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How I got here, and who came with me.

 

Nobody who was born should feel shame for how they got here.

MOMMA JUDY

I've been called that my whole life because I love taking care of people. Turns out I was being trained for this.
 

IT STARTED WITH MY HANDS

I became a massage therapist in 1990 at the Desert Institute of the Healing Arts while also attending Pima College studying therapy. Three semesters in, I realized I wasn't learning the tools that would let me create the change I wanted for people, so I began a TruthSeeker's journey in search of that.
 
What I wanted to understand was how the body carries what the mind refuses to process. That question never closed on me, and everything since has been an attempt to answer it and find a better way in. 
 
I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition at SUNY and became a health coach. I trained as an NLP practitioner with Terry Hickey, studying how language and belief assemble an identity from the inside out. I spent years on Feng Shui and Five Element theory, which is really the study of where energy goes and what happens to a person when it stops moving. I have not stopped studying ways to help and heal. 
 
Since 2011, I've worked with thousands of people in the most disorienting moments of their lives. DNA discovery, divorce, diagnosis, loss, spiritual awakening, and the kind of change that rearranges you rather than your circumstances.
 

AND THERE WAS ALWAYS THE OTHER THING, MY OTHER SIDE

From 1994, I worked in film, television and stage as an actor, voice-over artist, and director, including eleven years of  Meisner acting training at Playhouse West. I was on sets with David Lynch, Miloš Forman, and Warren Beatty, and worked alongside actors including Halle Berry, Jim Carrey, and so many other amazing talents.
 
Both of these passions and curiosities ran at once for twenty years, and people kept asking me to choose one path. My heart has always been in the healing world, and it has always wanted a creative outlet. I needed both to keep my own balance and happiness.
 
Those two decades gave me an education nothing else could have. Professional-level study of human behavior, of emotional truth, of the gap between what a person says and what's happening underneath it. Twenty years of watching people construct a self and perform it, and learning to spot the seam where the performance meets the person.
 
I understood that work intimately. I didn't know I'd need it on myself.
 

THEN THE TEST

I took a DNA test to find out whether I carried the BRCA gene because my mom had passed from ovarian cancer.
 
It told me I did not carry it and also the man who raised me wasn't my biological father.
 
The one person still alive who knew wasn't going to say it out loud.
 
What followed wasn't grief in any shape I recognized. Three decades in this work and I had no language at all for what was happening to me. I held the family together with one hand while my own ground gave way, without a single word for it.
 
Grief has a shape people know how to meet. There's a funeral, there's a casserole, someone is saying the right thing badly. This one had a lie folded into the loss, arriving in the same envelope, and no ritual exists for that anywhere.
 
So I built the words.
 

WHAT I BELIEVE

 
I always felt awkward when people asked how many siblings I had. I was one of five. One brother died before I was born, and I lost my sister Sue in 1992.
 

And I have the sentence I say most often and mean most completely.

Nobody who was born should feel shame for how they got here.

It's my favorite question now.

"How many siblings do you have?"

"Now I am one of eight."

 

When your old story stops fitting, you aren't lost.

You're in the middle of becoming, and that's a place with a map.

 
What I do now →

CO-HOST · UNRAVELED: AFTER DNA DISCOVERY

Dr. Richard Carmona

MD, MPH, FACS · The 17th Surgeon General of the United States of America

Nominated by the president and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2002, Dr. Carmona is the 17th Surgeon General of the United States of America. In that office he focused on prevention, health literacy, health disparities, and global health, and issued the definitive Surgeon General's Report on the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Trained in general and vascular surgery with a National Institutes of Health fellowship in trauma, burns, and critical care, he built and directed Arizona's first regional trauma care system. He has served as a professor of surgery and public health, and as surgeon and deputy sheriff for the Pima County Sheriff's Department. He is a Laureate Professor of Public Health at the University of Arizona and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Read his full biography →

He trained my sister Sue to be a flight nurse. When her helicopter went down in 1992, he was the one who went to get her, because he wanted to be the person to care for her in the moment. He had worked under my father. My brother was the principal at his grandchild's school. He knew three members of my family before I ever met him.

Nearly thirty years later, after a DNA test took my own story apart, his name kept surfacing until I gave in and emailed an address I guessed at. He called me. At the end of that first conversation he said, "Whatever you're doing, I'm in!"

I know my sister brought us together.

Judy

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER · UNRAVELED: AFTER DNA DISCOVERY

Rebecca Graham Forde

Showrunner · Founder, Grandi Storie

Rebecca has written and produced hundreds of hours of non-fiction television for Netflix, Discovery Channel, OWN, CBS, A&E, History Channel, ROKU, and MotorTrend. Her credits include Kings of BBQ with Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson, Kevin Hart's Muscle Car Crew, Fast N' Loud, The Universe, and The Ultimate Guide to the Presidents. The work has taken her from the tops of skyscrapers to dangling off container ships.

She founded Grandi Storie to develop the true stories she kept finding along the way. An active member of the Producers Guild of America where she served as a Vice President, she is a founding member of the PGA Social Impact Entertainment Task Force and a founding partner in the SIE Society. She is represented by UTA.

Read her full biography →

I have known Rebecca for years, and she was the only person I trusted with this. My life, and the work I built out of it, in the hands of someone who knows how to make a story travel without flattening it. That's rarer than it sounds.

Judy

Three people who got here three different ways.

 

One of us lived it. One has spent a career on what happens to people when the truth arrives late. One knows how to make a story travel. Between us, we built a place for the thing almost nobody says out loud.

UNRAVELED: After DNA Discovery is coming in 2026. 

TELL ME WHEN IT LAUNCHES →

Three people who got here three different ways.

 

One of us lived it. One has spent a career on what happens to people when the truth arrives late. One knows how to make a story travel. Between us, we built a place for the thing almost nobody says out loud.

UNRAVELED: After DNA Discovery is coming in 2026.