"It was so difficult, and to manage that emotional stress was very, very hard."
Candace Cameron Bure is taking a look back at her time as a co-host on "The View."
While appearing on a recent episode of ABC's "Behind the Table" podcast alongside her former co-hosts Sara Haines and Raven-Symoné, the actress detailed her experience being on the daytime talk show, saying that it ultimately left her with PTSD.
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View Story"The stress and the anxiety -- I actually have a pit in my stomach right now," said Bure, who was a co-host on "The View" from 2015 to 2016. "There was only one type of stress that I've ever felt in my life, that came from that show and I [have] PTSD, like, I can feel it. It was so difficult, and to manage that emotional stress was very, very hard."
The "Fuller House" star admitted that she "felt a pressure to represent" the conservative community. "[I was] just trying to understand and have a general grasp of topics that I didn't want to talk about or didn't care about," she said.
Bure said she would cry in her dressing room "like almost every day" before the show and would often feel "sick to [her] stomach."
"When I felt like I was going into a show that I didn't have a clear opinion about or it was something that I was legitimately nervous to talk about because I did have an opinion about it but I knew I was going to be the only one at the table that had my opinion, I would just get sick to my stomach," she recalled. "I hated that feeling. And then I'm like, 'I don't know who's going to come at me.'"
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View StoryBure and Symoné both revealed that they initially signed on to a different show than what it turned out to be. Symoné, like Bure, joined the cast for Season 19 in 2015 and left in 2016 after Season 20. And according to Bure, everything "changed" when Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, which, of course, he ultimately won.
"I was pitched a completely different direction," Bure said, "because that was my hesitation. I said, 'Politics is not, it's not my bag. I've never spoken publicly about politics. I don't even come from a political family, meaning I didn't grow up speaking about politics.' So they had told me, 'We're going so much lighter,' a lot more would be evergreen. ... We want to talk more about family and sex and life, so I was, like, 'Absolutely, 100 percent, I'm on board.' And then it all changed when Trump entered the race."
"Sara, I got catfished. I feel like I just got catfished," Symoné told Haines, who is currently a co-host on the show. "I thought I was going on a show, like Candace, where it was pop culture and fun and exciting and I got catfished, and I learned a good lesson."
While Symoné departed the show to work on the "That's So Raven" revival, "Raven's Home," Bure said she exited the show due to the fact that she had "four network contracts at the time" -- including for ABC for "The View" and Netflix for "Fuller House" -- and simply "couldn't manage it all," especially because she was "flying back and forth" from her home in Los Angeles to New York for the show.
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View Story"'The View,' by far, was the toughest job," she explained. "And as soon as Donald Trump won that election, I was like, 'This has got to go.' Because I could not, I did not want to be the punching bag for the next four years in that conservative seat. I just didn't want to. And it wasn't worth it to me. It wasn't worth my mental health, which was already suffering, so it was a very easy decision."
Ultimately, however, Bure said she is "very grateful" for the experience and doesn't have any regrets.
"I don't know that I regret anything, honestly," she shared. "I feel like there were so many wonderful takeaways from the show that as difficult as that job was, I'm very, very grateful for it. My opinion, it's my opinion. And maybe sometimes I said things better or worse on one day or another, but I don't regret anything in that way."
"I felt like after walking away, 'If I can do that, I can do anything.'"