Ep. 14 Part 1 I Was Called Dr. Les for 11 Years | Why I Left Naturopathic Medicine and Built Something New

I had the title. The license. The patients I loved. And a slow-burning anger I kept pushing down for years. This is the episode I haven't told on the podcast yet - why I walked away from naturopathic medicine after 11 years, how my own emotions were trying to tell me something long before I was ready to listen, and where the SEER Method actually came from. 

Spoiler: it started in my parents' basement.

Book 1:1 www.lesleyturner.ca/services

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode. Okay, so this one's actually a two-parter. I want to start by giving you a little bit of context because what I'm about to share sets up everything that comes in part two. You'll understand my the method to my madness. So this is the story of how the sear method came to be, which is also the story of why I walked away from naturopathic medicine, which is also kind of my origin story. I was, I'm sure a lot of you already know this, but I was a naturopathic doctor for 11 years. And up front, I loved it. I loved my patience. I loved watching someone come in feeling completely defeated and slowly over weeks and sometimes months, started to feel like themselves again. That never got old. Those aha moments were my absolute favorite. Still are. A boundary has been crossed, or pay attention to this. It's not something to manage away. It's information. And my anger kept showing up around my naturopathic license. Here's what was happening. So over the years, our scope of practice kept getting narrower. The regulatory body governing naturopathic medicine was heavily influenced by the Ministry of Health. And the Ministry of Health, from where I was sitting, didn't love the overlap between what we did and what medical doctors did. So things started disappearing, things like B12 injections. I used to do them all the time. And then suddenly we couldn't. Or even dosing vitamin D higher than a thousand I use, which is kind of a baby dose. Things became a little more sticky, a little more, I want to say hand cuffy. Um, but obviously that's not a word. Things that were genuinely helping people quietly got walked back. Now, even before that, there was this unspoken rule about vaccinations, like childhood vaccinations. We weren't allowed to have real conversations with patients about it. We could hand them a pamphlet and we could say, well, it's up to you, it's your decision. But an actual informed, nuanced discussion off the table. We weren't taught it in school. And it was up to us to kind of learn a little bit more about it. And then, but advising clients or patients on it was a no-go. This never sat right with me, especially when I was seeing families and kids and moms who had real questions and deserved real answers. So then COVID happened. And the message that came down the line there was tell your patients to get vaccinated. And practitioners who posted about other ways to support immune health, like prevention, which is literally one of our core pillars of naturopathic medicine, they were getting sanctioned or letters or told to back off. And I watched colleagues go quiet. I remember sitting with that and thinking, what's going on here? Who's actually running this? And who are they protecting? Because it didn't feel like my patients. Now, because the regulatory stuff was one piece of it, I do have to tell you the other piece. It was happening right in my treatment room. Even in my best sessions, even when someone was on a really solid protocol, supplements dialed in, sleep improving, I kept hitting a ceiling. People would get better, and then life would happen and they'd slide right back. And I started to notice a bit of a pattern here. The women who didn't slide back were the ones that we'd gone deeper with, the ones where we'd actually sat with something uncomfortable instead of just optimizing around it. And I also noticed the ones who couldn't quite reach that, the women who would dance around their emotions or keep everything really logical or analytical or surface level. And I understood that. I'd done it myself, but I could feel that without being able to go into that deeper place, something was missing. Real transformation, long-term transformation just wasn't happening. So I started shifting how I was showing up and how I was marketing. I started speaking to women who were open to looking in that deeper layer, who could sit in a little bit of discomfort without immediately needing to exit. And then those women started coming in. The impact I was making felt totally different. It was bigger. It rippled out into every layer of their life, not just their symptoms, but their relationships, their sense of self, the way they moved in the world. Now I had been doing Bowen therapy since second year naturopathic medicine, which is hands-on bodywork. And I'd been quietly weaving that into my practice for years. I'd started incorporating more energetic medicine when clients were open to it, when we could have those talks ahead of time, like, well, I'd love to work on you in that capacity. And then the emotional work kind of crept in naturally through every conversation that went a little bit further, other than what's your diet like? How's your sleep? Here's your adrenal support. Stress was kind of my open doorway into the deeper emotions. And I loved working with stressed out people. So I was kind of doing pattern work without having the language for it yet. And I want to stop here for a second and say: if you are seeing a naturopath right now, I'm not poo-pooing that at all. Some of the most gifted practitioners I know are naturopathic doctors. And the ones doing the most impactful work are often the ones who have found ways to weave in deeper emotional and energetic work alongside everything else. And honestly, it's beautiful when it happens. This isn't me saying that the profession is broken. This is me telling you what I knew I needed to do. So standing in the middle of all of that, combined with this growing anger about where the profession was heading, I had this really quiet knowing that I could be happy doing the hands-on work, the energy work, and the emotional work for the rest of my life. And I didn't need a naturopathic license to do it. In fact, the license had started to feel like it was in the way because I was looking over my shoulder, wondering if the work that was actually helping people was going to get me in trouble. And I knew I couldn't keep doing that. So on April 1st, 2023, I let my license go. Yeah, that was April Fool's Day. I've I've made peace with that. I want to be honest, though, it was not all relief. A friend and colleague of mine, someone I've interviewed on this podcast already, had dropped her license the year before me. And watching her navigate that transition gave me something to hold on to in those really tough moments. I could see that it was possible. I could see there was a life on the other side of this. But I still felt very unmoored. My self-esteem took a real hit in those early months because I'd been calling myself Dr. Less for 11 years. And my parents had a daughter who was a doctor, and they were proud in the way that parents often are proud of something they can easily explain to other people. And suddenly that was gone. Now my mom follows me on Instagram. So she has a general sense of what I do now, I think. But I'd say somatic practitioner and watch everyone's eyes go completely blank. Good times, good times. I'm lucky I had a husband who believed in this shift even when I was wobbling, and that mattered more than I can say. So three years in, I still have moments of reaching for those credentials, like wishing I still had a title, or of wanting something external that says she knows what she's doing. But those moments are getting a little bit quieter because I'm I'm trusting, like real deep embodied trust, that who I am now and who I'm still becoming doesn't require a title to be legitimate. What came out of all of this, the years of watching what created lasting change, the hands-on work, the energy work, the pattern work disguised as conversations about stress, is now what I call the SEER method. Somatic, energetic, emotional release. It's an acronym. It's also really cool that I'm an intuitive, and so SEER also means that. So we're doing a play on words here. And it's trademark now, which is a sentence I never expected to say about something that started in my parents' basement on weekends. But it didn't come from a whiteboard. It didn't come from figuring it all out in minute details. It came from 11 years of watching what worked and what didn't, from following my anger when it was trying to tell me something, and then from trusting that the slower, deeper path was the one worth taking. This is where Sierra came from. So this is part one. The next episode, I want to zoom out from my story and talk about something bigger, about why so many women have been gaslit by medicine for so long, about why it takes an average of seven, six to seven years to get diagnosed with things like endometriosis. There is a research gap. There's a dismissal of women's pain, and why so many of you came to me after trying everything else first. Your instincts were right. And I think it's past time someone with a clinical background said that out loud. I hope you join me there. If something in this landed for you, I'd love to support you further. Whether that's through private sessions, ongoing containers, or simply listening to another episode, trust what feels right. All the ways to work with me are linked below. There's no pressure, just options. Thank you for being here and for doing the quiet, brave work of listening to yourself.