’t. In the pigs.

Jason Palmer 37:55
I will say though, it looks like you’ve done okay for yourself from from slopping the hogs to an office with a with a PhD hanging on the wall. I’m just gonna say that sounds like like quite the success story. And I think that’s part of what what I really wanted the listeners to hear is you came from a really tough place in a really small town in the middle of nowhere, in back in in, you know, times when that was a really determining factor on who you would become. And when you did that. That was man, you had the deck stacked against you. And you’ve managed to walk that road all the way, all the way out to being a college professor, a public speaker, a TED talker. These are not the this is not the background of your typical kid who’s going through this.

Katie Nall 38:42
Yeah. And and I wonder myself, Jason, you know, I okay, so maybe a little spiritual on your hair. I do believe that there were a lot of angels that were guiding me throughout keeping me safe in different things. I look back at some of the situations. I mean, I was 18 year old naive girl from Nebraska, on the signs of the San Diego freeway hitchhiking.

Amanda Palmer 39:10
Yeah, I mean, that that’s dangerous. I mean that. I mean, there was a time where, you know, women who were hitchhiking were not disappeared.

Katie Nall 39:17
Yeah. Yeah. More than once of the California Highway Patrol would pick me up and say, What are you doing out here? I’d say I’m hitchhiking to get to school. And I go get in. You know, and they would, they would take me. And there were a couple times where I was in the back of a van and I was kind of looking around going, huh. I probably shouldn’t have gotten in on this thing.

Amanda Palmer 39:40
Yeah, wow.

Jason Palmer 39:43
I think the the part that that is so very important to see is that regardless of where you come from, with enough grit, with enough of the right choices, you will take yourself to the right place.

Katie Nall 39:57
And I do think Jason that a lot of it is They’re help along the way. Right? I mean, I didn’t do this by myself. I had lots of people helping, you know, I mean, my dad offered to pay for my college education. If I came out to California now I will. This is kind of funny. So I hitchhiked to get to school, right. It was a community college in California in the 70s. The tuition for a as many courses as you want to take at a community college in California in the 70s. was $2. And that paid for your health insurance. But my dad paid it, and it was great. Yeah, so I was able to take advantage of, you know, a lot of situations. So yeah, so a lot of it is I just kept wanting to, I knew what I wanted, I wanted a different life. I wanted a different life, I knew. And when I was 18, I wrote down that there were five goals I was going to have, I heard one time, that if you write down your goals, and you’re very specific, that you have a much better chance of accomplishing them. And so I wrote down my five goals, my number one goal was I was going to earn my PhD. And I didn’t know what a PhD was. And I didn’t know what subject it was gonna be. And I just heard that that was the highest degree you could get, and I was going to get it. And my number two goal was I was going to buy a house. That makes sense, right? I was gonna have someplace stabled live. And I remember writing in parentheses, I didn’t care if it had furniture, not I mean, I would sleep on the floor, I just got this going to buy a house. My number three goal was I was going to buy a car and it was going to be paid for my entire life. I lived on layaway. That was I wasn’t taught how to save money. And so instead of saving money, I would I remember, I got invited my senior year, I was living in a foster home, and I got invited to the prom, and I didn’t have any money for a prom dress. I didn’t know what to do. So I called my dad called him collect and said I bought some material on layaway, right for more worse or something and, and a pattern but I don’t have enough money to get it out. Would you send me the $18 or whatever it was to get it out? And he sent that to me? Everything I did. That’s that was the only financial education I had. So, yeah, I forgot where I was going with all

Amanda Palmer 42:36
your five goals. My five goals.

Katie Nall 42:38
Okay, so so it was going to have a car it was gonna be paid for number four, I can’t remember what it was because it was distant by No, it had nothing to do with anything because number five, my fiscal so out of all those my fiscal was, I was going to start serious dating at 18. I said, bye, Tom. I’m 25 at 25. I’m going to start serious dating real life on this hand. I was I didn’t have my PhD. But I was working on my master’s so that I gave myself credit for that. I didn’t buy a house. But I had figured out that if you were a manager and an apartment complex, you’ve got your place for free. So I was like, okay, that works. I did have a car and it was completely paid for. And I’ll tell you how in a minute. Remember, I didn’t remember number four. And the fifth one. By the time I was 25. Remember, I was going to start serious dating. By the time I was 25. I’ve been married to my knight in shining armor for five years and pregnant with my first Do you ever hear me saying anything at all about having children starting a family? No, no. In fact, when I was 18, I went to my gynecologist and I said I want a hysterectomy right now. Because I’m not gonna have any children. And they wisely said, No, we don’t give 18 year olds hysterectomies just because they asked for. So how did I buy my car? Well, I bought my car to satisfy my husband’s greatest wish for two years. He kept saying Will you marry me? I said, No. We married me. No, we married me. No. And then finally, he figured out my value system. And he said, Do you know that if we get married? That Navy pays us an extra $155 a month? I said let’s go to Vegas. So that weekend we went to Vegas and financial move. Yes. So I was so upset because on Monday, I said, Did you go and get it changed? He said yeah, they didn’t ask for the marriage license. I’m like, You’re kidding me. I didn’t have to get and I told him I would get married on one condition which he agreed to. I said, the only reason we’re getting married is for the $155 a month. He said okay, I said so. When you get out of the Navy, there’s no more 155 a month, right? He said, Yes. I said, so. When you get out of the Navy, we get a divorce. And he said, Okay. He never served more than two years and maybe

Jason Palmer 45:16
I think you forgot part of that. Deal, huh?

Amanda Palmer 45:19
Yeah. Well, I got a busy and you know

what happens?

Jason Palmer 45:28
Yeah, I think I think you’ve bought in, you’re a little too far now to go back and redeem that certificate for divorce.

Katie Nall 45:33
He’s almost trained. I’m not giving this.

Jason Palmer 45:38
Don’t give her any hope that she’s gonna give me train.

Unknown Speaker 45:42
It’s only 47 years, Amanda, just stick with it.

Amanda Palmer 45:45
I mean, we’ve got 20 years. And so I’m halfway there. There you go. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Jason Palmer 45:51
I was just never very good student. So, you know, might take a little more than that for me. Oh, my goodness. So well, I love your goal of getting a PhD in five years. I’m not certain that that one’s terribly realistic. But you got it and you’re in this amazing world and you’re working where you’re helping people and helping kids and came out of such a such poverty and distress and trouble and, and and moving into a world where you can make the world a better place. And and I think what you’re talking about here on your on your TED talk and the things you’re doing helping people with anxiety. We’re in a world now where it’s either different, or people just talking about it more. Anxiety never came up much. When I was a kid, I didn’t hear people talking about that today. I don’t know many people who don’t say they’re suffering from anxiety, you know, panic attacks, anxiety attacks. It’s it’s everywhere. People are struggling with it. Because life is hard. And for whatever reason, that’s just more of a thing. Now people know about it. There may be talking about what was going on for all those years. So as your as your help, you’re looking at that. And you’re helping people back to the acronym whose name I’m probably gonna mess up. Yeah, I’ll let you say it because

Katie Nall 47:14
I’m solving waffles worries, anxiety, fear, frustration, lethargy, exhaustion, and stress.

Amanda Palmer 47:22
I mean, we all have some waffles. I’m pretty sure I got a few boxes.

Jason Palmer 47:27
Yeah, yeah, we’ve got cases of those in the freezer. We got like Costco cases. Those sorts of waffles, I think, because we we’ve done foster care. we’ve adopted some kids out of the system, who have lots of those same things. And even as young kids, I have them and they don’t know, they don’t have the language to put around it, right. But I see anxiety in my, in my five year old I’ve watched it for since he was born, he was he was born addicted. And so he’s got his fair share of struggles and, and we’ll work our way through that. But to be fair, I know you said you weren’t a psychologist. I claim to be, but I’m a completely uneducated, untrained and a certified unpaid psychologist. It’s a hobby of mine. Right? I find it interesting. I play with the ideas, because I think it’s really interesting. And hopefully some of the things I can figure out will help these kids. But I don’t have a whole lot of real hard facts to help them with a lot of so the work you’re doing is that is are you working with specifically adults, this is stuff that works with kids as well.

Katie Nall 48:28
Well, Jason, my I think I mentioned I have the team adorables that I call them my legal granddaughters because the first letter of their name spell the word legal. So I gotta say that my legal granddaughters they are adorable. And they range in age from six months to seven. And I have used this technique on every one of them. When the oldest was about two or so she was petrified of loud noises, absolutely petrified loud noises so much that we had to take her out the house to vacuum and then trying to potty train her and she has to go to the bathroom in a restaurant where you flush the toilet and the sound reverberates throughout the whole place. It was like a a ay whatever you call it when you have the it was like a brigade. That’s what it was where we would hand her off to different people so we could get her out the door so we could flush the toilet because the sound would just be disruptive. So I checked with her, of course with her parents permission to help her overcome the fear of loud noises. She was in my house today and the blunder was going on. And she’s like, Oh, that’s a lot of noise in that and she no longer has that fear. The exciting thing about tapping is that the studies have shown they’ve compared tapping to cognitive behavior therapy which is talk therapy EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization. response, and then EFT, which is tapping. And what they found is out of those EMDR. And EFT can erase those emotions. I mean, they’re gone, they’re absolutely gone. But between EMDR and EFT, EMDR, you have to be sitting in front of a therapist, because you may go into a trauma response. And so you have to have a therapist with you all throughout the whole thing. The beauty about EFT is that you can do it yourself. There’s a school in Pacific Grove, California, where they’ve been doing tapping, they do tapping six minutes a day, every day. And it’s the students, the faculty, the staff, everybody does, they have a six minute tapping session, where they just tap on the different parts of their body, and they just do the tapping. And what they found is that after doing this at the test scores went up, that the behavior issues went down, and the special needs kids were assimilating better. So it is, it is something that has been popular throughout the rest of the world much, much more so than it is in America, which is why I love doing these podcasts to spread the information about it. And you can do it yourself, you can get usually faster results working with someone who’s been trained as an Advanced Certified practitioner. I’ve had training in level one, level two, level three, trauma and quantum. I’ve done some past life regression stuff, which has been very interesting. And I’m currently in training to become a trainer. So I can train others in this technique. It is an amazing, amazing, amazing technique that is easy to learn. And crazy effective.

Jason Palmer 51:46
It sounds like it because it’s funny. You mentioned the bathroom thing. We’ve had our own struggles, right? We’ve had lots of kids. And in today’s world, when you take a little kid to the bathroom, hey, you’re trying to potty train and they move on the toilet, and then the automatic flush or takes over. Right. Yeah. And yeah. And then mid mid movement, they try and go over the wall because

Amanda Palmer 52:12
the person beside them is done. And it goes off. Yeah, it can be tragic.

Yeah,

Jason Palmer 52:18
especially for you know, a lot of these kids that we’ve had come to our house have had some level of trauma. And some of them have had pretty high level of trauma. You know, we’ve seen everything from, from maybe a loss of a first family sort of thing, you know, a parent who either left or was, you know, those is deceased, and they lost them that way, all the way up to kids who have witnessed murders. And, you know, and been drug exposed. So we’ve had some pretty pretty wide ranging experience here. But these kids have dealt with a lot of trauma, and any trigger that actually hits that trauma button. Yeah. And oh, my goodness. Yeah, it’s, it’s not it’s not like they’re going zero to 60. Yeah, it’s not a linear thing. It’s like they go from zero to about somewhere around 1.5 million. And you get, huh, yeah, what happened here? Yeah. And we’ve learned to realize that, that we’re seeing trauma responses A lot of times, right, but it’s not always clear how to help them, especially in that moment. It’s just something you can use in the moment.

Katie Nall 53:24
Well, um, yes, you can use it in the moment. However, I would caution to use beforehand. They, the the person who developed this is a Stanford educated, electrical engineer by the name of Gary Craig. And he’s, what he did is he watched what psychologists and psychiatrists were doing with traditional Chinese medicine meridians. And he saw the meridians as if they were electrical circuits, and he identified these few spots that hits like 98% of the meridians. He has taken this into the Veterans Hospital, and work with Vietnam vets, who have been hospitalized and drugged for over 40 years. And in one week of tapping with them, they are drug free and free to go back into society. So yeah, they use it with PTSD a lot.

Amanda Palmer 54:22
Wow, that’s amazing.

Jason Palmer 54:25
One other quick question. Does it make majors like kids?

Katie Nall 54:31
It does, it does help teenagers just manage things because teenagers are, you know, they’re trying to figure out the rules and make their own rules and our jobs is to maintain the boundaries and their jobs is to test the boundaries. And and it’s really hard to keep maintaining those boundaries. You know, can I go to Waterworld? No. Can I go to Waterworld, not Can I go to Waterworld, no, can I go and And they, in the words of Bart Simpson, and they, they feel like it’s kind of like, you know, a slot machine, we’re just going to keep trying keep trying. Now, if the response is the same all the time, that’s good. But you know that one time they hit it, and we have had that day, and we are out of it. And we say yes, that they’re like, okay, it worked one time, and then they move forward, then they go full, full force.

Amanda Palmer 55:30
Let’s not stand at that fence, let’s not get over.

Katie Nall 55:32
The idea is to tap on ourselves, so that we have the strength to be able to withstand all of their testing. And that’s where the real real strength comes.

Jason Palmer 55:44
I’m one of those few fortunate people who’s pretty good at holding those boundaries. Once I build them, I tend to put up high voltage electric fences around on the meter. And you know, my wife, she’s 13. I almost called her my little girl. A little girl, she Yeah, she doesn’t appreciate the terminology. But as especially as a little girl, when she was she just beautiful little girl had this amazing ability to look at you and turn her head to the side. And she’d filled the entire inside of her eye with a massive tear. Daddy, please at that moment, you’d point just right. The tear would roll down or look so adorable. everybody around me with Melton, I would look at her and say, No. I’m, I’m that guy who, who still has that ability, but most people don’t. So how does how does this work for you? No. I mean, I’m not gonna say I’ve got it all figured out. You know, that part? I had figured out the rest of it. I’m certain I still need plenty of help, too. So how does that work for us, when we’re when we’re working with ourselves or maybe even working with young kids.

Katie Nall 56:48
So I’m the same way as you are Jason i was i was the disciplinarian in the family. And my husband apparently has only one word that is saying that’s Yes, of course. And then I get to clean it out. But yeah, no, you can use tapping to help yourself. And that that can make all the difference in the world. And you can teach it to your teenagers I have. I have clients literally all over the world, that I work with teenagers to help them overcome their math and test anxiety. That’s a sensibly what they come to me for. And in the process of doing that, I find out that I was really not about the math and test anxiety. It’s the way my friend is teaching me or treating me, it’s the fact that I’m concerned about my sexuality. It’s, it’s, I’m not really getting along with my parents, if this is that, I feel so much pressure to have to know what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life. And so it’s never about the math. And it’s never about the test anxiety. It’s always about something else.

Jason Palmer 57:54
Yeah. It’s never about the thing that we think it is always easier to transfer that over somewhere else. So how do you know just I mean, maybe a crash course. How do we how do we begin to implement some of that?

Katie Nall 58:09
Okay, well, which one of you want to be my victim volunteer?

Jason Palmer 58:14
You have to I have to turn knobs and buttons over here. Alright, I guess I’m up to size.

Unknown Speaker 58:21
Okay. Okay, Amanda, you’re a chicken.

Katie Nall 58:26
We love chicken. So that’s okay. So Jason, um, tell me something recently, that you found fearful or frustrating or cost you a little bit of stress? Oh, frustrating.

Jason Palmer 58:39
I have teenagers. I have three teenagers in the house. And some of them may enjoy pushing my buttons on a regular basis, almost like they know where they’re at. And then know which ones are the most entertaining to watch.

Unknown Speaker 58:52
Mm hmm.

Katie Nall 58:54
So tell me the most recent time when one of the teenagers push one of your buttons.

Jason Palmer 59:00
Most recently, he probably wouldn’t appreciate me telling the story, but that’s okay. He never listens.

Katie Nall 59:04
Okay. Yeah. Here’s the thing about tapping. You don’t even have to say you can just say that issue that happened on that day.

Jason Palmer 59:12
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that issue because, you know, I’m horrible. And I’m stupid and, and he hates me, and it’s a horrible place. And he wish he was never here and you know, fill in all the blanks. It’s teenager talk, right? It’s

Amanda Palmer 59:25
whatever. You’re not my real mom.

Unknown Speaker 59:28
Yeah, yeah.

Katie Nall 59:30
Okay. And when did that happen?

Jason Palmer 59:34
Very recently, I couple what, three or four days ago, maybe at the most four days

Katie Nall 59:38
ago. Okay. Okay. And when you think about three or four days ago, when you got all that information about that issue? What emotion do you feel?

Jason Palmer 59:49
Hmm? You know, I’m a fairly unemotional person, but I’m very, very well connected to the anger emotion.

Katie Nall 59:54
Anger, okay. And from the top of your head to the bottom your toes when you think about that issue that happened. Three or four days ago, and you feel think about that anger? Where is it in your body?

Jason Palmer 1:00:07
It’s in my chest,

Katie Nall 1:00:08
in your chest. And when you think about that anger this in your chest, what color is anger?

Jason Palmer 1:00:14
Ironically, most people see anger as red. But it’s definitely blue for some reason. But

Katie Nall 1:00:20
sure, of course, this book, and when I am going to ask you to repeat some words, first, we’re going to do it without words. And then we’re gonna do it with words. And when we do with words, with if I say something, you go, you know what, that’s not really true for me, or I would have said it differently. Will you restate it in your own words? Sure. Okay, great. And is this a Tuesday for you? right here right now? I feel safe. Yes. Okay. And from zero to 10, where zero is like, yeah, no big deal. You know, it’s just kids talking and 10 is the most anger you’ve ever felt in your life and you think about three or four days ago, and that anger in your chest that blew anger in your chest? What number is it intensity from zero to 10?

Jason Palmer 1:01:06
I’m pretty used to it. So I’d say it’s probably about a seven at this point.

Katie Nall 1:01:08
A seven. Okay. Okay. So we’re gonna, what we’re gonna do is we’re going to go through the tapping points, without words. And I’m going to describe the places in case somebody is listening to this and doesn’t have the video. Is that all right?

Jason Palmer 1:01:21
Absolutely.

Katie Nall 1:01:22
Okay, so we’re gonna start on the side of the hand between your little finger and your wrist, and you can use either hand. And with the other hand, you’re going to tap right there. So what I have is my right hand is tapping on this left hand side. So I left this tapping right where my fingers in my wrist are. So you got that? Yep. And Amanda, you can tap along with him. And that would be good. And you might actually have something called borrowing benefits. So you may feel an energy shift yourself, you mean

Unknown Speaker 1:01:51
within benefits.

Katie Nall 1:01:54
I’m sorry. And so, Jason, when we have two sentences that we’re going to say, we’re going to say the sentence three times while we’re tapping on this spot, okay. Okay, next spot, we’re going to tap and we’re using either right hand or left hand, or both is on the top of her head, and we can use one or the other, or we can do my monkey move. and tap on top of the head. Our next spot is going to be right above our nose on the edge of our eyebrows. So it’s going to be right here. And again, you can use one hand or the other or both. And you tap right there. And you can breathe while you’re doing that, because breathing is you know, really a good idea. And then on the side of the eye between the eye and the hairline, on both sides, either one side or the other, or both, it doesn’t matter. I took my glasses off so that you could see better. And then the next spot is under the eye. That’s where I store all my bags right there. And then under the nose, above the lips, right about the lips. And you can breed. They’re so good. And they’re the lips above the chin. Ah ha and then cross your wrist and so that you’re tapping on your collarbones, both sides. If you want to use one hand, you can stretch out the hand so that the thumbs on one side and the other fingers on the other. And then the last spot is about four inches underarms right on our ribcage. And you can do one hand or the other or you can give yourself a hug if you want to. I always felt good. And then at the end, I always ask everyone to blow out the air and cartoonish fashion. So we go.

Jason Palmer 1:03:48
Alright, you’re trying to do the cartoon?

Amanda Palmer 1:03:53
Right here. Oh, man, okay.

Katie Nall 1:03:57
Okay, so you’re ready? We’ll add words now. All right. Okay, so we’re gonna start tapping on the side of the hand and say, even though even though when I think about that issue three or four days ago,

Jason Palmer 1:04:08
when I think about the issue three or four days ago,

Katie Nall 1:04:10
and all the things he said

Jason Palmer 1:04:12
and all the things he said,

Katie Nall 1:04:13
I feel this blue anger in my chest right.

Jason Palmer 1:04:17
I feel this blue anger in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:04:20
Right here right now. I feel safe anyway.

Jason Palmer 1:04:22
Right here right now. I feel safe anyway.

Katie Nall 1:04:25
Even though even though this blue anger is in my chest,

Jason Palmer 1:04:29
this blue anger is in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:04:31
When I think about that issue three or four days ago,

Jason Palmer 1:04:34
when I think about that issue three or four days ago.

Katie Nall 1:04:36
And he said all those mean things.

Jason Palmer 1:04:40
He said all those mean things

Katie Nall 1:04:42
right here right now I feel safe.

Jason Palmer 1:04:44
Right here right now. I feel safe. Even though even though

Katie Nall 1:04:48
I can still remember. I can still remember all the things he said three or four days ago.

Jason Palmer 1:04:54
All the things he said three or four days ago

Katie Nall 1:04:56
and it gives me so much blue anger in my chest

Jason Palmer 1:04:59
when it goes So much blue anger in my chest

Katie Nall 1:05:02
right here right now I feel safe anyway,

Jason Palmer 1:05:04
right here right now I feel safe anyway.

Katie Nall 1:05:07
And then top of the head, this blue anger in my

Jason Palmer 1:05:10
chest, this blue anger in my chest

Katie Nall 1:05:13
and the edge of the eyebrow right above the nose, this blue anger in my chest,

Jason Palmer 1:05:17
this blue anger in my chest,

Katie Nall 1:05:20
no side of the eye between the eye and the hairline. This blue anger in my chest,

Jason Palmer 1:05:25
this blue anger in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:05:27
And then under the eye, this blue anger in my chest,

Jason Palmer 1:05:31
this blue anger in my chest,

Katie Nall 1:05:33
under the nose, this blue angers in my chest,

Jason Palmer 1:05:36
this blue anger is in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:05:39
And then under the lips about a level seven in my chest.

Jason Palmer 1:05:43
It’s about a level seven in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:05:45
And then cross your arms and the collarbone. This blue anger in my chest,

Unknown Speaker 1:05:49
this blue anger in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:05:51
And then about four inches down. All this blue anger in my chest. All this blue anger in my chest. Okay, ready for the cartoon part? Yep.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:08
So how’s it feel?

Jason Palmer 1:06:13
Oh, right now I’m still fairly peaceful.

Katie Nall 1:06:22
How do you feel? What do you What does it feel like in your chest?

Jason Palmer 1:06:26
Right now I don’t really have anything going on in my chest.

Katie Nall 1:06:30
Okay. And when you think about that, from zero to seven, when you think about that issue, the anger? Where would it be now?

Jason Palmer 1:06:39
Oh, I don’t really feel it at all right now, even when I think about it.

Katie Nall 1:06:47
So what happens is we have a limiting belief. And the limiting belief may be that I don’t know, a couple of them are all teenagers are supposed to rebel or the boys are supposed to be difficult or you know, whatever limiting belief we have. Just like when you like you get a different car and you look around and like all the cars around you are the same car as yours. Right? Does that ever happen? Oh, yeah. So when we have our limiting belief, anything that happens that we can use to support that limiting belief we hold on to. And then what happens is if we can get this one limiting belief, this one, one aspect, if we can erase it so that it no longer has emotional pole. And then we get another one, and it released that so no one has an emotional pool. And eventually that limiting belief goes away.

Jason Palmer 1:07:43
I don’t have any limiting beliefs. I know.

Katie Nall 1:07:47
I was talking about the rest of the world, Jason.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:54
me.

Jason Palmer 1:07:56
I’ve worked through all that already.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:57
I know, right?

Amanda Palmer 1:07:59
Do you have plenty of waffles?

Katie Nall 1:08:01
Yeah. There was a couple of things my therapist told me and I had a great therapist. I mean, I wouldn’t have stayed with him for four years if I didn’t. But there was a couple things that happen. One is that, at the end, when he and I both decided that we pretty much gone as far as we could and I had attained the balance that I needed. He said now I just want to warn you. Things may come up in the future, we’re going to trigger some of the same responses. And I was like, Wow. I thought we were done with all of this. And he was right. There were situations that came up that triggered me and I had that same response right all over again. The other thing I noticed is that he was a very good therapist, and he was a great business person. So I would come in in the middle of my work day, pour my heart out, being an absolute tears, shattered a mess. And he’d say, oh, Katie, it’s been 60 minutes. We’re done now.

And I’m and I would stumble my way out of his office, go to the car, try to regroup and go back into work. The beauty about tapping is that at the end of every, like 60 minute session that I have who I bring the client back to a state of peace, so that you don’t you don’t take that with you. You don’t take that with you. And the studies have shown that when you work on something, and it goes away, it does not come back. There’s the trigger is gone.

Jason Palmer 1:09:38
Wow. Yeah. That’s incredibly beneficial because, like I mentioned, we’ve got deep trauma that hangs out in our house, I’m sure. And so figuring out I mean, even if we could help a little bit that would be amazing. Sure.

Amanda Palmer 1:09:56
Well, then it sounds like you know, and and doing the tapping that It’s like self regulating. Yes. It’ll be so hard in the moment. Yeah, for me even as an adult, you know, there’s times where I don’t keep my cool and I should, you know, self regulation is a big, big thing.

Jason Palmer 1:10:15
I never have that problem.

Katie Nall 1:10:17
I know. Well, we’re just talking between

Amanda Palmer 1:10:20
Amanda and I, that’s if anybody could see my eye roll that.

Jason Palmer 1:10:24
pulled a muscle there. Yeah, that’s something that we all struggle pretty deeply with, you know, we bring on trauma to the world. And we try to parent kids who have trauma, because I don’t care who your kid said. There’s some trauma triggers. Oh, yeah. every kid’s life.

Katie Nall 1:10:42
I had no idea. my three kids had horrible childhoods. And the things they told me, I was like, wow, let me tell you what a horrible childhood is like.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:54
Yeah.

Jason Palmer 1:10:56
Yeah, that’s one of the things I think doing foster care has really, really opened my eyes to is I had a reasonably good childhood, you know, my mom, you know, spanked me a few times. I don’t think I deserved it. But there was probably a couple times she messed when I did deserve it. I didn’t have that bad of a childhood, right? It was pretty good growing up. And then we see these kids who’ve been through so much, and the fact of the Okay, yeah, I was kind of complaining about some of the stuff I grew up with and write about now and feel like I need to shut my mouth. Because it wasn’t that bad.

Amanda Palmer 1:11:31
And you’ve also dealt with a lot of my traumas coming to surface over the years. Sure.

Jason Palmer 1:11:36
But when you throw all that into a house, and then we have to learn how to regulate those for the kids and ourselves for their benefit, help them to learn to because they’re going to hopefully, someday grow up live a life, maybe even have kids of their own, they’re going to have their own traumas. Yeah. And the earlier we can help them figure out how to start that process.

Unknown Speaker 1:11:54
Yeah.

Jason Palmer 1:11:54
I mean, the better off I think that will be. Yeah, yeah. You didn’t mention people, you have clients all over the world. How would somebody like, find you to become a client?

Katie Nall 1:12:08
So a parent in Switzerland, saw my TEDx talk, and then googled me and found me through my website. My website is a play on words, because you know, I never do anything easy. So it’s my, it’s my last name, no, Na, l l, followed by the word edge, E, D, G, and then companies seo.com. So it’s knowledge company.com and www.na LEDG co.com. They can also email me by Hello at doctor and all that calm, that’s h e l l o at Dr and a Ll calm, and I will throw out a challenge for your listeners. I give my phone number on every podcast, and nobody calls me. So maybe maybe your listeners will call me My phone number is area code 772-480-0541. If I can’t pick up leave your name and number. I’ll return it.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:11
Oh, wonderful.

Amanda Palmer 1:13:12
You mentioned to Jason and I that you do semester mind classes. What does that look like?

Katie Nall 1:13:18
So a friend approached me in the middle of last year and said, Hey, I have these 40 days journal prompts for prosperity. You want to try them? And I’m like, yeah, sure, whatever. I’m good for someone. Yeah. And she is a solopreneur. I’m an employee. She is a devout atheist. I am spiritual. And we went through these 40 day prompts where we journaled every day we touch base with each other everyday, hey, how’d you do? Did you get them done or not? I being who I am, start on day one did all the way through day 40. My friend it started on day one, and life got in the way about the five or six and she wasn’t able to keep going. So the way this works is you go back to day one, and you start over again. So she would go and then go back. I don’t think she ever got past day. 15. But let me let me tell you the results. In 40 days, she doubled her sustainable monthly income. Now, I can’t double my sustainable monthly income because I’m an employee. So I’m like, Well what’s going to happen to me? Why I started paying attention and in those 40 days $10,000 came to me unsolicited now for you guys, that may not sound like a lot of money. But for me it was huge, especially for me not having to do really anything. We had had a car accident about three years ago and everything is settled over a year ago and out of the blue this other check came from the attorneys. And they’re like, Oh, this is the residual part. We’re like residual part. We signed everything. Why? Why are we good, you know? My mortgage broker called me up and said, the interest rates are so low now. Let’s see what we can do. They saved me $500 a month. And I was like, whoa. So I started this mastermind, because I talked to other friends who had done these journal prompts before, and nothing had happened. So I was trying to figure out why, what what was different about ours? Well, we did the journal prompts every day, we checked in with each other. So it was that accountability piece. But we also tapped, and we tapped away our money blocks. And it was in Tapi, I think the tapping was a magical circus, right? That was a piece that kind of held it all together. So this is about the fourth session that I’ve had the mastermind, and it consists of daily prompts that are sent to the participants once a week, or even once a day. And then every week they get assigned a new accountability partner. Now these accountability partners end up either becoming clients, or becoming somebody that you would buy things from or they’d become good friends. And then twice a week, we meet on zoom, and we talk, we talk about our wins, we talk about our challenges, we talk about what’s going on in life. So we have a new mastermind starting about every 40. Guys.

Jason Palmer 1:16:20
Wow. Yeah. And you know, a lot of people may not be terribly familiar with the mastermind and how they work in general. I’m mentioned on a regular basis on this podcast that I’m a member of a of a dance group online. And it all started, I was actually in a mastermind with the founder Larry hagner, who had a he had a podcast and a Facebook group around being dad, it was all dad centric stuff. And as I was in the mastermind, is where the the mastermind group started. And I’ve been a member that for the last four years, and the differences I’ve seen in my life have been phenomenal. And honestly, I can contribute mark, I can attribute not contributed. I can attribute most of it to the fact that for the last four and a half years now, on a weekly basis, I’m meeting with guys who’s who are dead centered people who are focused on what it means to be not only a dad, but a good dad, who are focused on what it means to be a good husband, who are looking at improving their lives, cleaning up their world in some places where they see it being around men who will hold them accountable. Because if I do some silly stuff, let me tell you, we’ve got group guys in this group from Australia, and in the UK, and all over the world. But the guy who runs the group who started off, he’s about 20 miles down the road. And if he felt the need, he might come over and thump me to get my attention. We’ve actually got a pretty big contention of guys in the St. Louis area close to where I live. And so just having that group of people around me, even if it’s just through zoom, hold me accountable. And, and and talk about the things that matter to us, that really mattered to us. Yeah. And that’s been really beneficial for me. So, you know, having a group of people in whatever way it is that you need to turn your life. That was something I needed. Yeah, it’s a matter of fact, when I had first joined that group was right around the time that that I had decided that, you know, after we lost our daughter, I went to a pretty dark space for a while. And without going through all the different parts and pieces, just know that that whiskey became more than a friend for me. And yeah, it was it was I only had one drink a night. That was usually about a 700 milliliter drink, and it was shaped just like a bottle. And I did that for quite a while. And it took me a long time to find the right group of people to convince me that the best thing for me for my wife or my kids, was to turn my life around and do some different things. And it’s amazing, as you mentioned it, you know, the just the financial side, once once I got myself dried out and stopped drinking at all. Suddenly, this opportunity came up or about the house that my wife had been wanting to live for the last 10 years, we’ve been driving past this house, beautiful Victorian style house. It was built back in somewhere around 19 Oh, something and she loved this house, and it went up for sale as we were looking at houses. And well, that’s where we’re sitting today. Oh, you know, all these things happened. And I was still paying for the other place, the old place that we were living in before trying to sell it. And somehow or another I was still able to pay for two mortgages. Yeah, my income did not go up. Right. But being around the right people made a lot of differences in a lot of ways.

Katie Nall 1:19:37
And Jason, the studies have shown to that, that sense of community that sense of people that are hold you accountable, accountable, the people that will drift in, unannounced, like you said and thump you upside the head. That’s really the one and only key to longevity. It’s not diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not it’s not wealth. It is community. And that’s what masterminds can really give you. So I’m so glad to hear that you’ve got a mastermind that works for you. That’s amazing.

Jason Palmer 1:20:09
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been really fortunate to find one that was really, really focused around one of the core things in my life. I’ve got seven kids. Yeah, one of my core defining things is I’m a dad. Yeah, of course. So, so yeah, no, I really do appreciate you. You tell us all about you’re sure. I your, your program and your mastermind. And even people that the website again, which is I love knowledge calm. Edge. Yes. That’s great. I’m Dad, dad jokes are real, right? I’m all about the pond, and Amanda had to chase some kids. Otherwise, he rolled her eyes at me again. She doesn’t need

Katie Nall 1:20:50
to do an eye roll for practice.

Jason Palmer 1:20:54
I feel like she knows me well enough. She just rolled her eyes to the back of her head and doesn’t know why. But no. So I really do appreciate you coming in here and telling your story today. It’s, you have a really wild an interesting story. And it’s one of those I mentioned it before, where you come from somewhere really difficult. And you have walked your way to success?

Katie Nall 1:21:18
Hmm. Yeah, with a lot of help. A lot of help.

Jason Palmer 1:21:22
Exactly. And, you know, learning to appreciate that help is a big thing. But I think we all have to realize that, that we have that in a somewhere.

Katie Nall 1:21:31
And that help is there waiting for us. All we have to do is ask.

Jason Palmer 1:21:35
Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s one of the things I think we all struggle with asking for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want to be a burden.

Katie Nall 1:21:43
So I have this thing I say to people who don’t want to ask for help. You know, there’s a phrase that a lot of people have heard that it’s more blessed to give than it is to receive. So if you’re giving all the time who gets the blessings you do. When you ask for help, you’re giving others the opportunity to be blessed. So give them the opportunity to be blessed, and ask for help.

Jason Palmer 1:22:14
I will agree with you 100%. I know that some of the best moments of my life has been when I’ve been able to reach out and to just some small act of kindness help someone else. And the feeling I get from that the experience I get from that is such a blessing to me. And when I refuse to ask for help from someone else, I’m I’m keeping them from that.

Katie Nall 1:22:32
Yes, you’re being what I call a blessings hog.

We talked about pigs a lot.

Jason Palmer 1:22:42
And I still don’t like them. Unless it’s bacon shaped.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:44
Yeah.

Jason Palmer 1:22:48
I don’t like hogs at all until they get to the plate.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:51
Yeah.

Jason Palmer 1:22:52
So well, it’s great talking to you today. I appreciate your time this evening talking with Amanda and I. I really do think that that our listeners can take a lot from the story and understand that their life is not been defined by their past. They have a whole future ahead of them that they still get to define. Yeah,

Katie Nall 1:23:13
well, thank you so much, Jason, and please give my appreciation to Amanda. I know she’s busy with the kids. And I love what you’re doing. And I appreciate all that you’re

Unknown Speaker 1:23:21
doing for others. Thank you.

Jason Palmer 1:23:31
Okay, foster care nation. Thank you for listening to Katie’s story that take her knowledge and wisdom the heart so you can create love and healing in your family in your community. Be sure to come back next week. We have new episodes of every Tuesday. If you would like to share your story as a guest you can reach us at foster care uj@gmail.com or from our website you can reach us at Jason at foster care nation.com you can connect with other like minded people on facebook@facebook.com slash groups slash foster care uj. And don’t forget we have a Patreon where you can support our mission for as little as $5 a month. It’s at patreon.com slash foster care nation. The links to everything in the show notes on your podcast player or foster care nation calm and as always.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:16
You are so super awesome. I thank you.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:23
Thank you