Jazz Jennings is looking to the past to help with her present pain.
On Tuesday evening’s episode of I Am Jazz, the 17-year-old TLC star and LGBTQ rights activist participates in past life regression therapy — a form of hypnosis and attendant talk therapy that essentially suggests that we carry evidence (emotional, psychic and occasionally physical) of our past lives into our current one — which brings up some of the negative feelings she’s currently battling.
During the session, Jennings lays down under a blanket with her eyes closed. Her therapist then instructs her to imagine looking up into the sky and spotting a big, white cloud. “I’m asking that cloud to move and carry you back into time and space. I want you to tell me the very first thing that you see or that you notice,” she says in a PEOPLE exclusive sneak peek.
Jazz says that her name is Cal, who is walking in a “town center” and is feeling hungry. “I don’t have a home,” Jennings says about Cal. “I don’t think my family wants me.”
When the therapist presses about “why” Cal doesn’t feel wanted, Jennings says, “I’m gay. They caught me with a guy and kicked me out,” which made Cal feel “rejected.”
“My dream was to hold his hand in this market and now I’m just alone in the market. I’m hungry — I haven’t eaten,” a visibly emotional Jennings says.
The therapist then instructs them to “drift and float forward to the last day of Cal’s life,” when Jennings envisions Cal “sitting on a rocking chair. I was never able to live the life that I wanted. I don’t want to do this.”
When the therapist asks, “You don’t wanna do what?” Jennings tells her, “I don’t want to live anymore.”
“So what was he hungry for that day in the market?” her therapist asks.
“He was hungry to be accepted,” says Jennings.
When asked what Jennings is “hungry for,” the teen immediately begins to choke up: “She’s still hungry to be accepted.”
I Am Jazz airs Tuesdays (9 p.m. ET) on TLC.