And so this great exploration in a forbidden relationship becomes exciting and wonderful.

By the way, I love what you said, and I just wanna like piggyback off of that and say like 100%.

I'm not saying that the shame that I grew up with is what caused the infidelity that I did later in life.

What I'm saying is like the shame that I felt around my sexuality did not set me up to learn how to speak truth in relationships and build intimacy in that way.

It actually did the opposite, where I was like, "Oh, I learned that if I'm ashamed of something, I need to hide it.

I need to do it behind people's back.

Okay, so I need to do this thing behind people's back and not talk about it," because sitting in the discomfort of someone's, you know, sadness, disappointment, anger was too much.

Mm.

Like, it was, like, a whole weird thing.

I just grew up with a lot of shame around my sexuality, and then thinking it was, like, a bad thing, that I was gonna go to hell, and that was, like, my biggest fear.

And then when I turned 18, I had sex for the first time.

The skies parted, the angels sang.

I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." Like, who the hell said sex is bad? I had sex for the first time with my boyfriend, who was a loving, caring, wonderful person, and it was so beautiful to explore my sexuality with him.

But then, of course, I developed a really big resentment and anger towards the church, who told me that my sexuality is something to be ashamed of.

Mm-hmm.

So what kind of brought you into this area of medicine and kind of helping people in this way?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So I grew up, I grew up in a very conservative Catholic household.

I am first generation Latina.

So my dad's from Mexico.

My mom is from El Salvador.

And I was born and raised in Los Angeles and just really heavy Catholic influence, Catholic and also a lot of shame around sexuality.

So I