Editor’s Note: Lauri Burns is the founder of The Teen Project, which has a Trabuco Canyon facility to help young women who have survived human trafficking and homelessness by providing intensive treatment, sobriety, psychotherapy and higher education. The following are excerpts from the first chapter of her 2025 book, “Notes to George; the Whisper.” Lauri is scheduled to be the plenary speaker at a conference about drug abuse among young people called the 2025 Joint Meeting on Youth Prevention, Treatment and Recovery, scheduled for Baltimore from March 18-20. The conference, which is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is expected to attract hundreds of experts in this area.
My favorite subjects in elementary school were math and English. Although I never really liked school, any reprieve from my home life was good. I loved English because I could escape through my writing, and I also had a kinship with math because it was predictable.
Living in an unpredictable household, I clung to anything that was absolute. Math was one of the few things I knew I could count on (no pun intended). At the age of thirteen, I was ready to report my father’s abuse to the authorities. However, before I could act, he conjured up a heck of a story and had me committed to an insane asylum.
Months later, upon my release, I entered a whirlwind of placements: first a home for misfits, then a series of group homes, and finally juvenile hall.
By the age of 23, I reached an all-time low. I was heavily addicted to heroin; I had lost custody of my three-year-old daughter, and I had been arrested four times in twenty-four months for prostitution. My welfare had been cut off, due to the absence of a permanent address and I was on a suicide mission, hoping the end would come sooner rather than later.
Three months before my twenty-fourth birthday, I was abducted by armed gang members, taken to a remote area, and brutally raped and beaten. The men that abducted me made it clear that I would be dead by dawn. Spiritually and emotionally bankrupt, I begged them to finish the job sooner.
That fateful night, which appeared to be the end, turned out to be the beginning. Rescued by a Good Samaritan, everything changed. I have since learned that sometimes, when it seems like everything’s falling apart, it’s actually falling together…
The Treatment
Since that day, every aspect of my life has been transformed in a way that is hard to explain. The catalyst for my transformation began when I entered New Directions for Women, a treatment center, to address my addiction. It was also at that point that I was introduced to my therapist, an earthborn angel, Sandy Shirey-Karrs.
She was committed to transforming every aspect of my being, whether I was ready or not. While my physical health improved rapidly, my mental health lagged. Embracing positivity was a struggle for me. Even as my life got better, I remained skeptical. I was convinced that at any moment, my newfound fortune would vanish like Cinderella’s magic at midnight. My chariot would revert into a pumpkin and my glass slippers would become worn-out Doc Martens with holes in the soles. When that didn’t happen, I grew cautiously concerned.
Having a sense of control is a funny thing. Whether things are going good or bad, if they continue with the same flow, there’s a warm and fuzzy sense of familiarity. As the hustle and bustle of my old life subsided, and my new life became eerily quiet, my anxiety rose. To make matters worse, there was a strong focus on God or a higher power at the treatment center. That further complicated things. Ever since I was a child, I believed in God, but I also believed he hated me. Being born into a faith that believed in reincarnation, I was certain the abuse and hardship I endured was directly related to sins I had committed in a past life. Convinced I must have been a witch or something, I was resigned to the belief that I had a plethora of past life karma to work off. Every time I endured another tragedy; it deepened that conviction. As you can imagine, this didn’t make for the best relationship with a higher power.
When the group facilitator told us that to maintain our sobriety we had to start praying, I was stuck. Since things were going well for once, it was clear that God had gotten a new, more time-consuming project and lost track of me…
A Little Prayer
As time went on, the other girls began to pray daily and speak about their revelations. I didn’t want any part of their little prayer circle, but I also knew I wouldn’t survive going back to the hell I’d just walked out of…
One evening, while drifting off to sleep, I vividly recalled my facilitator’s description of the term “God or higher power.” She said, “It can be anything; a tree, a rainbow, or the ocean, anything except you.” At that moment, my inner light bulb sparked, and my eyes sprung open. A memory surfaced from the 1980s movie, “Oh God Book II.”
If I was going to be pressured to choose a God, that is the only one I would ever trust. The man who played God in that movie. He was different than any God I’d ever imagined. He was soft spoken, kind, and elderly, so he fit the stereotypical model. He also wore thick glasses, smoked cigars, and drank booze, so he understood imperfection, cravings, and impulsivity. Best of all, he liked kids, so I knew he would be sympathetic to my lingering childhood issues. I never met George Burns personally, but I watched the movie so many times, I felt like I had. The movie impacted me deeply, because I knew if the “real” God was anything like George, I would trust him with all my heart. Although we have the same last name, we are not related…
From that day forward, I prayed to a guy that looked like and, for all intents and purposes, was George Burns.
Notes in the Box
Then, one day I received a suggestion from an elderly man in my sobriety meeting that would change the course of my life forever. He said, in a thick New York accent, “Look, you gotta learn to turn it over. You can’t keep praying and den takin it back. It don’t work dat way. Get a box, any box. Get paper. Den write down all da crap dat keeps you up at night. Each ding on a different piece of paper and shove it in da box and shut the lid. Once it’s in da box, let it go, da big guy’s got it. If you keep thinking about it, you gotta take it outta da box. If it’s His, leave it alone, stop thinking, and let him handle it.”
My first box was an old shoebox sitting on the closet floor in my rehab bedroom closet. It began to fill up quickly with notes, lots of notes! Convinced that once I dropped it in the box, he would handle it, my worries started to decrease dramatically. As the box filled up, my attitude shifted dramatically that my rehab friends all followed suit.
Even though my notes were for George and their notes were for the Big G, the workload seemed to be handled just as expeditiously. Within a year, I had my daughter back in my care, an apartment, and a legal job to support us. Today, I have several wooden boxes in my home, some so full that the lids barely close.
To begin this journey, I had to start listening to my thoughts like a parent with children playing in the room beyond. The goal was to familiarize myself with the mode and intentions of my unconscious mind. This was the only way I could determine which thoughts I could rely on, and which ones needed to be demoted. To open myself to everything the universe had to offer, I had to disable the broken record that had been running my life.
My new mode was to acknowledge, review, and disregard all incoming messages, and go full steam ahead trusting George and the universe every step of the way. The result was an extraordinary life!
The magic of these boxes and my decision to challenge the universe are the basis for my book.
