The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – CC: The Booklet: The Foundation of All Abuse by Konstantina Dimitra Mahlia

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

CC: The Booklet: The Foundation of All Abuse by Konstantina Dimitra Mahlia https://www.amazon.com/CC-Booklet-Foundation-All-Abuse-ebook/dp/B0FPHPVZ3X Mahliacollection.com CC.: The Booklet speaks of COERCIVE CONTROL , the liberty crime that is now a felony in ten countries and nine states of the USA . California signed it into law in 20021 and all of Canada by July of 20024. Coercive Control is the foundation of all INVISIBLE abuse that denies a human being - of any age, denonimation, cultural background, gender or ethnicity - their fundamental rights to be sovereign and free . The majority of the victims of this abuse are, but not exclusively, women and children. CC: The Booklet is designed as a tutorial , a handbook , a notebook, a journal and a data entry system. It is a legal resource, a psychological support and a sociological road map. It is designed it to be interactive . The intention is for it to empower and educate as many people as possible. Information is power, and the stautes support the evidence that coercive control is abuse decoded for one and all to see in its insidious power. THE FOUNDATION OF ALL ABUSE is explained here in CC: The Booklet. Inform yourself. It applies to all of us.About the author Konstantina Mahlia is a lifestyle creative; an award-winning, published and collected designer whose work spans interiors, fine jewelry, fashion, home furnishings and interior design based upon the principles of Malia, where all things compose the harmonious whole that enhances mental, emotional and psychological equilibrium. As a designer, entrepreneur, author, gourmet, self-healer, and world traveler, she speaks four languages which become five if you count the unspoken language of symbolism. Driven by an insatiable curiosity to “connect the dots,” Konstantina shares conversations shaped by her experiences across cultures and disciplines in her podcast Boldly Feminine. Her desire for an inclusive human culture embraces language, travel, customs and communication. This lifelong immersion in the richness of humanity inspires her mission to explore how we can live, heal, thrive, and elevate life holistically as one interconnected human race, coexisting in a vast, interconnected universe.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Vox here from the Chris Voss Show.com. My name's young, and the islandings that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Voss shows family that loves you, but as a judge you for 16 years and 25 hundred episodes,

we've been bringing the smartest people to educate your mind and make your life. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the hosts or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Better. Today, we're an amazing young lady on the show. Constitina Malia joins us on the show. She returns as a prior guest that we had before, and we're going to get talking about her book entitled C.C.

The booklet. The Foundation of All Abuse. And it is out on Amazon.com. We're going to talk about her insights and some of the other things that she does. She is a lifestyle creative, an award-winning published and collected designer whose work spans interiors, fine jewelry, fashion, home furnishings, and interior design based upon the principles of her, where all things compose the harmonious whole that enhances mental, emotional, and psychological equilibrium. As a designer, entrepreneur, author, Gourmet, Self-Healer, and World Traveler, she speaks four languages, which could become five, if you count the unspican language of symbolism. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Ms. Malia? Hi, nice to see you again, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot-coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? There are several.

So there's belia collection.com. That's my comprehensive website. And there you can find links to boldly feminine, the podcast, to the work that is jewelry, fashion, interiors, everything, and a lot about

my company and brand and why it is, what it is. Then we also have boldly feminine on YouTube and Malia Collection on YouTube,

and we have the podcast on all the podcast platforms. But all the links are on the website. And we're on Amazon now. Of course, right?

Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, Amazon. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book.

So the book is really a passion project. I was in Tucson, Arizona, which is where the business is based, and the University of Arizona invited me to give a presentation to the Retail Sciences School. So I gave this presentation in March, and it went over so well that it really was inspiration to write a lot more about what I could see growing in people's minds and hearts about what we're all dealing with collectively. And And so course of control is a foundation of all abuse. That's the terminology, right?

But it's also known as a liberty crime. And that's because it really is a very insidious and ineffective. Let me give you the capstone of the California statues, because California signed it into law in 2020 and made it in felony in 21. And I've included the statutes of California and of Canada in the book. for people to have easy reference to them. But one of the capstones in the California statute says that it's a pattern of behavior that by purpose or effect, unreasonably,

unreasonably interferes with a person's free will and personal liberty. So to me, the really key word in that, I mean, I was a linguist from trained in English. That was my double honors degree. But I was also a champion debater in Canada when I was a kid in high. high school. So language is important to giving a structure. And to me, writing the book was giving structure to the abuse. How do we explain how it happens psychologically? How do we happen? How we're fighting back against it legally? How do we understand it in terms of the social implications? How do we use political protections and then depend upon political protections

right or illegal projections and where are those weak and where are they surviving so we look at from the micro i just i describe it as the micro meso macro so micro is what happens between a parent and their child or a couple or a parent right or a lawyer or a doctor and their patient the mezzo is what happens within a broader network so we have have the social systems that support and embrace that abuse because it all works for everyone and nobody wants to walk the boat. You know, it's like, you know, don't be a dummy downer, don't, you know, be a crybaby, that sort of attitude that suppresses people being oppressed from speaking out. But then we have the macro, and that's the way I describe it, is

the government institutions that also gaslight us and say they're there for our best protections when in reality they're abusing our trust and rights. And so there are laws, you said there's laws being passed around the world? Well, it started, I think it really started to be paid attention to in the 50s with the Korean War. When they started seeing prisoners of war, like just mentally, decimated. There were no fences. There was no physical abuse being purposed against them. But these

POWs, when they got back to the United States, were like they'd had a lobotomy. They'd lost their will to live. They'd lost their independence. They'd lost their pride of self, their identity. And so they start, the consequences were so severe. I think 35% of the POWs from Korea died. after release that that was a statistic it really made really made a clear parallel to me of how severe mental abuse the consequences of mental abuse are right and that's when they started to study it so we're looking at also the weakest links in the chain which are women and children and how those abuses are enacted against them in domestic situations and family situations And so what we see is it's not that they're exclusively the victims,

but that they are the most, the highest percentage of the victims. And so in the, I think it was 2005, the Istanbul agreement, the Istanbul Convention went into effect in Europe for the European Union. And the European Union decided that these protections had to go into place and they were adopted by everybody. Everybody had to include them in their statutes to protect women and children from these ubiquitous abuses. But really what gave us legs in North America

was the statutes that passed in England in 2015. And 2015, there was an officer of Scotland Yard, Laura Richards, and she was, excuse, me, on their homicide division. And what she saw is that many of the homicides were preventable if they'd use the information they had to protect victims from abuse and from being stalked. Huh. Wow. That's interesting. So she got the statues passed in England and that passed over to Scotland, Ireland, Wales.

Then New Zealand picked it up. Australia picked it up. but everybody kind of used a different degree. So I call the Istanbul Convention course of control light in parentheses. Like there's, it's not a felony, there's no jail time, as of yet, most of the countries are all of the countries. Whereas even within the British Commonwealth countries and the United States states that have adopted it or are enacting it, everybody's made it stronger or less obvious consequences according to their own criteria or whatever the senator trying to pass it was above. What made you first interested in this topic and wanted to, you know, motivated to write about

it in this book? Well, I'm a female. That constrains a lot of my experience of society in many ways from my family system, which is quite traditional as Greek immigrants, right, to social systems that gaslight you, haze you, harass you, misogyny. And I'm not saying that it's all bad, obviously not. I think I live in the most privileged place on the planet to exist as a female. But it's not equal.

And my question was, why isn't it equal? Why don't I have the same privileges to exist that everybody does? And why are there these constant obstacles to entry that I have to navigate or sometimes give up, right? Certain situations that are insurmountable and just say, you know, cut your losses. It's just too challenging and it's just the cost is too high to my well-being to deal with this. So that started it. And then I just started, I've traveled a lot. So I saw there's places that are different, say the Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland,

they have a different level of inclusion in their social systems. You know, they expect dads to have parental leave for a year. They expect moms to have, you know, they write it into their laws that mothers have a year to have parental leave. And also, I think for me it was instrumental that, I was born in Canada, which is an extremely safe place and clean place to grow up. There's a lot of factors that make it feel safe that are kind of in the water you drink and the air you breathe. But my great aunt was the first woman elected to government in Canada there. So I saw a woman elected to government who felt she could make a difference and who fought to make a difference

and who had very high ethics, was very intelligent and very proactive in asking people to step up to the plate and make things better, you know, a very responsible politician. The bar was high. She said a high bar. So do you hope that, what do you hope to achieve with the book? The book is a labor of love. And the book is really compared to what you will see. on my website or if you Google me or read about me, I'm known as a luxury designer. I have a

boutique brand. I do fine jewelry that are collectibles. Those aren't affordable to most people, but they're works of art. And work of art inspires people and it soothes people and it's a bridge between me and others. That's very, very powerful and direct. The book is really an act of service because it took me so long, even though I'm super analytical and they say that's a trauma response, right, to try and understand everything is to sort of give you peace with it. I thought, why, I can't not, I can't waste this information I've curated and collected and understood what's the point of me just holding on to it for myself. This is going to do so many people good if I can put it together in a way that's digestible. So one of the reasons the book is full of graphics,

is because even though the statutes are in there for California and Canada, which is legal, legal documents, you know, 30 pages each for you to have resources to understand your legal protections and what you have to defend yourself, this snapshot, this cartoon also is a way of you understanding where you are, if you are in a bad situation, where is it coming from, what is it? and how do you protect yourself from that then? Because knowledge is power. Yeah, most definitely, knowledge is power. Okay, so in the book, you talk about this through the book, different victims and things of that nature, and it's up for Amazon on sale. You talk about something called Perspecticide.

Tell us about that. Well, I think Perspecticide was really evident. in again in what I read about the Corian War P-O-Ws. So prospectus side is how you twist somebody's reality and distort it. And once you distort them, it's like spinning them, right? They don't know what's up, what's down, and the perpetrator will have control. And how they achieve control is diminishing the person's ability to critically think for themselves. right? So it can be, oh, I left my glasses there. No, you didn't. They're not there. What are you talking about? Or you said this. No, I didn't. So its perspective side is also kind of enmeshed with gaslighting. And gaslighting was Miriam Webster's word of the year in 22. So it's pretty popular right now. But in an overview, gaslighting is distorting somebody's perspective of what just happened. So somebody yells at you and you,

are upset because it wasn't rational or reasonable. Again, it was an unreasonable response to whatever happened. So you're kind of thrown off by that. And then the perpetrator will run with that because you're thrown off, but they're strategically setting you up. That's what gaslighting is, right? On a governmental level, perspective side is, oh, the medical system is here to support you, But then another perspective is they're actually setting us up for many in many ways for a system that's unsustainable because some people can't afford medical care or can't afford medical insurance, right?

Or can't afford. They don't know if what they're being told in the news about vaccines or health scares is real or not because the news are skewed. So prospecticide is when you throw somebody off by distorting their own way of seeing. of trusting their own reality. And that's how you also get into cults. Yeah. Another leg of that, right? And that I'm sure you would understand a lot from your background.

Yeah, growing up in a cult. Yeah. And just having, I mean, if anybody needed to be prosecuted for abuse, that was mostly that church and all this members. Absolutely. That was an abuse of hell right. But it did shape me into being a great entrepreneur. So there was that.

It's kind of funny how the things that happen to actually sometimes make you better. You just have to survive. But, you know, there's a lot of people in that cult that, especially LGBT people, that end up committing suicide. So, you know, survive. And that's what they saw with the POWs from Korea. They would get states died. They were released. They were back in their own country.

And they would just curl up in a ball and die within a week. Their will to live had been taken from them, ripped from them. How did that happen? Well, they had no sense of self. They had no sense of purpose. They felt like losers. They were, you know, but this was also insidiously implanted in them by their captors because say their, say their girlfriend decided to break up with them while they were a prison of war.

They would get that letter, right? This was used to me. I didn't even realize that people actually got mail when they were prisoners, but they do. But then if they got a letter saying, hey, you know, this and this is good news from home that people were sending them. that loved them to uplift them, that letter would disappear. So over time, that sense of, that the small things that we even use to sustain ourselves and establish our sense of self, this is what we could observe in the consequences of war imprisonment were stripped from people.

And this is what we see in domestic situations where a person's sense of self is right. Like, you don't want to wear that. Obviously, if somebody put it on of their own free will, they chose it and they like it, right? But that external voice approaching them with, that's a dumb decision. Why did you do that? Or why do you look like that? Or why did you say that? Or this insidious erasure of yourself's, of your self-worth is what is like the ocean waves on sand.

It starts to just wear them down until they get to a point. where often they're, well, it's also this addiction to the perpetrator because that's the only thing they have left. It's also going to have a lot to do with isolation. You have to think a prisoner of war is in isolation, a person can be isolated in their home to. You know, it's just, it's context, but the actions are the same. I like this idea. I mean, there's a lot of instances where you run into, and it's not always physical abuse. It can be mental abuse.

No, this is, we call it invisible abuse. And that's why they're making laws about, in the whole European Union, the whole of the UK, all of the British Commonwealth, we're just starting to see it, you know, start to build in the United States. But we have 12 states that have it on their, on their legislature in, you know, waiting to sort of start building momentum. I wish for more people to be aware of it because we're living it. We are living it. This is, course of control is a soup we're sinking in right now. You know?

You see it from governments and everything else. Exactly. Now, let's move from your book to some of the work that you do on your website. You make these beautiful designs. Oh, thank you. Tell us about the Malia collection. Sure. So I started Malia collection.

So I did a double honors. English degree, which is where the writing comes from. But then I did a degree in business at the entrepreneurship at the University of Arizona. And in the entrepreneurship program, you have to come up with a business model, hopefully by graduation that you want to run with by the time you're free to sort of make a living. And so I decided to use these creative abilities I had. I was already making money off of doing interior design projects for people. And the biggest jump show in the world is in Tucson, Arizona. And so I saw there the potential of the jewelry industry on my doorstep and decided that I could

make a brand that sort of incorporated things that I love doing. I love creating interior spaces. I love creating beautiful things for the home. This throw is actually one of the pieces on my website. It's called the Lion Pelt blanket. So there are things we know that there's a lot of psychological. equilibrium that is created when we in the old times they called it feng shui or vasu sastra but they understood that there's an energy that we create by the placement of things in your space by the quality of things

in your space by the beauty of things that's why we all still buy flowers at the supermarket right but it's very very important to our emotional psychological well-being and especially you saw that explode during COVID. So COVID things were closed. People were refurbishing their homes like there was no tomorrow. It was Christmas on steroids, right? Yeah, it was. So that's where you see people recalibrating.

When things are very, very distressful, how do you anchor yourself and how do you soothe yourself? And the first thing you're going to need is a safe space. And to my point is where we started with the book, the antidote to that is if you don't have a safe space, is you create a functional art around you to soothe yourself. And so it's super important, especially like in terms of the quality of, because that also has frequency. If you're using synthetic fabrics, they have a negative frequency. If you use natural fabrics, they have positive frequencies. If you use certain materials, they have high frequencies.

And this is basically nourishment for our physical existence. Yeah. Yeah. And so you have these custom art pieces, would you say? Or are they, there's, I see there's different ones that are available for sale. Yeah. Like this pelt we can make, you know, for whoever wants to order it. There's pillows like it. There's embroidered pillows. I have less home things now or, you know, interior dip to decor. We have beautiful mirrors too. And the mirrors are messages. And so it's supposed to be inspirational. And also soothing. There's an eye for an eye makes you blind. In other words, is there a purpose to being vindictive? Really? You know, like, do you want to be the narcissist? Like, wake up. Another one is the first bite is taken with the eye. So we see things and we calibrate instinctively, but also in composition. Is it beautiful to me? Is it soothing to me? Is it threatening? Is it safe? There's a million things, right? And it's like, snap, it's that fast. It's, we're creatures. What would you say?

I see a lot of, I don't know that I would call them crosses, but what would I call them? I see a lot of that in your work, kind of a cross. Oh, thanks. Thank you for picking up on that. So one of the things I did as an honor student, I was studying Renaissance art. And I'm an art affixionado. You put me in the middle of Florence or, you know, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I'm, it's like you put me on drugs. I'm stoked, you know. And so I wanted to understand what I was looking at better. I knew there was a subtext that I was missing. And in Renaissance art, you start to get an overview of that. If you're in Florence, you're going to see symbolism everywhere. There's an eagle carved in stone. There's a bee carved in stone. There's a bee carved in stone. There's embroidery. There's all kinds of anchors that is really, really ancient language, way pre-Christian. And so I asked one of my professors if he would teach me symbolism. So I did a lot of studying in symbolism. I'm linguistic in symbolism. So I build it into my jewelry. So this ring I'm wearing as a butterfly, which is actually representative of the soul, but it's also freedom, right? It's something so ephemeral. And

our time here is ephemeral, and so there's so much language that we used previously in symbolism because it was the shortcut, which is the reason I did the pictures for the book. I made the book into kind of a picture book because you use you the shortcuts to the story. And when you put it into the work of a home or ornaments on your body, it tells a lot about the person because they are actually symbols that are a context of a belief system. It's not just one thing. So the cross, the symmetrical cross in ancient iconography, the vertical was male, the horizontal was veil, female, and the intersection was mankind. So it was a symbol of universality. It was a symbol of universal humanity. And we've bastardized that a bit since the onset of Christianity,

but it was by dividing us, oh, you're Christian, I'm Muslim, you're this, I'm that. But the original story of the cross was a unifying symbol. That's why I use it a lot, yeah. So is anything more we need to know about you, your jewelry line, and the book? Sure. Well, the book is available on Amazon. It's also available on the website.

We're just barely getting it onto, into stock, because I'm self-published. So the distribution process, as you know, is its own game. It's very different than jewelry or fashion. The fashion is available on the Real Real. The jewelry is available on my website and at the Real Real. So that's a pretty awesome network because I really, really believe in longevity creations, which means they will outlive me.

So a piece of jewelry that we see in a museum belonged to somebody and was worn by somebody 3,000, 4,000 years ago. And that's all we have left. We don't see the buildings anymore. There is no infrastructure for where that person lived. Even the pyramids, they have eroded, but the jewelry is intact. So it's a really permanent and powerful message of our humanity in a continuum through time. But we also find garments. You know, they reconstructed a garment from an Egyptian queen that was made of beads, the connection between the beads was gone, but they could reconstruct the dress. It gives us a continuity that we don't have to constantly recreate things. We can repurpose them. And so my relationship with the Real Real is really

enhancing and establishing how passionate I am about constantly repurposing. In the history of humanity, we have only mined three Olympic-sized swimming pools of gold. It is constantly repurposed. So to my point, you know, it's probably the least invasive and least toxic kind of thing you're going to use on your body and your time in lifetime. Is it really that small amount of gold? Yeah, it's that small amount of gold. Yeah. It's a repurposes. It's crazy, isn't it, to think of that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I know they mine a lot of gold, but it's most of it, the certain gold is made for... No, it sounds like it's a lot, but it's crumbs that you pull out. It's not often chunks. Yeah. I did. I was actually represented

by the World Gold Council, which is based in London, represents all of the gold mines in the world. And they had asked to use my jewelry to represent them in their marketing, because not Many jewelers even use as much gold in their work as I do. And so it really represented the gold industry well. Wow. And it's been reused all the way. So that's just wild. All the gold, never mind of human history, would just fill just under three and a half Olympic-sized swimming pool.

That's amazing. I know. We're really repurposing a lot of gold, but I guess it's one of those things that can do it without losing its purity, I guess, maybe. Exactly. It's absolutely pure. Yeah, it doesn't tarnish. It doesn't change with time.

It's identical after centuries. Wow. That's something else. So I learned new things every day of our wonderful guests that come by. So as we go out, give people a final pitch out to order up your book and get to know your jewelry line better on your website. Yeah, absolutely. And then, like I said, there's a representation of it on the Real Real, some of it.

more fashion is probably on the Real Real than by far on my website because the website is kind of like the glamorous pieces that are like the more complicated and elaborate things that I get to show off. But the Real Real is more wearable things like this blouse is my design as well.

And my first relationship with the jewelry was actually with Saxif Avenue. And that was who I worked with for the first 10 years, which was a huge school for me because I didn't have any back. background in jewelry. I didn't have family in jewelry. I just decided I wanted to do jewelry. And I guess I did some pretty good stuff. And so the good stores and the good clients just kind of found me. Wow. Well, that works out pretty good. Well, thank you very much for coming to show.

We really appreciate it. Thank you. I really appreciate being here. And I enjoyed having this conversation with you again. Yes. So folks, ordered the book where Refined Books are sold. CC, the booklet, the foundation of all abuse. Out later, I believe it's out, September 1st, 2025. Thanks for monies for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortunes, Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, Fortresschus, Chris Foss, one on the, and all those crazy places on the internet.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out. Great job.