#142 The Alchemy of Conflict: Turning Struggles into Empowerment

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #142 Jolina Karen

“The Alchemy of Conflict: Turning Struggles into Empowerment”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I’m host of this Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. I love doing these podcasts because it gives me an opportunity to not only meet new people, but to introduce you, my listeners, to somebody that has, in their life, had some kind of struggle with speaking up. 

And often, it seems like these stories help you realize that you, too, have a voice and maybe, just maybe, the person that you get to meet today has an answer for you. Hello, Jolina. 

(00:39) Jolina Karen: Hi, Doreen. Thank you so much for having me. 

(00:41) Doreen Downing: Yes. You wrote a bio, so I’m going to read that to give people a sense of what you do currently. Jolina believes that love and leadership live and die in everyday conversations. She works with an international clientele of sophisticated superwomen who want a relationship they’re not happy with whether that relationship was with a spouse, a child, a boss, or a customer, Jolina’s clients need a clear roadmap to go from feeling unappreciated, taken advantage of, or simply ignored, to standing her ground, setting effective boundaries, and communicating in a way that gets her feelings seen and heard, understood and appreciated for who she is. 

This is a wonderful introduction and lines up with what my listeners are here for. To find your voice so that you can change your life. All the little ways that you’ve already pointed to. It’s not just about getting up on a stage, it’s every conversation. You have an opportunity to be heard and listened.

(02:01) Jolina Karen: Absolutely. It’s every conversation. Every relationship to me is just a conversation. Some are very short and some are ongoing. And I think the quality of our conversations, our ability to express what it is that is important to us and also to listen in a way that makes the other person feel seen and heard affects the quality of the relationship.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s at home or at work, with an adult, with a child, with a customer, an employee, it’s the conversation that defines the relationship. 

(02:37) Doreen Downing: Yes, and it’s the listening, like you’ve said, and it’s not just about speaking, it’s about the whole sense that there’s something happening between us.

How do we make something so good that we’re both going away feeling like we’ve gained something, we’ve learned something, we figured out something, all the ways in which conversations lead to, to more possibility between people. 

(03:00) Jolina Karen: Exactly. With the work that I do, I’m really interested in the skills that we use in order to communicate. But more interesting to me is, “Who are we being in the conversation?” 

(03:14) Doreen Downing: Oh, I feel like I’m hearing myself speak. This is beautiful. Before we get into some of what I just read and what you do currently, I know in my own life, I didn’t just pop out as a communicator and somebody who believed in relational kind of being with each other in a way that we show up fully as ourselves.

So, what is your story? Let’s go way back if you can, please, and just give us some early snapshots and pictures of what it was like growing up. 

(03:45) Jolina Karen: Sure. I was raised in South Africa, born in England, but raised in South Africa from when I was very little. The South African context of apartheid was very much part of my childhood background.

My mother was a spiritual healer. She was also a physical therapist homeopath. She made Bach flower remedies from the African plants. She diagnosed people with their hair, swung her pendulum to determine the remedies and so on and so forth. 

My father was a nuclear physicist. So, here’s mom swinging her pendulum and dad standing cross-armed in the corners, rolling his eyes because to dad, if something couldn’t be proven, it didn’t have value pretty much.

I grew up very much with one foot in both worlds. One very much fascinated by mom and the esoteric weird and wonderful things that were happening through her and then very much wanting to be daddy’s little girl. Needing to speak in a language that could make sense to a scientist of these more esoteric, touchy feely, emotional, energetic experiences.

That’s been a big quest for me, to bring science and spirituality together in a way that makes sense of the human experience, especially as it relates to healing. 

I read Carl Jung’s autobiography when I was 14, and in it, he said, “We cannot affect true healing until you reach the soul.”

I wanted to know, “How do we reach the soul? What does that look like? What does it feel like? What happens when we get there?” So, I went off to psychology, to University of Cape Town, got a degree in psychology and didn’t learn anything about how to reconnect with one’s soul in order to create healing.

So, I spent the next 15 years traveling and studying on different continents with different teachers, trying to understand what made us human beings do what we do. My background is a lot of somatic therapy, a lot of metaphysical healing. I’m a Demartini student facilitator. Kinesiology. The Hermetic Principles, deep studies in the hermetic principles that sort of bring it all together. 

And I know that probably sounds very airy fairy, but what I do in a practical way is what I’ve realized is no matter what the story is that people are struggling with, whether it’s a physical disease or life purpose issues, whatever it is, there’s always a relationship involved and there’s always a relationship with ourselves that the relationship with somebody else reflects. Everything comes down to relationship. 

(06:20) Doreen Downing: Before you go on, because we just zipped through your life, and I want to go back to the earlier experience to give it a little more where the struggle was for you, because I definitely got the sense, and I love that phrase, wonderfully weird or the one that you talked about your mother and the image you gave us of just this rolling eyes father who had his arms crossed and then what that left for you is “feet in both worlds” but so as being the little girl in schools and I know that it’s pretty rare for a 14 year old to read Jung, but you’re already open. 

It feels like you came into this world with a big curiosity. There you were with a mother who just brought fascination to you, but a father who said, “Whoa.” 

(07:16) Jolina Karen: Right. Thank you for relaying me back in there. What I observed with them was that they didn’t communicate. So, it was a quiet household that I grew up in because dad was busy doing dad stuff and mom was busy doing mom stuff and they didn’t really communicate a whole lot. 

One of their rules was that they would not fight in front of the children. So if there was any disagreement in the house and there was plenty because they had such different perspectives, it was handled behind closed doors. 

And if we, as children, wanted to express something that didn’t fit with my father’s view of the world and we couldn’t prove it satisfactorily, and I’ll just speak for myself, there were a lot of those times when I couldn’t prove it and then up would come the rage and the frustration and usually tears because I just couldn’t get the words out to express what it was that I was experiencing and that was usually met with a, “Take it to your room until you can be nice.” 

So, there’s a very deep conditioning in me and a lot of the clients that I work with, because like attracts like, there’s a very deep conditioning to shut up in the face of challenge and conflict, and particularly a very firm, masculine, that’s rubbish kind of conflict. 

That played out for me in my first marriage, so for all that I was studying about why people do what they do and how relationships work, I couldn’t speak in my first marriage. I couldn’t speak up when there was conflict. I did a lot of appeasing and being nice and biting my tongue and just being quiet until husband- storm would pass. 

We’d been married for six years. We were together for eight. I was almost 30 at the time. We got to a point where, of course, I was the one and it’s usually the woman, I was the one trying to fix the relationship, right? I took us into therapy. He begrudgingly came along, but when the therapist asked him to commit. He said, no, he wouldn’t.

(09:24) Doreen Downing: To what? 

(09:25) Jolina Karen: Sorry, to commit to a series of sessions. I think she asked us to commit to six. Thank you for clarifying. She asked us to commit to six sessions, a block of therapy. He said, no, because it wasn’t his problem. It was my problem and therefore I needed to fix myself. 

The therapist was wonderful. She looked at him and she said, “Well, you leave me no option, but to work one on one with Jolina.” And he said, “That’s fine.” She said, “I just want you to know that we may get Jolina to the point where she’s strong enough to tell you to fuck off.”

He did this double take and she said, “Are you ready for that?” Then he floored me by sitting forward in the seat and he said, “That would be great because that’s the woman that I married.” It was such a shock to me because over those eight years of being together, I’d lost myself so completely that I couldn’t tell you my favorite color. I didn’t know what music I liked anymore. I tried so hard to be who I thought I needed to be in that marriage. 

The long and the short of it, the realization of what I’m getting to here with this story is that my inability to find my voice, my inability to speak up for what delighted me, for what I wanted, for what I needed, ended with both of us so angry and frustrated and lonely in that marriage. As much as I thought I was doing the right thing, being a good wife, managing, making do, settling, ultimately I wasn’t serving me and I wasn’t serving him. 

(11:01) Doreen Downing: Oh, yes. Well, the thread certainly is much clearer now for me around the struggle that you had and then how early experiences then show up later in life, and we don’t really see the connection.

So, thank you so much. I think we’ve really connected the dots, a couple of dots here about how you ended up so voiceless in a marriage, and felt like you didn’t have a way to be more fully yourself. If you lost yourself, then you’ve lost your voice. 

(11:36) Jolina Karen: Yes, and maybe it works the other way as well, that when we lose our voice, we lose ourselves.

(11:41) Doreen Downing: It reminded me of one of my experiences when I was doing couples counseling with somebody, meaning I was the therapist. The two got to that point and it was very tense. The woman, I was working with both of them, but the woman got up and walked out. She walked out of his life. The man ended up staying with me and worked for quite a bit to reconstruct his life.

But those moments in therapy can be real definitive for relationships. 

(12:10) Jolina Karen: Absolutely. And what a gift to have a therapist who can be so pointed, so unafraid of holding that space and creating a container in which that tension can come up and be, because ultimately where I’m at now, nearly 30 years down the road from that experience, I’ve learned that one of the things that we don’t have enough of in relationships is conflict or at least conflict that’s out and being expressed because it’s in our conflict that we get to learn about what’s actually important to each of us.

(12:50) Doreen Downing: Yes. I just connected another dot. Your parents not modeling what true conflict and resolution looks like. You take your conflict and you go into your room and shut the door. And what I assume you’re doing now, because you just brought in something I haven’t ever heard yet on the podcast is the value of conflict as a way of saying, “This is what I believe. This is who I am.” There’s some kind of conflict and that’s where real something about voices coming together to be heard and how do we listen and allow people to be fully expressed when it’s different than what we believe? 

(13:36) Jolina Karen: Exactly. I was 30 when I got divorced and it was probably the most painful experience. It still brings up emotion, so I’m going to breathe. I’m very grateful for that experience as painful as it was because it’s so radically altered my life and it was such a gift to me because it— and I believe this about divorce, this is just a personal opinion, I believe the spiritual function of divorce for women is to give us an opportunity to heal our relationship with our fathers.

Met the masculine with patriarchy. And one of the things that happened. Oh, I’m getting personal now. Oh, I’m just going there. One of the things that happened after my husband walked out was I found myself on the bathroom floor with a razor blade and in that very dark place, first of all, I had my mother’s energy show up.

She had died several years before, and she said to me, “Well, it takes two to tango. You have a choice to make. You can either end it now and be done, or you can learn all that there is to learn and never come back to this place again.” That was my mother’s spirit. Then I picked up the phone and I called my father and I said, “I just want to know one thing. I just want to know that you don’t think of me as a failure.” Because my story was dad, the nuclear physicist, very critical perfectionist. If I came home with an A, why wasn’t it a plus? My story was that I was never good enough. I was born a girl, not a boy. I never quite lived up to him. My story was no matter what I do, I’m never enough. 

And so when I said to him, “Dad,” and I didn’t say dad, I was much more subdued, “Dad, I just want to know that you don’t think of me as a failure.” He completely surprised me by saying, “Failure, lovey?” He said, “It sounds like you’ve done everything that you could do, and sometimes it’s just time to move on.”

My whole relationship with dad and the part of me that was dead, the relationship with myself, changed in that moment. And I’m so grateful to my husband, first husband for having walked out in the way that he did and creating the pain, like creating the circumstances for me to create the pain, the angst, the turmoil that I created, because the gift of that was a transformed relationship with my father and a transformed relationship with myself. 

(16:21) Doreen Downing: Oh, Jolina, this is so profound and touching at the same time. Thank you for being vulnerable and so real with us today. Take us to that very moment of transformation and then show us that transformation in the despair right there. It’s almost like a breath away. 

(16:43) Jolina Karen: That’s exactly right. It’s almost like a breath away. I remember being on the floor with that razor blade, in that place of, should I call dad? Should I not call dad? Should I call dad? Should I not call dad? It’s my cat circling around me. 

I had to make that decision to reach out to somebody and I’m so glad that I did. Obviously, I’m so glad that I did. What a beautiful gift that he said what he said. And what a gift that my husband gave me. 

A part of the work that I do is from a spiritual perspective. I see everything, no matter how dysfunctional it may seem to others, I see everything as such an incredible gift and such an opportunity to really come to know and love ourselves. I’ve seen the biggest transformations happen through these truly painful sort of life turn upside down experiences.

Coming back to what we were saying earlier about that perhaps we actually need more conflict. We fight for the things that are important to us. What I see a lot when couples or when it’s usually women that show up with me, what I see a lot of is there’s been not enough fighting along the way and so now there’s a resignation and a frustration, but a, “I don’t even want to bother because I’ve had so many years of trying and not getting through, and it’s just easier to do it myself.” We have a lovely South African expression, if I can use it, gatvol, which is “I’m just up to here.”

It’s the being nice. It’s the settling. It’s the placating. It’s not rocking the boat too much along the way. That actually brings us to these places of inner frustration. Gatvolness. But in that energy is exactly what we need, the anger, and the fear, and the sadness. All of that is pointing us actually to our next emerging value system, like the things that are trying to call us forward into life.

And if we just have a framework to make sense of our struggles in that way, then that anger, that frustration, that energy can actually be transmuted into life-giving, life-affirming relationship moving-forward energy. 

(19:00) Doreen Downing: Oh, I’m so glad that you’re here today and communicating such a profound kind of— it’s almost alchemy, the way that you’re talking about that. There is truly transformation from a kind of energy that feels so negative and usually negative energies, we want to get rid of it as opposed to well let’s look how we can move into it, through it, and transform it. 

I love this idea of it leads to the next level of whatever it is, and it feels like the next level is something that has way more for us as elevating who we are as human beings, perhaps.

(19:40) Jolina Karen: Yes, absolutely. I’ve just been back in South Africa for a few months and I had an experience there that was a reminder to me of how deep this conditioning of being nice and avoiding conflict, how deeply it can go. And therefore how much we need to practice a different way of being. 

(20:01) Doreen Downing: Before you go on, I’ve just been so fascinated, I neglected to take the break, so I’m going to take it right now. That helps everybody stay because they know we’re going to hear something. So we’ll be right back.

Hi, this is Doreen Downing, and we’re back with Jolina Karen, who’s telling us so many wise words today. Her voice is way out on the periphery of where people are looking for transformation. We suffer, but we don’t realize that that suffering has value for us. 

Jolina has had several life experiences where she’s not only learned that lesson and has learned how to go through difficulty and make something really magnificent happen.

It feels like whatever’s next has magnificence and you were just about to tell us a story. 

(20:56) Jolina Karen: Oh, yes. Thank you. So, I was just home and the story relates to the need to practice speaking up in difficult situations, to break the habit of avoiding conflict and avoiding discomfort. For all my years, I took an Uber from a hotel I was staying at to a conference and I paid 125 rand and I asked the driver if he would like to pick me up the next day and take me downtown for the second day of the conference and I would pay him directly.

On the second day, I called him up just to confirm that he would pick me up and I said, please confirm the amount so that I have the right amount of cash. He said, “That’ll be 200 rand,” and I froze. I felt that indignation come up in me of, “Oh my god, I’m being a nice person.”

I’m trying to help him make a little bit more money and here he is taking advantage of me. I couldn’t get myself out of the freeze in that moment, so I just said, “Okay.” And then I went into 15 minutes of trying to get ready for the conference, but furious in my head, spinning around in, “Oh my goodness. Can you believe it? Here I am. I’m so nice and he’s taking advantage and, but I can’t call another one at this point. Oh, maybe it’s because it’s Sunday morning, he’s charging—” All this stuff going around in my head and of course, I didn’t do anything. 

I just went downstairs at the appropriate time, got picked up, and then sat in the back of his car, refusing to say a word to him because I was fuming in my indignation. 

We get to the conference room. I almost threw the money at him, slammed the door behind me, and went inside. Then I went from my self righteousness of I’m such a good person and he’s bad taking advantage of me into shame. I started to beat myself up for, “Wow, that was really immature. That was not a nice way to treat him. I should have said something. I should have done something to get us to a better place,” but I didn’t, so I would spiral up into indignation and down into resentment to myself.

In that whole experience, I had this moment of realizing just how this habit, this addiction to being nice is playing out in the world around us. Because that poor guy, who knows what he was thinking, but he certainly left my presence confused, right? Confused as to why I was so nice and friendly yesterday and not nice today.

My being nice and not saying anything, my refusal to have the difficult conversation of, “What’s going on here? Are you taking advantage of me?” My refusal to do that played right into the separation between him and myself, which is playing out all over the world around us. I wanted to share that because I feel it’s something that every one of us can do. 

To learn to be authentic rather than nice in difficult situations, just like that. All I had to do was name what I was feeling. All I had to do was say, “Oh, that’s different from yesterday. Help me understand this.” Anything, but nope, I just spun around in my, “I don’t feel good about this,” but then I put on my, “I’ll just be nice face,” and went out and participated in more division in the world.

And that took me into recognizing how deep these habits are and that we need to practice them. We need frameworks and skills and groups of people around us with whom we can practice. I just wanted to say that because I know you also are involved in helping people practice these conversations, so thank you for doing what you do. 

(24:46) Doreen Downing: Oh, thank you. Yes, it’s so clear. My early days in an assertiveness training class, I think that was one of the first personal development programs I ever did, and I had a conflict of somebody who would smoke in my car, smoke cigarettes, and I was afraid to say, “You can’t do that,” or “Please don’t,” or “Secondhand smoke makes me sick.”

I don’t know. I could have said anything, but I remember that was my first challenge in that assertiveness training class to find my voice and speak up to this person. I really love the work that you’re doing. You’re talking about frameworks. 

Before we come to an end here, I’d like you to say a little bit more about what those frameworks are and make sure let’s find out how people can find you.

(25:33) Jolina Karen: Thank you. There’s two frameworks that inform my work. One has to do with a value system perspective on why we do what we do. So, very briefly: each one of us has a unique hierarchy of priorities in life, which I call our values. We all have a unique hierarchy of things and experiences that we value enough to actually dedicate our life energy towards. 

What’s important to you is not as important to me and what’s important to me is not going to be exactly the same as what’s important to you, et cetera. And conflict is, for the most part, most conflicts are nothing more than my hierarchy of priorities bumping up against your hierarchy of priorities.

Most conflict is simply a power struggle of one person wanting their priorities to supersede the other person’s priorities. So, if we can talk about conflict through a lens of “This is about my priorities and your priorities and how do we work together to where we both feel like we’re getting our needs met.” It depersonalizes conflict and I think that’s hugely important. 

One of the things that I work with clients on is speaking for what they want rather than against what they don’t want. Because in most of us, and I’ll be honest, I’m one of them too, most of when we get together with our friends or with our therapists, the first thing we do is complain about all the things we don’t want, right?

It’s extraordinary to me how easy it is for people to complain about what they don’t want, but how difficult it can be, and I think this affects women, particularly in midlife when we’re going through the shift in value systems from who we’ve been for half our lives into who we’re being called to be, but that value system isn’t clear yet, it’s hard to articulate what we want when we don’t fully know what our value system is, what the new emerging evolving value system is. 

So, part of the work that we have to do is— and I teach a framework for getting clear on what our emerging values are so that we can speak for them rather than keep on fighting against what we don’t want.

(27:42) Doreen Downing: It’s beautiful. Well, we don’t have time to go into the listening part, but that seems like what you need to do is to have a listening to yourself so that you can hear whatever the voice is that’s speaking to you for the next whatever is calling you. 

How do people find you? 

(28:00) Jolina Karen: The best way is just through my website, which is JolinaKaren.com. 

(28:04) Doreen Downing: It’ll be in the show notes. Thank you. All right. Well, we’re here at the end and I’d love to just give you another minute to see what comes up to close our time together and see what wants to be said.

In your listening right now, what is it that you want to leave us with? 

(28:23) Jolina Karen: It’s the tagline from an event that I put on several years ago for women that I called the Red Shoes Experience, which is a whole other story, which we’re not going to go into, but the tagline was, “You loving you is what’s best for everyone.”

I really believe that all of us doing our work to come to really know who we are and to love all of who we are is the very best thing that we can do for everybody around us. 

(28:57) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. Thank you so much.