Becoming Empowered with Karena Kilcoyne

Karena Kilcoyne 0:26
You know, it’s interesting, I listen to your podcast, and I enjoy it very much. And I know that you often start with this question, and I have been thinking about it, and how interesting it is with the people you have on whose personal life and their experiences dovetail so beautifully into their life’s work when they’re living in this sense of service and purpose and wanting to share their mission. And I would say that I am aligned completely in that perspective as well. So my work and what I do, I as you said, I am a retired lawyer. But for the last eight years, I have been on this healing journey. And I have been writing this book rise above the story because I wanted to create, for everybody out there listening who’s suffered from trauma and suppressed energy around their trauma and their emotions, I wanted to write the definitive guidebook on how to free yourself from that trauma, and rewrite, and rise above those limiting stories that we create, because of the trauma we experience. And this all started for me a long time ago, so everybody’s gonna have to do a little time travel with me. I had a pretty traumatic childhood,

george grombacher 0:02
Karina Kilcoyne is a former trial attorney who specialized in criminal defense. She is now sharing her personal stories of trauma and healing in her newest book, rise above the story. Welcome to the show, Karina.

Karena Kilcoyne 0:14
Hi, George. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

george grombacher 0:18
Yeah, excited to have you on. Tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

Karena Kilcoyne 1:42
early on. And the real big turning point for me when I was about 12. And my father was sentenced to the federal penitentiary. And when he left, we had you know, we struggled financially, and my mother was just really not in a great space mentally or emotionally to handle the pressure of what was going on in our family. I had younger, a younger brother and a sister. And I really forfeited my childhood, to help take care of everybody, my mother, my younger brother, and sister. You know, we I was and I ended up borrowing money from people asking strangers for money to buy food and help pay our bills keep the electricity on. And that trauma I experienced, really put me in a space where I started to write these stories about myself that, that I was unworthy of pretty much anything including a childhood, right. And I felt abandoned and just had a lot of shame about what I experienced. Years later, when I was 24. My mother died of cancer. And by then she had had my youngest brother, I adopted him. And I raised him. And I suppress every bit of trauma and the emotions I had around it. And I was so ashamed of where I’d come from. I went on to become an attorney. And I felt like I really had to excel and exceed and hide who I was and become this different person. And so while during the day, I became a successful criminal defense attorney, and I was representing people and fighting for their freedom. I was attorney internally and emotionally, just anxiety just and depressed and lost. And I felt like an imposter in my own life. And after a couple of really near Rock Bottom setbacks, I knew I had to get right and I had to heal those inner wounds, and I had to really unearth a lot of my trauma. And that George is what set me on this course eight years ago, of really researching and healing and figuring out what I needed to do to on earth that pain and rise above those old limiting stories I had.

george grombacher 4:06
Yikes, what uh, I’m so sorry that those things happened.

Karena Kilcoyne 4:11
Well, thank you for saying that. But you know, now I realized with a little gratitude that everything that happened, shaped me into who I am today. So I take it from there.

george grombacher 4:23
It’s it’s that was sort of my follow up is Are you sorry that it happened? Or are you grateful? It’s that’s a weird thing.

Karena Kilcoyne 4:32
Yeah, it is. It is. And it’s and I think that, you know, we all kind of go through that and it’s a, an emotional and mental evolution. And it’s, I think, a big part of the rise above the story. Formula and what I believe in so much is that sense of shifting, shifting out of that kind of just mental story that plays and plays in plays in your in the emotional part of your brain and getting to a part And shifting that all to like your the thinking part of your brain where you understand and have compassion for yourself and what you’ve been through. And I think when you can get to that space, which took me quite a while when you get to that space, you can find that gratitude that’s a silver lining for what happened. And that is such a beautiful place to sit when you’re trying to heal from something so traumatic.

george grombacher 5:29
That makes a lot of sense. What? What was it that you were so shamed of? Was your dad going to prison that for that you felt like you were then forced, and it’s how I’m trying to find the unworthiness. Although I certainly felt unworthy for a lot of my life and had didn’t have to go through any of those experiences.

Karena Kilcoyne 5:56
Yeah, is that true? And it’s so sad, I feel like we all kind of have that experience of feeling unworthy, and we don’t really talk about it, right? It’s something we just kind of suppress and harbor and and fester. But for me, the shame and the shame and the unworthiness came so young. And it was because yes, you’re right, I mean, kind of this feeling of being the daughter of a felon, and what that meant at school and what that meant in society. And, you know, it, there was a stigma to it, to me at the time, and what’s so interesting is, is that now that all these years have gone by, there’s all these statistics out now like, it’s like, I don’t know, one in five people have had a family member, go to prison or be incarcerated. And so, but when you’re young, you don’t know that. And so that was the sense of unworthiness, and then what came after it, the poverty the doing without the, you know, it’s like nothing really felt like I go to school, and there wasn’t the joy and going to school and friendships like I didn’t want to have people to my house, right, I didn’t have a normal family, my mom wasn’t up in the kitchen making cookies. And it just I didn’t have that type of an upbringing. So the shame came just from Little by little day after day, this combination of feeling so different, and not knowing any better or different. I let that become a weakness to me. And then I was less than an unworthy of. And that’s, and then it just never stopped until my healing journey, right? It just kept growing and growing. Because those stories kept looping in my head, no matter what I achieved no matter what I did. So that’s when I realized I needed to shift out of that and change the way my brain was processing that old trauma.

george grombacher 7:58
I want to talk about how you did that. If you don’t mind. I’m fascinated. You’re 24 years old, having come through all of this than your mom dies, you make the decision to adopt your your nine year old brother. I mean, was that a feeling? Like? Obviously, I’m going to do this? Or is it like holy cow, I can’t believe this is happening. But obviously, I’m going to do it. Tell me a little bit about that.

Karena Kilcoyne 8:28
I would say both, you know, was just like you said, a little bit of I can’t believe this is happening. My mom had been sick for a couple of years. And then the last year of her life, I caught on that this was not going to end well. And my youngest brother that I adopted, we had different fathers. And I knew given the situation he had, my youngest brother had no one else but me. So I knew what was coming. And quite honestly, I mean, you know, I had always been his like his second mother just because of the shape. My mother was in health wise. So I had some idea, right of how to care for him. But at 24 years old with a nine year old, I obviously did not know everything. And sure. Yeah. And it was it was quite, it was quite interesting as things evolved, as you can imagine, right going to, to to parent teacher conferences and showing up as you know, 2425 years old and the teacher is not understanding and me not understanding and add to it. I’m trying to work as the new lawyer making money to support us and learning how to be a lawyer and that’s very taxing. So, in a way, interestingly enough, it felt like a continuation of trauma to me because I was put in this position, which of course I took on this response. spilling out of complete love for my brother. But it was still a lot to take on. And it did not give me the space to properly process my mother’s death. Right. So I did not grieve that. And I didn’t grieve the loss of my life. And my personal freedom, right, I was now a parent, I didn’t process ungroup, any of that, in fact, the therapists told me, you shifted into survival mode, right. And I feel like a lot of my life I had been in fight or flight survival mode. But it really shifted into it, then. Because I had all this responsibility. And I know there’s a lot of people out there listening, who may not have adopted their brother, but they have this huge sense of responsibility of caretaking for others, and what that does to you, and how you, you lack the sense of self care, and how you suppress your own needs in your own emotions and what that does to you internally, and the DIS ease it causes in your emotional, and mental well being. And so yeah, it was it was a lot to take on, but I did it. And in the way I did it, I had to continue on suppressing my own grief and emotions until years later, when I felt like I had the space to finally process them.

george grombacher 11:22
Oh, my goodness. All right. So you get to the point where you recognize these feelings of less than an unworthiness, all these stories and experiences. Also, I suppose just keep looping and keep looping. And he realized I need to make a change here. Did you think this is something that’s possible, or I just need to figure this out whether it’s possible or not, because something needs to be different?

Karena Kilcoyne 11:54
I’d say the last I’d say the latter, it was very much. I felt as though. And there were really two phases for me and the healing journey. And then a little bit of a start, stop. And this is I think, also a common a common thing that happens when people are on a healing journey. I had a really bad relationship and breakup in my mid 30s. And it really caused me to think about why am I choosing these types of people in my life. And it was because I was coming from this space of unworthiness and fear and living in fight or flight and having this addiction to chaos, right and wanting these kinds of people, subconsciously pulling and attracting these type of people into my life. And that was my first foray into healing and what what what did that look like? And why was I doing it. And that was a big, that was a big leap for me. And I really started full on into therapy. And I did a lot of self work. I began yoga and meditating and journaling and digging into things and reading books, and really trying to understand why I was choosing who I was choosing, I spent a lot of time alone, I learned how to finally be alone. I’ve never been alone. And that was so huge to learn how to be comfortable, and feel safe, being quiet and at peace by myself. And then I got to a certain level of healing and I thought, Oh, I’m fine. How many times do we do that? Right? Oh, I’m good. I don’t need to go therapy anymore. I’m good. And then about five or six years after that. I had a beloved dog, a golden retriever, who had unbeknownst to me, I never trained him to do this or anything. He became my emotional support dog. And I was still having, you know, anxiety and depression. And when he was seven, he got very sick. And he ended up dying of cancer at a young age. And oddly enough, it was 20, almost 20 years to the day when my mother died of cancer. And the grief I felt when this beautiful dog die was actually my first experience with unconditional love. When he died this grief just rolled out of me. And I I just cried. I couldn’t stop crying. And I caught on like, this isn’t just about thin. This is about all kinds of other things, these memories of my mother of my childhood, all these old memories came up. And that was when I really, really had to get real about how I was feeling and what I was still holding back. So to answer your question. I didn’t know if it was possible. And I didn’t exactly know how to do it. But I knew it had to be done. And I knew that I had to do this if I was going to change my life.

george grombacher 15:03
I appreciate all that. All right. So from that moment to where we are today, you you obviously have, is it work that you’re ever going to stop doing? Is it ever done?

Karena Kilcoyne 15:17
No, no, no, no. And that’s one of the things that I love to talk about. And teach and reassure people with is that healing is never a one and done. In my experience, it is, you know, two steps forward, one step back, you will have a long time where you feel good and solid and peaceful and healthy. And then something will happen and it will trigger you back into your old stories. And it took me in my process, I read all the books, right. All the books are so many well written, heady, brilliant books out there about trauma and the way your brain works during trauma. Gabor Ma Tei, Bessel Vander Kolk. I mean, you name it, they’re brilliant, brilliant books. And I read them all. And I realized that what was so needed and what was so important in in the world, to a lot of people, a lot of people probably listening to the show, too, is that you, I wanted to distill all that down for people, because that’s what it took me to heal, I had to understand and take all of that and understand, what does that really mean? How is my brain really working? So the way I came up with it, that really helped me heal. And this is what I, I just wanted to shout from the rooftops is 90% of this is understanding, becoming self aware of how your brain works. So in my distillation of the science is that there’s two parts to your brain, your emotional brain, which is all your fight or flight, your heart rate, your temperature, your breathing, the things you don’t think about. And then there’s your thinking brain, which is, you know, the higher level thinking, and it’s your cortex, your prefrontal cortex. And it’s where you have compassionate empathy, and self awareness. And when I understood that I was actually caught up in fight or flight. And when you’re in fight or flight, your brain tries to keep you safe. So it writes stories around things to keep you safe. It shows you with fear, don’t do that. Somebody might not like it don’t do that people won’t like you don’t do that. And in the process of those stories looping in your head, you are no longer brave. You do not seek love, you do not seek intimacy. In fact, you’re afraid of it, you don’t see connection, because our brain is hard wired for survival first and foremost. So when I understood how my brain was working to keep me safe, and filling me with fear, keeping me from real love keeping me from connecting, and I could change the way my brain worked and was processing with my self awareness. I wanted to let everybody know exactly how to do that, too, because it was the biggest shift that I had in healing. It was that and it was a lot of introspection and unearthing old pain and processing that with objective language. And understanding that nothing that happened to me happened to me because I deserved it. I think a lot of us fall into this victim mode. And there was just a lot, a lot of moving pieces that over the years came together. And everything that I learned and everything that worked for me, I wanted to put in one place that was accessible for people.

george grombacher 19:00
I appreciate that so much. So scary. If I feel like and I think that we all the worst thing that happened to me is the worst thing that ever happened to me, whether it’s i i skinned my knee when I was five or I went through some of the experiences similar to to to you. It’s just personal to us. And we carry that with us. It causes us to, to accept less, to feel unworthy to feel undeserving to not do the things that we truly want to do in our lives. So, but it’s scary to stare at that stuff to look at that stuff to examine it. What is what is your advice to people when when they are apprehensive about going into those dark places? What is the benefit that you’ve experienced of doing this work?

Karena Kilcoyne 20:01
That’s a great question. And it’s it’s multifaceted. And I believe so. I feel that early on for me, I definitely needed to find a safe space. To do that in, right, I had to find a good therapist, I had to find different modalities in order to pull this trauma, this hurt this pain out of me, because I knew that I had to go through this darkness if I wanted to heal. So I started with traditional therapy. I then tried all kinds of different modalities breathwork, you know, hypnosis, all sorts of things to bring things out. And I will say that once they started to come out, and I process them, the big takeaway for me was when I started to look at my trauma, and the stories I’ve written about my trauma, objectively. So, there’s the subjective way to look at something where as you were saying, Oh, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. And because it happened to me now, I’m so ashamed, and I’m so unworthy. And to give you an example, in my own life, my old story used to be Yeah, you know, I’m a felons daughter. And no one’s gonna like me, because of that. Or, you know, I grew up with without, you know, normal things like, you know, sometimes we couldn’t take a hot shower, blah, blah, and therefore, I’m so filled with shame that I don’t want to go to school and really talk to anybody. And when I really started to think about it, how can I objectively look at what happened to me? And how can I objectively look at or what I went through and objectively look at how I process it, and how I define it, my story and acknowledging my story, and my traumas started to sound more like this. Because my father went to prison, factual. I wrote the untrue story about myself, that I was unworthy of connection. Or because my father went to prison, I wrote an untrue story, that I was unworthy of certain things. And when I started to see that there’s a different way to talk about my pain, and my trauma, and the story I wrote about it, I shifted out of this victim mode, I started to realize like, this isn’t, this isn’t stuff that, that because it happened now I have to live the rest of my life in this less than role. That’s not why we’re here. The one thing I know for sure, is we are not meant to go through life, taking it on the chin, about every bad thing that happens, or that we experience. We are meant to live a beautiful, empowered, wonderful life, we are not meant to go through life feeling less than and unworthy than we should be going through life expecting the good things to happen to us. And when we start learning how to objectively see what has occurred, it’s amazing what happens, you have the shift out of victimhood, and you have the shift of Oh, woe is me and you have more of a shift into wow, I have a lot of compassion that that’s really, I really handled that. Well. I can’t believe I went through that and look at where I am now. So shifting into that objectivity, and that thinking part of your brain where you can be compassionate and empathetic is really crucial. And identifying and, and pulling out that old, hurtful stuff.

george grombacher 24:08
That makes a lot of sense. Love it. We’ll create it. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they get their copy of rise above the story?

Karena Kilcoyne 24:19
Rise above the story is sold everywhere books are sold, and you can learn more about me and the book at rise above the story.com.

george grombacher 24:29
If you enjoyed this as much as I did show Karina your appreciation and share today share with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to rise above the story.com and learn more about everything that Karina has been talking about. Get your copy of rise above the story wherever you get your books. And like Korean and I’ve been talking about our Korean has been talking about and I’ve been chiming in occasionally. I think that we all have some trauma and unworthiness. And I know that I’ve benefited greatly from from addressing it. And I’m just have all the confidence in the world that you can as well. So if anything has resonated, which I’m sure it has, do check out the website at least and I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book and that she spent eight years working on this and writing it and distilling down so much information will certainly save you probably a lot of time and effort. So thanks again, Karina.

Karena Kilcoyne 25:31
Thank you, George. It was wonderful being here.

george grombacher 25:34
Till next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.