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An introduction of me, Candace Van Dell!
Hello beautiful souls. I’m so grateful that you’re tuning in. Welcome to my podcast "Misunderstood: Guiding Highly Sensitive People Through an Emotional Dark Age." I'm your host, Candace Van Dell, and I'm honored to embark on this transformative journey with you.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Misunderstood'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, beautiful souls. I'm so grateful that you're tuning in. Welcome to my podcast, Misunderstood, guiding highly sensitive people through an emotional dark age. I'm your host, Candice Van Dal, and I'm honored to embark on this transformative journey with you.
Sensitivity as a Superpower
00:00:17
Speaker
Have you ever felt like you didn't quite fit into the world around you or even your own family? Like your sensitivity was a burden rather than a gift. If so, you're not alone. And here's the truth. Your sensitivity is not a flaw. It's a superpower. It's what allows you to feel deeply, to connect with others on a profound level, and to access a higher realm of consciousness. And on this podcast, we're going to explore how to harness that power and use it to create a life of purpose, passion, and true confidence.
00:00:45
Speaker
Here, in this sacred space, we honor your sensitivity as the gift it truly is. Get ready to embark on the journey of unapologetic emotional honesty and next-level healing. Let's dive in together.
Childhood and Misunderstanding
00:01:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Candice Vandell. This is my first podcast and I wanted to talk about my story. Why is this podcast called Misunderstood? Because that was the entirety of my childhood and so many clients I've worked with over the years.
00:01:17
Speaker
Being misunderstood can be so painful because if we don't have that emotional mirror of someone getting us, we don't feel affirmed or validated. We don't feel like we have a full identity. We don't feel safe and secure enough to drop into our own selves and have a self. Many clients that I've been working with over the years have come to me because of an uncertain sense of identity. I call it the uncertain identity. We don't know for sure if we can own ourselves because we're still looking for that external validation. And this happens a lot of the times when we don't feel understood. I guess my coping mechanism as I was growing up was to figure it all out. Figure myself out. Look into the all these parts of myself to see like, can I make sense
ADHD Diagnosis and Education
00:02:05
Speaker
of it? Do I make sense? If you know my story, then this will be review for you. But if you're new,
00:02:11
Speaker
My story started really in the school system. In the 80s, I feel like I was one of those first kids ever to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, which you'll hear me re sort of reframe throughout this podcast as attention being dialed to a positive, or sorry, attention being dialed to a higher dimension, a positive dimension for sure. And it wasn't always that way. At seven years old, I was brought into a psychiatrist's office to see if I had...
00:02:46
Speaker
issues with learning. And after they gave me an IQ test and said I was at almost genius level at age seven, there must be something wrong because she's really smart, but she does things differently. And so at the time they called this a processing problem. And I grew up thinking there's something wrong. There's something wrong with me. But really it's just a difference. Neuro divergence is real. It's actually the biggest gift I can say I have for the work that I do in the world as a spiritual coach. When I can see things differently and get to the root cause right away and look at it holistically naturally, a lot of my clients laugh because they're like, gosh, you just get right there real quick.
Criticism and Ritalin Experience
00:03:31
Speaker
A good example of this is in math class. When the teacher asked us to do long division and I would get every answer correct but do it differently, I'd get marked wrong. Again, this message of there's something wrong with the way you do things. This took me many, many years to get to a place where I felt like it was a huge gift. But as a child, I was just constantly misunderstood, which would make me not understand myself. Why am I doing it differently? I was doing it intuitively. I just saw it differently. So that's where all this began.
00:04:07
Speaker
So here I am a seven-year-old being given Ritalin. Here, go home, take this pill. Now, it's supposed to help me focus. And to be honest, it definitely made me less emotional because it numbs you out a little bit, at least for me it did. And sure, I'd get better grades because I was basically forced to focus on things that I was not interested in. You feel me, right? I'm really good at everything that I love, not so good at things that don't interest me. Who is? But I guess, At that time in life in the 80s, everybody was like, you know, if you're smart, you do things this way. I just didn't understand why I wouldn't be called smart when I'm doing things my own way.
00:04:47
Speaker
But anyway, here I am, seven years old. I have to have a little secret and take a little trip to the nurse's office every day at lunchtime to take this little yellow pill. I was the only kid in school. I think there was 500 kids. So I was like, I'm the only one that has something wrong with them. That's what I believed. And as I was young and I would say this to my parents, my mother would say to me, no, honey, everybody has something. This is just your thing. It didn't sit right with me, let's be honest. And having a mother who's also a teacher, it wasn't easy. We had a lot of fights. We were not attuned to each other and it was very, very difficult. Talk about trying to get understood and get that mirroring when you do things differently than your own mother and the whole school system. It's hard to get validated in certain ways.
00:05:33
Speaker
So I did that little thing. I took the little pill and they would take me off the pill in the summertime because it was stunting my growth. And they wanted me to just grow and have a nice, you know, summertime, which was great because summer is always my favorite. Well, let's get back to it.
Redefining Labels and Finding Purpose
00:05:50
Speaker
So I'm taking these pills. Now here's the interesting about thing about it is I was actually really excelling in all my sports. and all of my music. I played violin, I played piano, I was a soccer player, I was really into gymnastics. I did all the things, I was super, super active. It really helped my mind to just have a bunch of things all at once, right? What I like to say about ADHD is we need to be really stimulated so we can focus.
00:06:17
Speaker
I can't focus unless there's like a TV on, my phone's next to me. I'm really enthralled in what I'm doing. And thank God my career nowadays for the last decade plus has been deep talks with amazing humans for a living. I get to deep dive into your psychology and your emotion and that is my favorite topic. So of course I'm gonna be good at it, right? But guys, this created so much shame for me. It really did. You can see how some things were so good and then there was this thing and I always felt like I couldn't get out from under this negative aspect of me, this wrong thing, this label.
00:06:54
Speaker
So I spend a lot of my work redefining labels because this label really was a damper on my self-esteem. And even though I still excelled, there was always this major doubt in me of like, well, maybe I am bad. If everything isn't perfect all the time, it doesn't go right. Maybe it's true that I'm bad. And so many of you do this where you're like, if you don't have a constant good thing, you drop into doubt. That was me for the majority of my young life. So being misunderstood was not a gift at the beginning, but it did actually create that pain that became my purpose. And my purpose now is to help people out of their pain and to really thrive. And I see this contrast in my childhood as the thing I actually used to find my truth.
00:07:42
Speaker
I knew what I wasn't, so I knew what I was, right? I knew I was neurodivergent. I knew I was right-brained. I knew I was really bright and intelligent. And I also knew that I was a creative thinker. So these were all very positive things I got to take from it. And because of that, I think that's what made me really follow my dreams. When I was a junior in high school, I had a spiritual awakening where I literally, I was at a youth group camp, and I had an out-of-body experience. And I'll tell you more about it in another podcast that we'll probably call The Spiritual Awakening. But it was a time where I realized everything about me was God-given. I am perfect for my purpose. This is the way God universe made me. And I knew that. And what I realized when I came home from that retreat is I knew I had to follow my dream. And my dream at the time was to be a model.
00:08:33
Speaker
I really wanted to be a model. I wanted to travel the world and wear the amazing clothes. and I just loved clothes. I don't know if it was because of the Ritalin or my genetics, but I was always really skinny. And by
Modeling Career and Self-Doubt
00:08:44
Speaker
the junior year in high school, I grew so tall. You know, as opposed to freshman year where I was four foot 11, junior year I was five foot eight, almost five foot nine. And I said, I really want to be a model. I came home. I started following all the signs. And as the universe would have it, I was driving in my car with one of my best friends to this day, still my best friend.
00:09:07
Speaker
We were listening to the radio and it said, model search America tonight at the Hilton hotel. And we looked to our left and there was the Hilton hotel and it was the right time. And we pulled in the driveway and I said, is this crazy? I don't even have a portfolio. I don't even have some pictures. She's like, it's not crazy. Let's go. We went in. We waited, waited, waited. There's thousands of people. And I was one of the ones that got chosen. And I was like, is this real or is this one of these scams? You know, but I kept believing in my dream. A couple months later, I went to New York City to meet the big agents and I got picked by about six of those agencies. I had to go back to New York and visit those agencies and do some test shoots and everything started from there.
00:09:48
Speaker
I was from Chicago, so since I was still in school, I got an agency in Chicago, and my first audition for that agency in Chicago was for an agency in Japan. And I got that contract. So this is crazy. But a week after I graduated from high school, I was off to Japan to do my three month contract. I got one of the best clients you can get there. And there's a whole bunch that goes into this story about my self doubt and how I kind of almost sabotaged this entire thing, by the way.
00:10:21
Speaker
But the point is, knowing that, yes, I'm misunderstood, but I know God made me perfect for my purpose helped me to really follow my dreams. So I was a model for 20 some years. I moved to Los Angeles. I started acting. I was acting for over a decade. It was fabulous. Fergie Ferg was my first roommate. It was kind of amazing. Now, were there difficulties in life? Yes. And I'm going to tell you why. It goes back to that little girl who was deeply misunderstood, who still wondered.
00:10:53
Speaker
about it. Was there ever really something wrong with me? And even though I had all these successes going on, I still wasn't sure, you guys. I still wasn't sure how to know for sure if something bad is going to happen. If I make a wrong move, will it confirm the fact that there's something wrong? I was working under this perfectionism that was starting to really kill me. It was really, really weighing on me. I was getting migraines. I was having strange symptoms. I was having narcissistic type relationships. I was falling into these things that was kind of the shadow aspect that I never quite healed. And I'm telling you this because people can be really successful in the world and still have inner wounds. Just because you're successful doesn't mean you're going to be happy. It doesn't mean you have a great sense of self. So it's something to really think about.
New Path in Spiritual Psychology
00:11:46
Speaker
So in my late 20s, I was ready for a change. It was my Saturn returns. I'm like, you know, I really don't want to do this career anymore. I think part of the reason I did this career, not only because I loved it, but i I needed validation. I needed people to see me and say, you're good. And I realized that those times I wasn't working, I was dipping. I was dipping into the doubt and I wanted to secure my inner confidence. So I went back. to school to get my master's degree in spiritual psychology in 2011. And it's the best thing I ever did. That's where I discovered this gift I have to tune tune into people really quickly and know their energy and understand them in a way they've maybe never understood themselves. And after I graduated, I immediately shared this on my friend's podcast, Teresa Palmer. She had a podcast called Years and Life.
00:12:40
Speaker
or test talks. It was called test talks at the time. And she's like, you got to come on here and you got to tell people what what you do. It's crazy. It's amazing. You've changed your life. And I had so many emails from that one podcast that I literally had to open my coaching practice and it started from there.
Future Podcast Topics
00:12:57
Speaker
So this is a shorter podcast, is but it's just me introducing me to you and I can't wait to dive deep into every freaking topic we can think about. I'd love to have so many different types of people on this podcast, clients who can tell their stories from start to finish and more about my own story because I love it and it's fun.
00:13:16
Speaker
So I want to thank you guys so much for joining me. I'm so, so excited. I can't wait to help you understand yourself in a divine light. I love you guys and I'll see you in the next one.