Entrepreneurial Empire
Learn the fundamentals of where you are in business and how to scale with your host Jacqueline. Your business will go through many stages, and every stage will have it's own set of requirements. Let's unravel the journey ahead together and find strategic solutions that will help you conquer it all.
Entrepreneurial Empire
🚀 Transforming Justice: Judge Rosie Gonzalez's Fight Against Family Violence and Crime 🌟
Judge Rosie Gonzalez joins us for an enlightening conversation on tackling family violence and child abuse in Bexar County, San Antonio. With her extensive background in both social work and law, Judge Rosie provides invaluable insights into these pressing issues, emphasizing the importance of viewing them as behavioral rather than gender-specific problems. At the heart of our discussion is the innovative Reflejo Court, which focuses on addressing unresolved childhood trauma in first-time offenders with substance abuse histories, aiming to break the cycle of violence through comprehensive rehabilitation.
Our episode further explores the transformative power of treatment courts like Bexar County's Reflejo Court, which has overcome significant political challenges and gained legislative support through House Bill 3529. Celebrated as the Texas Association of Specialty Courts' Treatment Court of the Year for 2024, this pioneering court not only earned national recognition with the first trauma certification but also sets a precedent for reducing crime and victimization across generations. We also reflect on the vital role of community awareness, adapting the military's challenge coin tradition to encourage proactive reporting of family violence and promoting alternative parenting strategies that eschew physical punishment.
Finally, we share a personal journey of resilience and love, highlighting Judge Rosie's upbringing and the impactful stories within the LGBTQIA community. From early political activism to a memorable wedding on an Alaskan cruise, these anecdotes underscore the power of education, activism, and kindness in transforming lives. As we wrap up, we offer heartfelt advice on navigating life's challenges, whether through travel plans or small acts of kindness that leave a lasting impact. Join us for an episode that promises inspiration and a call to action for meaningful change.
Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Empire podcast. This is the place where you can find business and career strategies, techniques and real life success journeys of individuals who have built businesses to the million dollar revenue mark and beyond. I'm Jacqueline Hernandez, life coach and business development consultant. I've worked with startups, fortune 100 companies, network marketing, direct sales organizations, churches, nonprofits and government agencies all to become the authority experts in their industry. Lead with people and scale their revenue. Let's get started. All right, welcome back listeners. We have our very special guest here today at Entrepreneurial Empire. We have Judge very special guest here today on Entrepreneurial Empire. We have Judge Rosie Gonzalez, but we got Speedy Gonzalez. I hear a lot.
Speaker 2:My middle name is Speed Lynn, so for the lazy articulators it's easy to just say Speedy.
Speaker 1:Speedy. Okay, got it Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. Judge Rosie, this is amazing.
Speaker 2:So tell us a little bit about what you do as a judge under a rock that San Antonio and Bexar County have the notoriety of being the ground zero for family violence and child abuse. We have the highest numbers we've had in the past. We're working on reducing the numbers of family violence, cases of intimate partner violence, homicides and of child removal from parents due to child abuse, neglect, trauma, but the silver lining of those removals is that, like during the W Bush administration, bexar County was recognized as one of his thousand points of light because we had the highest number of adoptions in the country.
Speaker 2:But those adoptions were the direct product of termination of parental rights, so that you have high number of terminations, you're going to have a high number of adoptions. And for me, I practiced law 16 years and a great number of those years was spent representing families and children entangled in the child protective services system. I'm a recovering social worker. I did every type of social work job, I think 11 years prior to going to law school, and I bring that to the bench For me. The bench that I sit on is child abuse at the adult level. I mean child abuse is family violence. The age of the victim is just lower, and so family violence is what we hear, and it covers a plethora of behaviors. It's a behavioral issue and we've been fighting the narrative that it's a man's issue. It's not a man's issue, it's a man's and it's a woman's issue, and so I can tell you that within our court, we see that in how the numbers break down, we have a subcourt to court 13, and that's a treatment court titled Reflejo Court.
Speaker 2:It is one Reflejo is the name of the court that I picked because of the work that we do in that court, which is to pause and reflect before you act, and a lot of folks that are victims of trauma are unable to do that because they are triggered and they react. But there's a way to change that reaction to a response and it's all science-based. We are one of three courts in the country there's one in Ohio and there's one in Florida that treat the offender.
Speaker 2:We don't do services for the family or the wife or the kids or any of the victims. This is with the offender and it's only available for first-time offenders of family violence with a history of substance abuse. Everything is tied to each other. It's science-based. What we found when I first took the bench almost six years ago was that 85 to 90% of the defendants walking through the doors were arrested or were accused of behaving in a violent fashion under the influence of alcohol, cocaine or meth.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay.
Speaker 2:If you spoke to that universe of defendants, almost 100% of them self-disclosed that they were adult survivors of childhood trauma, abuse or neglect that went unresolved. So think about this. Think about a 6 to 7, 8-year-old who's a victim of abuse at the hands of the people that are supposed to love them care for them provide clothing, food, shelter.
Speaker 2:What's a 6, 7, 8-year-old supposed to do when care for them provide clothing, food, shelter? What's a six, seven, eight-year-old supposed to do when that individual hurts them? They don't have a bank account. They can go empty to rent a place of their own. They don't have the skills or access to a motor vehicle to get away from the abuser. So then we start to address the root cause of this behavior. It's trauma, and so we address it through mental health services. And then we also look at where that leads the individual right. So it leads them to self-modulate their emotions through substance abuse.
Speaker 2:To kind of numb the pain, yeah, and so at 10, at 12, 13, they start drinking their dad's beer in the fridge Maybe they're going next door to smoke their friend's weed and as they get older, now they're hanging out with those older cousins who are doing cocaine. And before you know it, that altered state turns into a criminal act and they end up in my court.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we look for first time offenders with a substance abuse issue. We offer them a one year program that treats the trauma, gets them sober, we help them find employment and we help them find housing.
Speaker 1:Wow, and this is all for the offender?
Speaker 2:Yes, because every offender that goes untreated can create 12 to 15 new victims in their lifetime if that trauma is not checked, if it's not brought under some sort of control. And so we start with first time offenders, because that's when they're the most vulnerable. This is when the offender doesn't want their kids to know that they touched the other parent in a violent way. They don't want their neighbors to know because they could lose their lease OK, ok, they could be kicked out of that apartment complex. They don't want their in-laws to know that they touched their adult child in the way that they did. Yeah, and so when you have this type of criminal history, it affects you for a lifetime. If you don't get it resolved, if you don't get your trauma resolved, you're going to keep reoffending.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. If you don't get this program under your belt and you don't get this case dismissed, then that criminal history can prevent you from access to your children. It can prevent you from being a chaperone on a field trip. Yeah, it can prevent you from being a chaperone on a field trip. Yeah, it can prevent you from college financial aid or trade school financial aid. It can prevent you from being able to protect yourself, right, yeah. And so it puts up all these barriers that will remain there for a lifetime. So we offer an opportunity for a young person that they mostly of them are young in their twenties, you know some of them in their thirties.
Speaker 2:We do have a 50 something year old woman, but she has a lifelong, a lifelong history of battling, battling her emotions and over-medicating and, you know, then gets into an altercation with the relative and ends up in our court.
Speaker 1:What's a success story that you have? That they've gone through your program and they were an offender obviously.
Speaker 2:I'm going to invite you and your listeners to pull up YouTube and in the search bar type in A-I-T plus reflejo and you're going to see a black and white video. How do you spell?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Reflejo is spelled R-E-F, as in Frank L-E-G-O, reflejo, and so it is a 16 minute mini documentary, and it's all graduates of our program, oh wow. So they're giving you their testimony of how they saw the program, how they finished the program and how it's changed their lives. We've had 35 graduates. Thirty-four have not reoffended after they graduated.
Speaker 1:Thirty. That's a very high statistic right there, so it's less than a 3% recidivism rate. Wow.
Speaker 2:And we've got about four or five more to graduate in January. We have graduations twice a year. Okay, and it's a hard program. Not everyone wants it. It's a one-year program. It's a one-year program, but we know that life happens. Yeah, we know that pulling the scab off of that trauma can discombobulate you and get push you into emotional turmoil.
Speaker 2:So we give you extra time now you're having to deal with those things that you've been trying to medicate right, and so we want you to deal with them when they're with us, because we will give you the skills, the processing, whatever you need to shore you up and strengthen you to deal with the trauma. Right, because the trauma is not going to stop when you graduate with this. The triggers will continue for the rest of your life. But now you have a whole new skill set to deal with those triggers.
Speaker 1:You got some new tools in your tool belt to deal with those.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so we want you to lead with that skill set and be ready for those triggers as they present themselves throughout your life.
Speaker 1:Is there a particular case that strikes to you as one of your proudest?
Speaker 2:There is Recipients and I'll use a different name. I'll call her Debbie. Okay, but Debbie came to us off the streets and was couch surfing. How old was she? In her 20s, early 20s, and kept relapsing on math. Okay, and we sent her to treatment two or three times. Every time she asked we'd sent her and she was able to graduate. She just celebrated three years of sobriety. Wow, she is running a sober home.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh A sober home that she was a resident in, okay, and she's very involved in the sober community and she's doing phenomenal. And that's a woman, um, and once you see that video, uh, she's one of the women in that video and, uh, you'll see men and women both testifying as to the how the whole court changed their lives wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:And now this you said this has been up and running for six years.
Speaker 2:No, I've been on the bench six years. When I first got on the bench, I ran because I saw there was a problem and I had ideas of how to start chipping away at a solution. And so there was an archbishop by the name of Desmond Tutu, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu used to say we have to stop pulling the drowning people out of the river and we need to start going upstream and find out why they're falling into that little creek that turns into a river in the first place. Ooh, that just gave me chills. My job was to go upstream on this problem. Find out who creates the victims the offender? Why is the offender creating these victims?
Speaker 2:When you talk to half of these offenders, they don't remember what they did. It was either an alcohol or drug-induced blackout, or they literally saw red. Because our brain has a mechanism that shuts it down to protect it when we experience a traumatic event, and it leads to you forgetting that event or things that led up to that event, or events that happened right after that big traumatic event, and it's a brain function that protects your brain from further trauma. So that is a thing right To not remember. But it's not always drug-driven. Sometimes it's trauma-trigger-driven, and so we teach them to recognize that, because it can be anything. It could be that song that was playing when your dad would get drunk and then beat on your mom.
Speaker 2:It could be something like this the scent of burnt beans for the whole is came models. Right, because you remember that when mom got a little distracted, the beans burnt and here comes dad beating her because she burnt the beans. Yeah, or maybe it's a certain cologne that the person that hurt you was worried, or maybe you know it could be a number of things. Yeah, maybe it was food you were forced to eat and that triggers you.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a specific word that was used and that it triggers are as different as an individual's dna yeah, absolutely and so we teach them to recognize that, and it's not a pleasant experience for them, but we hold their hand through it, we give them therapeutic support and we do the most we can so that they can learn that this traumatic event was not your fault. Yeah, the pain that you're experiencing, the distress you're experiencing, was not something you created. It was imposed on you, and so we have to change their paradigm of thinking about how they think about themselves.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right and how they move about in a new way in our community.
Speaker 1:So you were able to get into this court and and so create.
Speaker 2:Yes, so we created it, knowing we had a need for it. Yes, I had been a drug court attorney almost my entire attorney career and how long was that? 16 years 16 years Okay.
Speaker 2:A gentleman, a judge, retired judge, who was a mentor and is a friend of mine. Now Judge Al Alonzo, almost at the same time with Judge Mary Ramond, started talking about treatment courts. Now we have treatment courts across the country and all over the world. What's a treatment court? A treatment court has a common denominator, which is they must have a drug treatment component, okay, and they provide that to different populations In Bexar County, as well as Dallas, fort Worth and in Harris County. We have the highest number of treatment courts in our jurisdictions across the country. We have 15 in Bexar County, we have 15 in DFW, we have 15 in Harris County. So I'll give you examples Esperanza Court, that is for sex workers.
Speaker 2:They're in the industry because they're having to feed an addiction in most cases. Okay, we have them for juvenile court. Okay, juveniles who have some sort of substance issue, right, and it led to a criminal accusation, we have them in CPS court. Children removed because of whatever issue dealing with substance abuse, we have them. Ours is one of the newer ones Reflejo Court. We have another one that came after us called the Community Court, for individuals who find themselves homeless, houseless, but they have been accused of a crime, but now they also have a substance abuse attached to that. That's for folks that find themselves without shelter. We have Community Court. We have Adult Misdemeanor Drug Court. We have Felony Drug drug court. We have 15. I can't name them all but, um, when I first got on the bench, I went to every single city of san antonio council person and met with them individually about this proposal.
Speaker 2:I met with every commissioner individually on the city council side. Hey, great idea, good luck. Um, I had one councilman say well, rosa, my constituency won't support something like that great idea. Well, he made himself famous. Let's put it that way he's that guy, he's that one that we found on the deck in the back of his house. Oh no, and then, uh, judge nelson wolf patted me on the back, said it's a great idea, but, rosie, it's bad politics.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:And he said people do not like to help violent offenders.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see.
Speaker 2:And I said well, judge Wolf, good thing I'm not a politician and good thing I'm a public servant.
Speaker 1:Yes, and.
Speaker 2:I pursued this, and with the help of my spouse, who's an expert on trauma and addiction herself, with 21 years of sobriety, phd. Dr, Stacy Speedling Gonzalez. Uh, we put our heads together and we put this proposal together for a whole court. And once all the doors were closed to us locally, we went to state level. We wrote a house bill house bill 3529. And At the time State Representative Roland Gutierrez sponsored it in the House. Then Senator Jose Menendez sponsored it in the Senate.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:The bill came out of both chambers unanimously, and then Governor Abbott signed it into law that summer. That was June of 2019. It took a year for the county to assist me in setting up all the protocols and the systems, and so, in 2020, we admitted our very first Lewis participant, who, by the way, now runs the house, the sober home that he was in as a participant. Our very first graduate came in 2021. Since then, we've had six graduations. We're about to have our seventh or eighth and we're just trucking along.
Speaker 1:Wow and making impact.
Speaker 2:We hope because the impact that we're making is not going to be seen by us. It's generational.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you said 13 offenders will come I mean 13.
Speaker 2:An offender that does not get treatment can create anywhere between 12 to 15 offenders in their lifespan. Yeah, I mean not offenders, but victims in their lifetime.
Speaker 1:So when you take all the people that have graduated from your guys's, you know.
Speaker 2:Let's take 34. Multiply that, yeah 34 times 13,. Let's just say Wow, that's how many people have been spared of the scourge of family violence. Hopefully.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, gosh. That is amazing at the work that you guys are doing here in the community, and we're in an award winning court.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you that for 2024, this drug court team, the reflejo court treatment court team, was selected as treatment court of the year by the Texas Association of Specialty Courts. That's statewide Wow. Two years ago, in 2022, I was selected as judge of the year for the by the Texas Association of Specialty Courts. That's statewide Wow. Two years ago, in 2022, I was selected as judge of the year for the by the Texas Association of Specialty Courts for the innovative work that we're doing in Bexar County with this court.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing. So one more thing I got to brag about this.
Speaker 2:It's a two year process and we earned our level one trauma certification for Bexar County Court at law number 13. We are the first and the only court thus far that is trauma certified not only in Texas but the entire country.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, In the entire country. So do they ever send? Do other states or cities come to you guys to learn about what you're doing?
Speaker 2:I've had requests from other judges as far as Alaska, new Mexico, all over the state, asking us for our format, our curriculum, and I'm a big believer that knowledge is power, but only when you share it. If you keep it to yourself, no gatekeeping here. Pa' que me sirves, right as they say. What's it good for if, if you keep it to yourself? No gatekeeping here, right as they say. What's it good for? If you just court it? It's only valuable when you're able to use your knowledge to help improve the lots of people around you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I love that. Okay, so now that you guys have this established, you guys are already you know. You're trucking along, you're grabbing these awards, you're being well known, you're established.
Speaker 2:What do you see is the next thing for you? For me personally, the work isn't finished with Reflejo Court. I fight every day to find funding. We have $100,000 from the county and we have to look for funding all other sorts of places. We do have a nonprofit that's hosting a fundraiser for us. Rosie's Gracious Hearts is the name of the nonprofit. The fundraiser is titled Sana Mi Corazon.
Speaker 1:Sana Mi Corazon.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that'll take place on February 12th at the neighborhood place on Rebus, just down the street from Rosedale Park.
Speaker 1:And how do you get involved in that?
Speaker 2:So you come by the courthouse or you call 335-2625 and ask to speak to Terry. Okay, terry's our administrative assistant. Here's the project you pick up a plywood heart.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:And you decorate it any which way you want and you turn it back to us the first week of February. That heart will then be auctioned off on the 12th of February $25 minimum bid and you get to take your Corazon Sanado home or gifted on.
Speaker 2:Valentine's Day Okay, now, it's not an original thought. I used to live in Austin. I was a probation officer there in the mid nineties and there was this fabulous annual event and it was titled Toma Mi Corazon. Okay, and that was a fundraiser by a gallery titled La Peña, and they promoted Latino arts there on South Congress, and every year I don't know if they still do it, but they would host Sana Mi Corazon I'm not Sama Toma Mi Corazon and they would give out free plywood hearts to anybody who wanted to pick it up and we would turn it back in. Now I'm going to tell you it has potential for a lot of stuff. Cesar Chavez was given one of those plywood hearts. Wow. He drew the Phoenix on the farm worker flag with a lead pencil and signed it. That's all he did with the plywood heart. That heart brought in over $2,000 at that auction.
Speaker 2:Ann Richards did a heart, willie Nelson did a heart. That's Austin people. We already have commitments from people like Jesse Borrego. I need to drop off a heart to the mayor's wife, erica Prosper, and so we're looking for, you know, big name people to put their name on a heart and help us. Help Rosie's Gracious Hearts. Provide some funding for our participants in Reflejo Court.
Speaker 1:Awesome, okay, so I want to talk about this coin right here.
Speaker 2:The challenge coin.
Speaker 1:Yes, the challenge coin. Tell us a little bit about this. What does it represent and what's the purpose behind it?
Speaker 2:So we're Military City, usa, and if you talk to anyone who is a veteran or currently active in the military, they adore and they very much cherish their challenge coins, and so that challenge coin comes with the challenge you have to do this or you have to, or you accomplished something, and so they, it's they, they pass them around, you know, like like a monopoly little little little figurines, but um, so I decided to create a challenge coin for our court okay and the challenge is to stop family violence and I tell people, don't be that neighbor that hears a person screaming or hears that argument and just turns their back and shuts the door because that person could disappear and that would.
Speaker 2:That person will turn into a rescue mission because you decided not to call law enforcement if you see something say something, because this is a behavior that happens behind closed doors.
Speaker 2:This is not a behavior you see on the streets. Yeah, you know, because it's a behavior that's frowned upon. Yeah, when you see a couple arguing at a restaurant or in front of their kids, you kind of get uncomfortable. Some folks may even especially if you're older, like I would say, the grandmas and the tias oh yes, mija, oh yes, mijo, not here. Older, like I would say the grandmas and the tias were oh yes, mija. What is michael not here? Look at people are watching. Yeah, so what? Where does that behavior travel? Behind closed doors in a bedroom at night, when no one's looking? Yeah, so when you do see something, say something, because you could be saving someone's life you mentioned earlier about statistics of murder, homicide and, in relations, abused relationships.
Speaker 1:How often do you see that?
Speaker 2:Well, mine is a misdemeanor court, so professionally I don't see it come into my court. That's the felony courts. See that. I can tell you that there are lots of folks locally who gather data on this subject matter, and they've informed us that the downtown zip codes and I'm talking like from hemisphere park all the way over west to the other side of utsa, downtown, all the way, uh, let's go north over to the other side of haven for hope and let's go south to 90 there's about three zip codes that cover those areas. Those three zip codes account for the highest number of intimate partner violence homicides in the whole state of Texas. So, though that area that I just described, we're sitting in it is the most dangerous place for women to live in in the whole state, because we die at a higher rate here at the hands of the people that are supposed to love us yeah, wow, that's Well.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that you guys are staying informed and you know everything that you're doing right now with the community. Again, it's just you're taking it to a whole nother level and giving exposure to people about behavior, about trauma. A lot of people I feel like they experience these things but they don't really take care of it or they don't think twice about it.
Speaker 2:You know why? They just think it's normal. You just used the word, because there's two things that have been normalized.
Speaker 1:Desensitized.
Speaker 2:And we've become desensitized to two behaviors One, drinking and then getting behind of a wheel of a motor vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And driving under the influence of alcohol. And two, laying hands on the people that we love and that behavior. The second behavior, which is what I deal with, is a longstanding behavior. It's it's the product of our colonization. Yeah, when the colonizers came to this part of the world, there were indigenous people everywhere, in the hundreds of thousands. They needed someone to do their labor and to carry their water. Who do you think build this UNESCO series of missions in our community? It wasn't the colonizers. It was the blood, sweat and tears of the people that were already here.
Speaker 2:The men and women that did the cooking and paved the roads and built these churches and missions were indigenous people, and if they did not come into step and comply with the directives and commands of the colonizers, including losing their language and their culture because they needed to be Christianized, then they would be beat. And if they didn't respond to being beat, they would be starved. And if they didn't respond to that, their spouses would be killed and raped and their children would be taken. Wow, what choice do you have? They have gunpowder and guns that I've never even seen before they got here. They have these. They call them big deer. They had horses. The natives thought they were deer, big deer, yeah, you know, because they'd never seen things of that character nature before. And so this behavior of correcting people's behavior through force, through laying of hands, is hundreds of years old and it's tough to try to decolonize those types of behavioral patterns in our culture. Wow, because the very first violence that we experience as children toward us, believe it or not, is spanking. Yes, definitely.
Speaker 1:What do you say to a parent that maybe needs to redirect or reach out, or you know course correct, I guess, with their child conduct?
Speaker 2:correction conduct. Um, I say to them raise them. My parents didn't lay a hand on me. What they did do was they promoted positive behavior, and if it wasn't positive behavior, then they took from us things that we wanted. I'll give you examples. Today it's a phone. You're not going skating this Saturday. No, you're not getting ice cream. No, you don't get to stay up and watch that show. No, you're not going out on your bicycle today.
Speaker 2:So these activities that we just loved and enjoyed were taken from us until we corrected behavior yes from a very early age, my mom would tell the story of if we did not behave in public, the activity was done and she would not take us to the bathroom for a spanking. She would just bring us home and say there it is. We were there 30 minutes. We could have been there three hours, but your behavior led to us having to leave Nice.
Speaker 2:Our, our, our, our punishment was you sit at the dining room table. No TV, nothing to eat, nope. Sit at the dining room table. No TV, nothing to eat. No, you're not going to color, you're not even going to be allowed to read. You sit there and you think about why you're sitting at this table.
Speaker 1:Yes, for hours Nice, or what about standards?
Speaker 2:The writing of the sentences. Oh, that was at school, right. And then there were other old ways that did not involve per se violence. My dad's, one of my dad's favorite corrective measures was to make us kneel on bricks.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, but the bricks had raw rice or raw beans, a little hill of beans or a little hill of rice, and we had to kneel on that and then hold a brick in each hand, oh gosh, okay, above our shoulders in a corner, and we could not drop our arms. We could not stand up until he told us it was time to do so. Not a mark left on us other than dimples on our knees.
Speaker 2:That went away in 30 minutes, but not at the hands of somebody that loves you right, not at the hands of someone lashing out at us that that was one of his favorite, you know, okay, um, I worked on a case where I had a 12 year old boy that I, that I represented, and CPS came in because the mother had that 12 year old boy tipping the scales of over 200 pounds. She was divorced from an active military man and so when dad had his visits, his discipline was go run a lap, I need to do 10 sit ups, I need you. He gave him physical activity and mom accused dad of abuse for doing that and the tables got turned on her and CPS said he's not being abusive, you are by continuing to overfeed this boy and in the end, dad got full custody because of all of this. So abuse can come in very different forms and fashions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or different genders and in different genders, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Now, in your opinion I mean based on the people that do come through your court what would you say? The percentage are of women.
Speaker 2:We've been at like with reflejo court at a 50 50 split. What, oh my gosh? Um, it tends to vacillate 60, 40, 70, 30, but we've seen a growing number of women come through as the alleged perpetrator wow that I mean.
Speaker 1:I that's so crazy because you wouldn't think that. Well, normally people don't look at women as but?
Speaker 2:but you know why? Because the most under reported crime in the country is assaults on men by women. That I could see that. Now think about it. What man wants to admit and report that he's being abused by the females, whether it's his mother, his wife, his sister, his daughter, whoever in his life. It carries a huge stigma. So what do they do? They just don't say anything about it yeah, so we don't hear about it, so we don't hear about it wow, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's interesting. Now tell us a little bit about personally like did you ever think you would run for office?
Speaker 2:no, although I can tell you that I've been running political streets since about the age of eight. What, okay wait talk about that.
Speaker 2:I'm originally from Brownsville, texas, okay, and my mom worked for two brothers, ben and Ruben Edelstein, and they had a chain of furniture stores from Rio Grande City, roma, all the way down to Brownsville, and she was one of their bookkeepers and they really valued education and so she worked for them for about 26, 27 years and the last five of those years she went to night school. What does that mean? That means they let her leave work early, how early?
Speaker 2:30 minutes early, 4.30 instead of five. I didn't see my mom from about second grade through eighth grade, ninth grade, because she was going to night school. Oh, wow so she worked during the day and then went straight to night school. If I saw her, it was If I was still up when she got home, or on the weekends, okay, and on the weekend she would take my brother and me to the library with her.
Speaker 2:It was air conditioned she would be up in her study group. We would be down in the children's library Hanging out. Sometimes they had movies for us to watch and so education was a big deal. And when people would tell her well, yes, how can you do that to your kids? Who's who's? Who's watching them? And she, she came up with ways for us to stay involved. Um, but she said I have to model for them. I can't just tell them go get your education.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have to model for them how education can change your life, and she did. She did that.
Speaker 1:What did she get her?
Speaker 2:education in. She got her bachelor's and her master's graduated a summa cum laude in five years of night school.
Speaker 1:Wow, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:So I went from being a bookkeeper to an elementary school, bilingual teacher, special ed teacher and then went and got her counseling certifications and licenses and ended her second career as a therapist and counselor for the school district. Wow, okay, so my point in all, that is when I was eight, ruben, one of the two brothers, ran for mayor of Brownsville, texas, and he kind of said to her you're going to be my volunteer coordinator.
Speaker 2:I need you to set up all these events and events, and so every weekend, here we are and I'd help her with the you know bags and bags of tamales and cases and cases of beer, and we would set up pachangas meet and greets for mr mr rubin so he could meet everyone that he wanted to vote for him. And, um, I was the little assistant and he ended up winning his race for mayor brownsville. And the voice that you hear right now on this podcast I had at the age of 12 and I did very well in school. I could, could read, and so at 12, I was already phone banking. I was given a script and they'd say, okay, these are your numbers, call these people and read the script.
Speaker 1:At 12 years old, I didn't know I was 12.
Speaker 2:I sounded like I sound right now with this peppermint patty voice.
Speaker 2:And so, going back to mom and her finding things for us to do because she was in school, she got us involved in just about every school activity she could find for us okay whether that was student council band, uh, key club, uh, whatever latin club, but it got us involved because we had adult supervision at those activities and so I got very much involved in school government and and I was president of my class voted uh most likely to succeed like I already ran a campaign and got someone into the mayor position so started early in campaigning and politics and that bled into college and then my adult life, and so I helped with a lot of campaigns and before I became a candidate myself okay, now how.
Speaker 1:Now, how did you meet?
Speaker 2:your spouse At a conference at the Contessa, and so she was the point person in San Antonio for a. At the time the organization was called Algebra Tech and it was the Association of LGBTQIA Therapists and Counselors.
Speaker 2:And she's a therapist and she's a therapist and counselor. She owns her own mental health clinic called Salient Counseling Solutions and she has about 10 therapists that work for her. But she was in charge of the San Antonio Conference and Luncheon. It was at a time when San Antonio was going through a rough patch with the non-discrimination ordinance and we had Ivy Taylor as mayor and she had taken a very personal stance against it, and so the conference wanted to pull out of San Antonio and she convinced them to stay and that she would bring in LGBT leadership to attend that luncheon and I was one of the guests and that's where we met.
Speaker 1:And the rest is history.
Speaker 2:That's what she'll tell you. I was. You know, in our community we say you know someone is straight passing right. You can't tell you know. In our community we say you know someone is straight passing right. You can't tell you know if they're straight or gay yeah she's.
Speaker 2:She passes as a straight woman, so I'm not one to go and try to convert anybody right. So, plus, I knew her mom was was a judge and I'm like I'm not gonna have this woman go tell her mother that this attorney was hitting on her right. So I kind of just cooled my jets and listened to her. She was very impressive, gorgeous, smart, but I had no idea she was LGBT. She made it known to me and then the rest is history.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So she was interested too, love at first sight. Yes, got it. And how long have you guys been together now?
Speaker 2:So she hates it when I use this time marker. We met right before president trump's first administration, first election, so eight years ago. Okay, we met around this time and then we married a year to the date of this meeting at marriage island behind the contessa, where we met okay and then we had a public ceremony and invited folks to join us for that on an Alaskan cruise the following summer.
Speaker 1:Nice. Okay, we need to go back in time. I need to be on that cruise with you guys. Everybody like totally raves about this Alaskan cruise that I know that have been on it yeah.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful. I wanted to. I had never been on a cruise and Stacy had wanted to talk me into it and I was digging my heels in because the only image I had of a cruise liner was the one, the Titanic no, the one that that tilted in Greece, oh no and so they had like I don't know how many people on this boat and it was tilted and there were these horror stories of sewage overflowing and they couldn't get off the boat and they were stuck on the ship, captain take off, I don't know what
Speaker 2:happened, but they were stuck on this. This Didn't the ship captain take off. I don't know what happened, but they were stuck on this tilted, stinky ship. And so I had said to myself I ain't never going to go on a cruise, no way, right. And she talked me into well, if you could go on a cruise, where would you want to go? And I'd say I really want to go see the glaciers before they melt away. And that's exactly what we did.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, that's incredible gosh, that's incredible.
Speaker 2:So how many people went with you guys? About 40 people, oh my gosh. So what we did was we didn't want to leave anyone out. You know how that goes you don't invite somebody to your wedding. They get their feelings really hurt. So I ordered 500 magnetic with our photo. Save the date magnets with the one 500, you were really not leaving anybody.
Speaker 2:Well, and so I carried them with me, and so we'd see people. Hey, what do you do? Are're getting a man? Oh, he went here join us. Here you go, put it on your fridge. Don't forget, call the 1-800, make your reservation, that's how we did it okay and so if you were left out, it's probably because we didn't see you for six months.
Speaker 1:But before the wedding, yeah well, we're going on a cruise and there's about 40 of us going. I'm gonna have to ask my producer, my producer, where exactly are we going?
Speaker 2:We're going through Mexico and then we're going to. Are you going?
Speaker 1:Caribbean to Aruba. No, we're going through Mexico and then Like through the Panama Canal. Yes, oh nice, so that's where we're headed, so I'm excited about that.
Speaker 2:We're going to go to two different, three different countries.
Speaker 1:right, okay, three different countries.
Speaker 2:That's awesome yeah, so I'm excited.
Speaker 1:First cruise, though as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right. Okay, don't know what we're in for. Royal Caribbean, which line are you all going to?
Speaker 1:MC, I think it's called. Yeah, there's several there's.
Speaker 2:Celebrity. There's X, there's Royal Caribbean, yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So we're excited. So 40 of our family members are all going.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:So it's going to be fun, and we already got the excursions planned out.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic, msc, there we go. That must be a new line, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm like I don't know anything about cruise. Knock yourselves out, have a great time.
Speaker 1:But everybody's saying you're going to love the buffets and the eating.
Speaker 2:So I'm like yeah, let's do it. Well, what we look for is cruises that take place during the school year, because otherwise there's kids running around everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's my next question Any kids in mind for you guys?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, we got three with four-legged kids. We got a Chihuahua, a Chiweenie and a Sholish Squinkie.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're kind of keeping them all together.
Speaker 2:Okay, how old are they?
Speaker 1:Are they all the same age?
Speaker 2:They're all about seven, eight years old. Maybe Chella might be about four.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's it for you guys. Okay, travel, do you guys travel a lot we?
Speaker 2:try and travel. As a matter of fact, stacey just left for Greensboro this morning. She's on a speaker circuit. She lectures a lot, and so and then I think our next trip, those short trips, well you know, over Thanksgiving, and we're going to look for somewhere to go over Christmas, but I'll be going. We both travel for speaking engagements and conferences.
Speaker 1:Wow, what's your favorite speaking engagement that you've done, and where?
Speaker 2:Probably you know I'm not it's probably been a podcast where there's, you know, several of us kind of engaging. Elena Yala's podcast, nosotros, was really fun to do with her. Actually, I can tell you it wasn't a speaking engagement, it was an event where I was on a team a couple of weeks ago, the Andy Mireles Foundation annual foundation fundraiser.
Speaker 1:Was that here locally it was.
Speaker 2:And his wife, margaret Mireles, puts on an annual fundraiser. Was that? Here it was? It was uh and his wife, margaret meet ellis. Uh puts on an annual fundraiser and she puts sets up teams to compete in a family feud type of setting so this year it was the women versus the men's human league right and the women won right and we won and we came from behind after losing every single round.
Speaker 2:We took the whole thing in the last round, so it was great that was. That was the most fun so far lately what's it saying?
Speaker 1:teach a woman and change the world that's right educate a woman and change the world. I love that. All right, can you leave us with any? Let's say two tips for our listeners right now. Two tips.
Speaker 2:Don't argue with folks whose minds are made up. Walk away. You know there's a think, a saying we hear. You know we can't fix stupid. I just walk away and focus on your own happiness and the happiness of those people you love. And I have been able to find a great sense of satisfaction just in knowing that whatever I said or did on a particular day may have changed a person's life. And it can be as simple as smiling at a stranger, complimenting someone who isn't used to getting compliments.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Maybe getting someone a sandwich who looks like they haven't eaten in a while. So just small gestures can really change a person's world.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then second.
Speaker 2:Second, if you're getting to be my age I'll be 60 in a couple of months.
Speaker 1:What? No way.
Speaker 2:So I'm learning a lot about longevity and health, and so I'm going to tell you now whatever health issues are coming down the road start 10 years before they even manifest symptoms, and most of our health issues are rooted in lack of sleep and poor nutrition.
Speaker 2:Oh, my god, and so if we dedicate ourselves to eating right and getting enough sleep, we can avert a lot of the health issues that we see in our ideas, our moms, our deals, our dads the diabetes, the fibromyalgia, the anxiety, the high blood pressure, cancer and what's funny is a lot of that is also rooted in untreated trauma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, definitely. It's interesting. You say that I just had a hysterectomy recently and I went to go do cupping about a year ago, a year and a half ago. And I get there she doesn't speak English, she only speaks Chinese and in her phone she speaks into it to translate and she says you have a bad uterus. And I was like what? How do you know A year?
Speaker 1:ago she said that yeah, a year ago she told me she's like cupping is going to help you, so it did subside the pain that I was getting.
Speaker 2:But eventually you had to address it.
Speaker 1:But I had a mass in my uterus yeah.
Speaker 2:Did you get that?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And she was able to say to you something's wrong with your uterus. A year ago.
Speaker 1:A year and a half ago and I was just like I never met this woman.
Speaker 2:I don't think we use Eastern medicine enough. Oh my gosh, I love Eastern medicine Eastern medicine is very different from Western medicine. Western medicine is focused on synthetic pharma chemicals treating the symptoms, not the problem. But that's what you specialize in going up the river, going up river, let's figure out what the root of the problem is yeah, well, she called it and it was the uterus. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, women's health as is. Yeah, well, she called it and it was the uterus. There you go, yeah, yeah but yeah, women's health as well, and absolutely, these are definitely things that we need to address going up the river and everything that we do.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely Not letting it get to the point where you're drowning.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Waiting for somebody to save you.
Speaker 1:All right, well, thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Thank you for coming on, and I am a total big fan of yours.
Speaker 2:So we'll be listening in. We've been promoting this, this podcast, so on social media, All right, well, you guys heard it here.
Speaker 1:Live with Judge Rosie, thank you so much, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to the Entrepreneurial Empire podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, do me two solids Subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode and leave us a review so that others can find this life changing content that we provide here. This show can be the very difference for someone you might know struggling in their business, and we need your help to bring us together. And thank you again for being a part of our entrepreneurial community and for tuning in each and every single week Until next time. Bye for now.