Julie Hilsen: 0:08

Life of Love with Julie Hilsen. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of Life of Love, where we meet every Thursday and talk about magic and joy. And always some synchronicities happen for me when I’m getting to meet friends and authors and just people of like-mindedness, and so this is no exception. I’m really excited to introduce Susan Gold to Life of Love. She is an author and she’s had a long career of promoting and being in the entertainment field, and then also she’s learned a lot about healing and she’s written a book. So, without further ado, welcome, Susan to the show. I’m so, so happy to have you. Thank you.

Susan Gold: 0:51

Julie, I’m thrilled to be here and I just want to put a plug right up front. What’s that? Yeah, for the Life of Love book that you published. I got it maybe a month ago and I just I love the messaging, I love the way it’s laid out and it really speaks to my heart and I know what it takes to put a book out, and this is an important one. I have chill bumps all over my body, so thank you for your work.

Julie Hilsen: 1:27

Oh, maybe it’s because we’re on the same heart energy that you did that, because I’ve never had a guest call out and help me with my book, like telling people about my book, so that’s just very special. That’s a first Yay. Well, and I just I love how at the end of your book you have action steps for people to move through difficult situations and that you know you have resources that you take, you take the reader through this year roller coaster of your life and all the things challenges. And I was reading your book and tearing up and, like I told you in the pre interview, I just wanted to hold you as a little child and be like this is not how the world’s supposed to be. You know, I just wanted to make it all better for you and you just you’re so courageous and so, yeah, I, I honor that and your authenticity and so that’s what I really like to write about is being authentic to your joy and finding that and it’s been your life path to to distill the joy and to break down paradigm so we’re holding you back or just survival mechanisms. So I would love for you to share. I don’t want everyone to have a spoiler, but could you, could you give a little background? I know you’ve done this a million times, but just to to catch my readers up to your story. And then I have some questions. When I was reading I really wanted to ask you, so I’d like to do that after you give your short bio or whatever you’ve. Whatever’s on your heart to share is perfect. Well.

Susan Gold: 3:02

Julie, I didn’t really. I didn’t really know to the core of my being that my upbringing was much different than yours, but I knew something was a rye and I knew very early on there were five children. I was smack in the middle. My dad is a genius astrophysicist. He’s still with us today. He’s a hoot, but boy was he a big Peter Pan and alcoholic and womanizer. And my mother had five children with a very short succession and she self-soothed with food by overeating and back then they prescribed diet pills for that. Well, back then diet pills were straight speed. So it was not a hotbed of mental health and I also believe my mother was struggling with a mental illness. Her mood would shift on a dime. She could be incredibly loving and she could give Martha Stewart a run for her money. I mean, she was very talented and she could be nurturing. And then the next moment I was being beaten for what? I didn’t know what and why. So I had very low self-worth, value, self-esteem. I was in complex trauma. Most of my upbringing I was very empathic. I could sense the emotion of the room and the temperament. I could hear the thoughts of the adults until it became too dangerous to interpret those thoughts and about 10, I started to really shut down. And by 12, I was shut down tight and I was focused on getting out and how I was going to get out. And I left the morning after I graduated from high school at court. Today in the morning, the car was packed and I had watched Barbara Walters on my beanbag chair in my basement on my belly, and I wanted to go to New York City and be like her, julie. So at 19, I found myself living in Greenwich Village alone. I had negotiated myself out of college for a term to do an internship in New York for an arts management firm and that was, you know, unheard of at the time. Now you have to almost have an internship to graduate. But back then they wanted you to stay in your track and don’t deviate. But I did deviate and I went right back there. As soon as I graduated from college and I was tired of working with these performance artists. I wanted to work more with mainstream talent. So I got a job at International Creative Management. It’s a very large talent agency that’s still in existence today Ultimately went to work for the head of the celebrity commercial division. He left and formed his own agency and invited me with them. So I think I was 24. And I was learning how to negotiate talent deals because we were working in a studio apartment and it was great experience professionally. But this gentleman had a sexual addiction and he used to invite actresses in for their moment and I was asked to leave and it was so slimy and horrible and it kicked up so much trauma and shame in me. And then one day he tried it on me, on you. So I had been personal trainer on the side to several people exercise training to make ends meet, and Barbara Walters was a client. So I rang her doorbell the next morning at 7am and she took one look at me, julie, and she said Susan, get in here. What is wrong with you? She knew, yeah, she was so intuitive, she would have loved you. She’s a girl’s girl. And she got it out of me within moments and she said I’m coming to work with you this morning and we’re going to confront this man together and I said, barbara, this is before me too.

Julie Hilsen: 7:16

Movement Like that wasn’t even a thing. This was in the 80s, yeah.

Susan Gold: 7:21

Yeah, and oh my God. And I said you know what I got it it’s okay. So I did confront him that day and he promptly fired me. I had two months of money in the bank. I was newly sober because the same issues that I saw growing up were starting to happen in my own life. I couldn’t go anywhere without knowing there was going to be a drink. I didn’t know if it was the first drink or the fifth drink that was going to get me drunk. I just wanted out of my own body. I took a slug from the wine jug at work to ask for a raise. I knew that was wrong. My friends were becoming more and more fair weather, so I got sober. That’s a whole another story. I’ve been clean and sober ever since and that’s been, you know, absolutely the mandate for my recovery and my having a full life. But I also had just extricated myself from an abusive relationship where the gentleman held the purse strings and I was terrified I would go back into that relationship. But I could not be an assistant any longer and Barbara offered for her then fiance, who was running a film distribution company, and I said, barbara, I just can’t be an assistant anymore. I’m so grateful, but I just can’t and I launched my own talent brokerage firm and somehow was introduced to Donnie Deutsch, who was running his dad’s ad agency. Now he’s an iconic television host and entrepreneur. But then he wanted Andy Warhol to endorse the Pontiac dealers and I love that part. That was so good, and we were. We were introduced and he said do you think you can do it? And I said well, I’ll try. And I had no idea and I was 25 and shaking in my shoes, but I wanted this deal so desperately. I couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone at the factory, so I took the subway down from the Upper West Side to Murray Hill where his brownstone was. I knocked on the door and Fred, his business manager, answered. So I went in and we had a little conversation while I was there. He goes OK, come back tomorrow and I’ll let you talk to Andy. So I thought, ok, well, at least there’s some kind of chance that he’s going to let me talk to Andy. So I showed up the next day. I waited and waited and finally two double doors open. It was Fred. He said Andy, we’ll see you now. And it was a dark studio and there was a pin spotlight in the center and I was scared to go in there. I went in and there’s his platinum hair going 17 different directions and he’s scribbling on his paper with colored pencils and three pugs. You know those little dogs with the smush yeah. Faces. They were running around the studio and I go into my spiel and he could care less. He’s not looking at me, he’s penciling. He’s occasionally looking at the dog and picking them up in his arms like their little babies. And I saw this because one of the skills I got in my home was to intuit the other person’s energy and their desires and their hopes. And I could feel his isolation, his desire to connect and his desire to be recognized. And finally he looked up and it’s the first time he looked me in the eye and he said now, really, susan, why should I do this? And I said because you can have the pugs in the shot with you so good. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I had nothing to lose, why wouldn’t they be in the shot?

Julie Hilsen: 11:12

That’s what he wanted.

Susan Gold: 11:16

Steve landed a commercial with Andy Warhol. That was my first deal in my company and it really sort of help me solidify my reputation for matching celebrities to brands and ultimately that got me into producing for television and then film.

Julie Hilsen: 11:38

Such an amazing story. You had a superpower because you had to do it to survive. You had to constantly read your mom and maybe tiptoe around your dad, depending on what level he had gotten to on that bottle, or you had to deal with meeting his mistresses. When you were introduced at that picnic I just wanted to just die. I wanted to choke him Like why and it’s just you really had to rise above so many things. But I guess when you look back you’re like, well, you never would have been pushed to go to New York or create your own major, like at Ohio University. They didn’t even have an internship for your major and you just went up and asked for it. And your intuitive skills and that’s what I wanted to ask you Several times you mentioned in your book. In a difficult situation you felt your feet go into the ground and I don’t know if you realize it, but it seemed like you were connecting to Mother Gaia or source energy. And I don’t know if you want to expand on those times in your book or if anything comes to your mind about when you’re or maybe a situation where you’ve done that and maybe if you can say how you started doing it. I don’t know. Give me some insight on that.

Susan Gold: 13:03

Well, you are so insightful and creative to ask that question, because I’ve not been asked that question and only you would ask it, and I’m so grateful, julie. So, yes, I had to connect with my being because so often I was ungrounded. I was living with trauma, my central nervous system was working on overdrive, you know. I didn’t have a lot of worth and value, so I was living from the outside in rather than the inside out and I knew I needed to connect and ground. So often that’s how I would do it. I would feel my two feet on the ground and now I actually do send love to Mother Gaia and I feel the energy come up through the ground and through me. I tell my son to do that now without his rubber sole shoes on. But yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but I totally believe that yes, indeed, I was grounding and asking for the power and the value and the worth to come up through Mother Gaia and feed me, and I was always protected.

Julie Hilsen: 14:17

Mm-hmm, you were and I just you know. I picture you as a young woman navigating the streets of New York City and extricating all those hundreds of cockroaches out of that apartment. You’re for when you were helping that lady and living in an apartment and how you you just went to resource. You’ve always lived in this creative resource full. I’m going to make this fit. What I need and I do think that’s why you were addicted to exercise is that you’re trying to just run through everything because you didn’t. You knew you needed to get it out, but that repetitive movement in the you know you’re. I don’t know if you want to talk about how perfectionistic you were with your workouts and how you had to learn self-care.

Susan Gold: 15:03

Yeah, so physicality was always important. We were really pitted against each other, Like the Kennedys we were. You know, the five of us were always playing, doing, going, rumping, and you know my father, looking back, had exercised bulimia. I didn’t see that at the time. Yeah so, and I too, soothed through food. So food for me was a weapon and I would eat in equal value to my output. How I was exercising. And I started running at the end of college. And then I started marathoning and I was getting too many injuries marathoning. So here’s, here’s the genius. I’ll start triathloning, I’ll spread it out over three sports and that way maybe I won’t have all the injuries that are coming with all this excessive running. And then I was getting too many injuries with the triathloning, so I decided I’m going to become a nationally ranked master swimmer.

Julie Hilsen: 16:09

I know you just don’t go halfway, you are just, you’re so fun.

Susan Gold: 16:14

And I started. I started training like a heroin addict would use heroin. I was. I was training like an NCAA athlete, way over that age bracket, and I hired Olympians and world champions to help teach me to swim and I would do double workouts and I would do kettlebells and then I would go to hot yoga and I was walking my dog around the block, you know, three times a day and I had this whole persona and I had no connection to that worn beaten little Susie inside my heart that was absolutely getting trampled on and I had no temperature for saying no when it wasn’t comfortable for me because I didn’t ask. I was desperate to achieve.

Julie Hilsen: 17:09

And approve to yourself, because that was, you know, when you’re your marriage. That’s when you’re, that’s when you went to swimming. If I remember correctly, your marriage Didn’t wasn’t working out, like he was not showing up for you and your son, and and so I think that might be in how you cycle through that trauma of you know you had to forgive yourself for for getting into that place. You promised yourself you’d never be right, like you said, I’m not going to be that person, yeah. And then your body’s like no, you’ve you need to deal with this emotionally, not just physically, like you’ve got to. You’ve got to forgive yourself, you’ve got to be vulnerable and and that whole path of of doing that was it was just amazing to witness.

Susan Gold: 17:54

The universe has given me many gifts and most of them have come in the form of trauma and it’s taken me a long time to see that as reality. I mean facing addiction early on, and then I had a 10 year struggle with clinical depression and learning how to work with that. And then it was the over exercise and endurance athletics and, little known to me, it was ultimately narcissistic abuse that pulled the whole train wreck down on my head. I was invited from New York city to LA for a career move that looked so golden and it was. I’m really glad I took it, but really I was invited there to meet my biggest guru and that was the man who would become my ex-husband, and when I say the word guru I mean, as in, teacher, and I really felt this man was my match. Finally, you know, because I had made so many mistakes, I mean since second grade and Billy Fritz, I was wired at the hip to some boy who would give me attention and I could be worthy and valued. So it was again from the outside and I was codependent and I was a caretaker and I was controlling and I didn’t want you to leave, even when it was painful for me. So ultimately, the billboard that had to fall in my head. I had bought a home for a family in Southern California. We had a son and I was really feeling drained. He was not coming up to the plate with a sense of integrity and I was running and plugging dykes and fixing and I cried when he went to the paint store with me towards the end of our marriage and I knew there was an expiration date that was well past due. I tried to make him accountable through a post-nuptial agreement. We got to the last point in mediation. I was like, yeah, my marriage is saved. When he folded his arms and his eyes went into those cold, reptilian like slits and he said I’m hiring an attorney and I’m filing for divorce. And that intuitive voice was so powerful, coming over my right shoulder and in through my heart this is the universe doing for you what you will not do for yourself. And we went back to what was then our home and he took up residence in the master and I, by choice, took a mattress across the floor of our home into a partial conversion in our garage and for one calendar year that became my monastery and that’s where I went, indeed to do somatic work to clear this trauma. I had done so much therapy, I had practiced so many modalities. If there was an A on the end of the meeting, I had been to it and participated wholeheartedly. But here I was and the way that I learned to successfully divorce divorce one, I feel, is a narcissist is to hold no contact, meaning no verbal contact and no eye contact. And that’s what it took. And every time it felt unjust, and every time I wanted to rail against what seemed absurdity, I just kept hearing this is the universe doing for you what you cannot do for yourself. So within a calendar year we came to an agreement. I wrote him a six figure check and he went on to his next source of supply. And I call him my greatest teacher or guru, because I learned my power authentically for the first time and I gained compassion and connected with that sweet inner child within me, that piece of soul that’s walking this walk with me, and I became the woman I always wanted to be but could not. And he reflected all that back to me and I am so grateful.

Julie Hilsen: 22:16

That’s just awesome, that’s so wonderful. And you basically started over after that because you had to keep your house and deal with that. The big payment to you know it was the state of California was. I can’t remember what the law was, but you said you didn’t realize the state of California had this divorce law that they get half no matter what, or and I was at, after 10 years they get half.

Susan Gold: 22:51

No matter what my divorce attorney said, this law has got to change. They’re seeing so many women, just you know, really on the short end of a stick and it is what it is. It was what I needed to learn and it was the lesson I needed to walk through and I converted that partial conversion in the garage into an income suite and he cleared all his belongings out of there you know, he was a collector and had floor to ceiling, you know and I turned that into a money making suite. It paid half my mortgage, my taxes and my insurance and there were so many miracles that happened all throughout that period and after, and it was really an acknowledgement that this is a life of love, that I can choose to see it, my challenges and my challengers, in a positive light. If I choose and miracles happen. Help is there, support is there and I have tried to come from a place of love each time.

Julie Hilsen: 23:59

Yeah, because that’s how you get to your creativity. Because you’re not, you’re at a victim, you’re accepting and you’re owning your part and then your heart can open up to the possibilities and you’re a living testament to it and just cheering for you. That may I want to read you, with your permission of a portion of and I wanted, I just wanted to read it to you and then you can respond if you want, or we can just move on. I noticed a white and golden, fleckled misty and wet energy in my room. Telepathically, the gentle force was directing me to release any shame or guilt, urging me to self forgiveness and affirming my ex and uncle as playing old and dying patriarchal masculine roles.

Susan Gold: 24:53

Julie, I love that you picked it out. So that was a dream I had. It was not too long after the divorce and often narcissists will turn family members against you and I saw the manipulation happening before we even got to the point of knowing we were going to go through a divorce, and it was a dearly loved aunt and uncle. I didn’t have any other family on the West Coast at the time and I had guilt after I survived this experience, I had guilt for surviving it. And that was the dream and it was lucid and I was in an awakened state in what you’re describing there, that that energy, that moisture was tangible in the room and that was the messaging that I needed to let them go. I needed to forgive myself and release the guilt, because empaths, people that are so sympathetic to others, will often carry emotion. That is not ours, and I certainly was until I had that gift of entry so good.

Julie Hilsen: 26:13

And then I love how you said you had to put aside resentment and make forgiveness your soul focal point or fall, it’s a discipline and you had to trust your moving toward a very different mindset and living a way that you’d never experienced. And that trust was not your middle name. And I loved what you did to passing drivers and it’s so illuminating that you did in LA, one of the worst traffic situations in the whole world, and this is what you’re doing. I can I share with the audience what you did in your car? Like, silently, I’d begin wishing passing drivers, passengers and pedestrians what I wanted for myself Peace, abundance, compassion, goodness, light, safety and joy. I wanted to fully embody the phrase I am light, I am the light, the light I am.

Susan Gold: 27:14

And that was. That was a simple and beautiful way to do it. I actually learned that from a teacher named Matt Khan, and he has people put hands on hard and say I love you and believe me in 2014. I was doing that, it was not comfortable, it was not tasteful at all, but it has really helped change the reality that I live in, and I live with much more peace and much more freedom than I ever have, julie, and it’s just. It’s such a privilege to come and share it with you and your listeners today, and I really want to give them a message of hope and inspiration that if it can happen for me, it can happen for you too. That’s perfect.

Julie Hilsen: 28:04

Thank you so much for sharing that, and I will put a link to your book. You know, it’s just a wonderful, wonderful adventure to go on with you and you’re such a heroine and just I love being in this space with you. So thanks for taking the time.

Susan Gold: 28:20

Julie, thank you and thanks to your listeners and I’m going to encourage them again to pick up your book. It sounds like we’re promoting each other’s books and nothing more, but this has magic and purpose and point, and I’ve read the messages from the angels and I’ve gone into the appendix and I’ve searched it out. When I needed self-worth, I knew exactly where to go and the beauty is there. It’s so poignant. So thank you for the book and also thank you for the life of love podcast. It takes energy, takes finance, takes time, takes emotion to produce all the content that you are, and I’m so grateful.

Julie Hilsen: 29:00

Thank you. I’ll keep doing it till I can’t because, like I say, every day is a chance to live life your dreams, and so connecting with people like you helps it seem more like a dream. So much love.