The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rise Above the Story: Free Yourself from Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want by Karena Kilcoyne

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Rise Above the Story: Free Yourself from Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want by Karena Kilcoyne https://amzn.to/3SdPNQR What do we do when the pain of the past is too much to bear? When trauma and shame overwhelm us? When we feel empty and worthless despite our success and daily triumphs? We rise above our story. Before Karena Kilcoyne was a successful criminal defense attorney, trauma defined her early life. Her mother tried to give her away at birth. Her father went to a federal penitentiary when she was 12, leaving the family poverty-stricken and Karena to care for her siblings and her mentally unstable mother. After her mother died, she adopted her 9-year-old brother and graduated from law school at the age of 24. She fought for the freedom of others while imprisoning herself in self-doubt, depression, and anxiety. Existing only in survival mode, she repeatedly recounted the stories she’d written about herself: that she would never be enough, that she could never be happy. In Rise Above the Story, Karena shares with raw vulnerability how she rose above her stories of abandonment, worthlessness, and shame. She’ll help you let go of your own past by embracing every beautiful, imperfect piece of yourself—no matter what your story looks like. She’ll teach you how to: Acknowledge your story. Identify the story that’s limiting your life. Release your story. Discover how your story took over your life by unearthing your repressed fear and shame. Rise above your story. Explore how your hardships can serve you and learn how to finally love yourself unconditionally. Rising above your story will empower you to live the life of your dreams. Karena’s beautifully simple, yet powerful, formula offers emotional freedom and unfettered joy when you’re ready to embrace the vibrant, worthy, and lovable person you truly are. Your past doesn’t define you—you do. It’s time to rise above your story and live the authentic life you deserve. About the author Karena Kilcoyne is a former trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense, including complex white collar criminal and civil litigation in federal and state courts. Later in her practice, she worked as in-house counsel for a publicly traded worldwide manufacturing company. Karena now passionately shares her own personal story of trauma and healing. Through vivid, evocative, and transparent storytelling, she teaches others how to rise above their own stories and find true peace and emotional freedom. She shares these powerful ideas through video and personal posts on Facebook and Instagram. Karena also corresponds regularly with the subscribers of her email newsletter. When she’s not helping others rise above their stories, she’s curating a colorful life full of books and art from far-flung places. Karena lives in Florida with her husband David and their furry son Irwin.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. When the Iron Lady sings it. That's how you know it's official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. Thanks for being a part of the show. As always, you're bringing the smartest people, the CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, all the great authors who have written all their wonderful stories over life and everything that they've done.

And they brought it to you in this wonderful package that they call The Chris Voss Show, sharing with you the stories and everything that goes into life. We have an amazing author on the show today, and she has written her latest book that is coming out January 23rd, 2024. Karina Kilcoyne is on the show with us today. Her new book is Rise Above the Story, Free Yourself from Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want. Karina, did I get your name right? You sure did.

And this is so exciting to be here. I love this podcast. So thanks for having me. It's wonderful to have you as well. So she is going to be joining us on the show to talk about her amazing book and stories that are going to enlighten your life, improve the quality of it, and give you what we call the Chris Foss Show glow. And you'll be able to walk around all day and people will be like, so you're so intelligent and amazing. What do you listen to? Great authors on the Chris Foss Show.

Karina is a former trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense, including complex white collar and civil litigation in federal and state courts. Later in her practice, she worked as an in-house counsel for a publicly traded worldwide manufacturing company she now passionately shares her own personal story of trauma and healing through vivid evocative and transparent storytelling she teaches others how to rise above their own stories and find true peace and emotional freedom she shares these powerful ideas through video and personal posts on Facebook and Instagram.

Karina also corresponds regularly with the subscribers of her email newsletter. While she's not helping others rise above their stories, she's curating a colorful life full of books and art from far-flung places. She lives in Florida with her husband, David, and their furry son, Erwin. Welcome to the show, Karina. How are you? Thank you for having me. I'm fantastic. Fantastic as well. I am awesome.

Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs or wherever you want people to look you up. RiseAboveTheStory.com. There you go. RiseAboveTheStory.com. And give us a 30,000 overview of the book, if you would. My book is called Rise Above the Story, Free Yourself from Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want. And I wrote this book as the ultimate guidebook to healing.

And I wrote this book because I had been through my own healing journey after decades of trauma. And I realized early on in my healing journey that I wasn't alone in my pain. And like the statistic is something like 70% of us will experience trauma in our lifetime. And I think even that number is probably even higher because people don't always talk about their trauma due to shame. So I really wanted to put together this book and what this book is, and I says guidebook to healing as it's part memoir. I share my own stories of trauma with very raw detail about all the things that I screwed up, quote unquote, and the things I did as a result of my trauma. And I also share the distillation of brain science,

because one of the biggest things I learned in my healing journey was how my brain was working in the face of trauma. So I take this complex neuroscience and I just still it down for people. So this book is part memoir. It's part self-help, self-improvement. I distill science. There's beautiful journaling and deep dives. And I also share a lot of different healing modalities in addition to just traditional therapy. There you go. You know, you mentioned not being, not realizing that you're not alone in your trauma and that other people may have gone through similar things. These are the great things about why we say the stories are the owner's manual life is by sharing our stories with each other. We realize that we're not alone because the worst place you can be when you're suffering is

feeling like you're alone. You're the only person the world is, you know, after you and, and all that stuff. So give us a, give us, you know, how did you grow up? Give us a little bit of the history that you talk about in the book. What was your origin story? My origin story was profoundly traumatic. I grew up in scarcity and poverty in Ohio. And when I was 12, about 12, my father went to the federal penitentiary. And he left me, I was the oldest child, and I had a younger brother and a sister. We were not financially secure by any stretch of the imagination. And my mother really had a difficult time mentally and emotionally coping with the circumstances she was left in. And it fell upon me early on. And I really took care of my siblings and her and went to the grocery store and asked strangers for money to buy us food.

And we often went without things, electricity, hot water. And that carried on until my early 20s. And when I was 24, my mother died of cancer. And by that time, she had had my youngest brother. And when she died, I was 24. My youngest brother was nine. And I adopted and raised him. Wow.

And at the time, I had also just passed the bar exam and was trying to be learning how to be a new lawyer. So I had been in survival mode for a long time because of my traumatic childhood. And in that moment of having to become a full-fledged adult with responsibility of a nine-year-old, I shifted deeply into survival mode and suppressed so much of what I had been through, including the grief about my mother dying, my lost childhood, all of these things. And so I went on from there to practice law. I had this sense of deep, deep sense of shame and a deep sense of unworthiness. And these were all stories that I had written for myself because of what I had been through. I thought because I had experienced such poverty because I was the daughter of a felon,

and that made me less than, that made me unworthy. And so I saw early on that education was going to be my ticket out. And I put myself through law school. And when I was practicing law, I was under this false impression that I could succeed my way out of trauma, out of pain, out of shame, out of my stories of worthiness. And it worked for a little while. It was a little hit of this, a little hit of that, a high of success, out of shame, out of my stories of worthiness. And it worked for a little while, right? It was a little hit of this, a little hit of that, a high of success, this, this, this. But after a while, I was still so anxieties and depressed and doubting myself. And then there were these few moments of near rock bottom for me in my life when I realized that there was no amount of success that was going to fill that hole inside of me that was going to make the

darkness in me light. There wasn't enough vacation, designer bags, fancy things. None of that was helping me. And I had to get real about what my pain was and what these stories were I believed about myself, if I was ever going to feel good, to feel happy, to have emotional freedom. And that origin story and the resulting trauma and stories I wrote about it is really what sponsors and promotes this work I've done. There you go. Rise above your story. It sounds like, you know, another word for that might be your identity because it sounds like you're using your story as your identity. You know, I grew up, you know, in this sort of way, you know, you lost your childhood, you know, it's really hard for

children to deal with trauma because we're not really equipped to it. I don't know why I just quoted myself at 55 years old as a child, but maybe I am. You can ask the audience. But we're not equipped to it. And so we put it away. Some people, one of the reasons they pack it away is because mentally they can't handle it because they're not equipped to it because they're so young and then uh we had someone on the show one time that talked about the reason you finally get around to healing your trauma when you're like you know 40s 50s and later in life is because you finally your brain kind of

goes i think that they've developed enough where we can hand this back to them and say hey maybe you should fix this crap so i don't know if that's true or not, but it's interesting. But yeah, dealing with your identity and kind of how you're passing through things. Was there a breaking point for you? Was there a point or epiphany moment where you just went, okay, enough? Yeah, I actually had two of those moments. And I'm sure there are people out there listening who have had this experience where you know enough and you you feel enough and you say something's not right and an inkling like this could be better and and so you you have this sense of okay I'm gonna I'm gonna do something

I'm gonna therapy so the first moment I had that was in my mid-30s and I had a very it was in a very dysfunctional relationship, romantic relationship. And when it ended, it felt like the world had stopped for me. And it really gave me great pause to say, why was I choosing these types of relationships? And a lot of that went back to you know as we often experience right we choose relationships based on what we're familiar with what we witnessed growing up and what we believe about ourselves and so that was really the first foray into deep healing where I had to really unearth this pain from my childhood and and the violence I witnessed and the domestic violence I saw and some other things that really impacted me. And for me to say who I was choosing in

relationships and examine that and learn how to be alone and be comfortable being alone and learning to value myself, that was a big foray. And then when I got to this level of healing at that point, when I realized I had this subconscious addiction to chaos, emotional chaos, and it felt rewarding to me in a certain way. When I realized that and I started working through it, I felt, whoa, I'm better. I got this, right? I stopped. And then I stopped. I stopped because I felt like that's enough. And then it was about six, seven years later, I had this beautiful golden retriever. And he was my first real experience with unconditional love. And any dog or cat lover out there, animal lover out there knows exactly what I'm talking about. And I did not train this

dog for this. And I did not expect this dog for this. And I did not expect this or understand this, but he really became my emotional support dog. So when I was having anxiety or depression or whatever, he would comfort me and console me. And I love this dog like no other. And he was seven years old and he was diagnosed with cancer, a terrible, terrible form of cancer. And I realized during his treatments that he was sick and dying almost 20 years to the day that my mother died of cancer. And so when this was going on for a month, I was having all these flashbacks and all these thoughts about my mother and my childhood and all these things I had never processed. And when he died, the grief I felt for him, again, any animal lover would

understand this, the grief you have when that happens, but it continued to roll through me and roll through me. And I realized that I had opened the floodgates to my grief. And I was in this space where it felt safe to finally let it out and I started grieving my mother and my childhood and that which was about now eight years ago was really when I started this big gargantuan journey into my healing and my research and trying everything I could figure out and things I read about because I really needed to understand why all those years later, like you talked about, right? Being in your 40s and 50s and now all of a sudden it like comes out and it's time to deal with it. And I wanted to understand how to finally do it.

There you go. So how can we rise above these stories of abandonment, worthlessness, and shame and allow ourselves to heal? What were some of the techniques that you used that you espoused in the book? I break the book down into three steps and the healing into three steps because when I went back and really thought about all the different therapies I tried and things I did, that's really how it played out for me was three

big moments and three big steps. So the first one I'd say is acknowledging the story you're telling yourself. And that's all about self-awareness. Because I think a lot of times when we're struggling with pain, we just keep going on and thinking like, oh, this is what life is. And I'm supposed to take it on the chin and nobody really wants to hear my sad stories. And the self-awareness of I am in pain, I did experience something, and I have written a story about it. That self-awareness and understanding how your brain works in the face of trauma that is trying to keep you safe. So it writes these limiting stories for you about, oh, don't do that. Somebody might not like you. Oh, don't do that. They won't love you back. Oh, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't follow that dream because that's silly.

I mean, you're not good at that anyway, right? These kinds of stories. So the self-awareness of what is happening in your brain. I also felt like when I started to objectively look at my, what my trauma, what happened to me, what I went through and the story I wrote about it, that was really impactful because it let me see that I was looking at things from victim mode. Right. When I started to look at it, like, wow, this is interesting. So yes, my father went to prison factual because he went to prison. I wrote this story that I was unworthy and undeserving. Right. So I started to see things through a more objective lens, helped me shift out of victim mode. The second thing, the second big step is learning how to release those stories, let them

go because God, we get so comfortable telling the story over and over and over again and living it out. So how do you do that? Well, for me, I had to really understand how I got so tangled up in my stories. Was it recurrent trauma? Was it the way I was raised? Was it multi-generational transfer of trauma? For me, it was check, check, and check and check right all those things and then the sense of forgiving others and forgiving myself gosh i mean forgiving ourselves is like oftentimes harder than forgiving others because somehow we put ourselves in this position like oh this was all my fault and that's a big big lesson, a big thing I've learned, a thing I'd love

to teach people is none of that is your fault. And the third big step is finally rising above your story. And that's two big things. And that's finding the silver lining, flipping the script on what happened to you, what good came out of it. And the biggest thing of all and the most powerful thing anyone can do is finally tap into self-love learning how to unconditionally love yourself is something that is so powerful and needed if you're going to heal. Definitely. And you've got to realize that, yeah, these things happen to you as a child, but they don't have to be your story. They don't have to be your identity. You can change your story.

That's the beauty of life. Sometimes I get sick of my life and I'm like, I want to do something different. I don't like this story anymore. And like you say, self-analyzing with it. Did you go to therapy at all or did you do this on your own? No, I went to therapy. I went to traditional therapy. I also share in the book a lot of other things that I have done. I'm a big believer in breath work. So for me, my healing journey, and I feel like a lot of people too, when you go through trauma, you can develop an oversensitive, overexerted nervous system,

right? I call it kind of chicken little mode. We're always like, oh, what? Yeah, the sky is falling, everything bad, everything bad is going to happen to me. And it's just, right? I listened to that for years. And it's like, truly, it's just your nervous systems and overdrive because you lived through some serious stuff that made you feel like that. So for me, this journey was, asking what I did, it was also very physical and mental and emotional. So I started yoga and meditating and like I said, breath work, sauna work, hypnotherapy. Some people love that. It works for them. So in the book, I share a lot of different modalities, EMDR, all these things about, and they'll kind of the different modalities, EMDR, all these things about, and they'll kind of give the background of what they are and a few pros and

cons, and maybe it's for you, maybe it's not. But I feel like healing can often be, and that's why this is a guidebook, it's like, here's a menu. It's like dim sum. Try a little of this, pick a little of that. It's not the same for everybody, but here's what works for me and here's what some options are. There you go. Trauma is sometimes is not only emotional, but it finds its way into the body. It can cause cancer, I think, in my opinion. There's different ways that it can hold itself in the body and, you know, learning discipline, learning breath work or doing yoga, especially things that make you feel healed and you're starting to care for yourself as well and take care of this being instead of abusing them. childhoods and they see these relationships and they and they form their basis for relationships off of that and so they're constantly and they don't it's really weird how they don't feel comfortable in like a healthy relationship they have to have the chaos and if they can't find it

they'll create it or find someone who's really good at chaos but it and you're like wait you feel comfortable in chaos like how does that work but it's it's just how it goes but i like how you have these different techniques the chicken little mode i think i've seen some people online on facebook where just every other post is this guy is falling every day and you're just like honey get some help um you're talking about why the brain is a master storyteller and how to elevate your thoughts from the emotional brain to the thinking brain tell us about that yeah so i read a lot of the books right when i was in my healing journey you know some of the most brilliant minds have put together wonderful books about trauma and

what your brain does in the face of trauma. And it is so crucial to understand. So in Rise Above the Story, I wanted people to understand that. So I broke it down so simple because the brain science is so super complex. And quite honestly, it can be kind of boring, right? I really want to know all that. But it's so important. So there's one chapter about in the book. and what it is, is like, I break it down to like, there's two parts of your brain, your emotional brain and your thinking brain.

Your emotional brain is really not thinking at all. It's like autopilot, right? It's your heartbeat. It's your temperature. It's your, you know, your blood pressure. It's all these things.

It's your fight or flight response is when your body feels like it's in danger. Boom. Your nervous system goes into fight or flight. And, and so then there's a thinking brain and the thinking brain is you know the part of your brain that develops later in life and actually it doesn't fully develop usually like your mid-20s and that's you know your cortex

your frontal cortex your prefrontal cortex but really what it is is it's where the big guys are right the thinking guys the self-compassion, the empathy, the self-awareness. So what you want to do is you want to understand the two parts of your brain. And in a normal childhood, in a normal life development, those two parts of your brain are supposed to integrate. And they're supposed to send information back and forth so that you don't end up in chicken little mode, right? Because what will happen okay, okay, danger happens, trauma happens. Sometimes your emotional brain can go rogue and it doesn't send the information upstairs, right? So it's important to understand you have two parts of your brain.

It's important to understand how to tap into self-awareness, how to wait. Wait, let's really think about what's happening here. Objectivity. Am I really in danger? What's really going on here, right? Analyzing it being a little more up here about it, right high level thinking about it And that's really what I like to teach people is you can understand the difference of where you are If you learn how to tune into it and you understand how your brain works in the face of trauma

There you go trauma there you go there you go so how do our stories distort our beliefs and create a victim mindset is a victim being in a victim mindset all the time as you've said the chicken little mode is that is that a sign that if you know if if we see hey i'm constantly being a victim about everything is maybe maybe i have some unresolved issues is that usually a sign yeah i think so because what happens is what i've seen when i've witnessed myself is that it it's that story and your brain that makes you feel unworthy right and so what your brain tries to do is it tries to make that it makes it looks for evidence right to reaff reaffirm, reaffirm, reaffirm. And victim mode

is that. It is reaffirming your lack of worth, your perceived lack of worth, your, you know, all these things. So victim mode, and as a criminal defense lawyer, I explain it like this. There, there is in any situation, a perpetrator and a victim typically, right? In a criminal case. And yes, there is a moment where you can be a victim in some sense of violence, in some sense of trauma, of course, right? In that situation, yes, I was as well. But here's where we switch it. Here's where we flip the script, Chris. It's like, then you step out of it and you step into your own power and you go, you know what? But I don't choose that anymore. I don't want to be that victim. I want to be empowered. And I want to understand that I didn't, I didn't, I don't want to be this

person anymore. I don't want to have this story anymore. So it's about letting go of that. And a lot of that also, I think dovetails nicely into forgiveness, right? I think a lot of that also, I think, dovetails nicely into forgiveness. I think a lot of times people who carry around this victim thing are, oh, well, look at me. This happened to me and how awful is this other person? So I think if it's like, you understand that you can empower yourself and you have the power, you need to reclaim it. And then you say, oh, and also, is there forgiveness work that I can do around the situation? And listen, one big important thing, and I'm sure a lot of people already know this, but forgiveness is never about the other person anyway, right? It's about you. It's about, do I want to carry around this emotional muck about this person the rest of my

life? Or do I want to let it go? Right? It's really about creating the emotional mental clarity for yourself. There you go. Forgiveness is so important because I think that's a huge part of the process. And then you talk about self-love being one of the final and most important parts of the journey. Yeah. I mean, because parts of the journey. Yeah. I mean,

because here's the truth. You cannot get to emotional freedom or real self-love. If you have an emotional tsunami going on inside of you, it's just not going to happen. If you are filled with shame and you are filled with unworthiness and you are filled with all of these things, abandonment and fear, you are never going to get there, right? So learning how to tap into compassion for yourself,

for empathy, for awareness. And a big thing that I did that helped me so much was I did a lot of inner child work because for me, it felt like I had splintered off these versions of myself, right? These younger versions of me, you know, the 12 year old me who asked strangers for me, it felt like I had splintered off these versions of myself, right? These younger versions of me, you know, the 12 year old me who asked strangers for money, right? I'm so ashamed of that. Oh, that, that, that part of me is over here and I never want to look at her again. I want to talk to her again. I don't want that, that part to be a part of me anymore. And so on my journey of self-love, it was me bringing back in all those different parts. So I would do compassion meditation and I would envision 12 year old me standing outside my house in the snow, waiting to go across the street, waiting till I had enough courage to knock on my neighbor's door and ask for $20 when I knew we could never pay it back. Right.

I bring in these pieces of me and I have compassion meditation or I write letters to that part of me. Oh, really? And I see, wow, what you did was so brave. What you did was so graceful. What you did was... And so that's how I found self-love, was finding those pieces of me that I was so ashamed of

and looking at them from an objective outside perspective and saying, wow, there's nothing shameful about that at all. That was incredible that you had the inner power and fortitude to do something like that, right? And I think if we had that view of ourselves, that compassionate, graceful, wow, like you did the best you could in the moment you were in, if we did more of that instead of self-blaming, that's how you find self-love.

I love that concept of writing letters to put on paper and just kind of cement it. Yeah. It's really powerful, actually. And like I said, it was a big part of it. And I also found that the more I did it, the more it would come up. Wow. Right? Yeah.

There you go. You know, the world is filled, you know, and people love stories of the phoenix rising from the ashes. People love stories of overcoming adversity, you know, tragedies that happen in life and people that come above it. And I think that's why stories are so great and call them the owner's manual to life. Because, you know, everybody goes through hard times. I don't think there's anybody in this life that doesn't have some sort of hard time or some sort of complication or some sort of challenge that's put before them. Life is a survival game. The universe is a survival game. And those things make us grow and make us better if we can utilize them in the kind of the way that you've talked about where instead of, you know, staying in the victim mindset, we go, how can I

take this moment, this, what happened to me and turn into something that's empowering. And, you know, you probably found that maybe a lot of those things of you stepping forth and being that brave little girl and taking care of the family, having to kind of be the dad of the family, if you will, raising your siblings and stuff, you know, yeah, maybe you lost your childhood, but it is what it is, but it probably helped shape you maybe as a better attorney, as a better professional, maybe it shaped you more in your life and you can kind of appreciate more of the things that you, you know, help make you become. Some people can look at their trauma and go, I might be a better person because of it. I mean, it happened.

Maybe I'd be less of a person if it didn't. But there's so many stories through the arc of time and humanity where people have survived tragedies and gone on to do amazing, wonderful things and usually inspire and motivate the world to be better. So I think what you're telling people to do is so important, you're giving them a roadmap to get out of that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's just brilliant the way you put that because it's so true that setbacks, right? People say, oh, I've had a setback. And I think you're right that when you've been through trauma and you've been through this journey of what did it what did it really mean and what did I get out of it and and who

was I on the other side of it and who was I who am I now with this perspective where I come from where I come with things now is I don't see things as setbacks I see them as opportunities to rise even higher oh Oh, there's something else in here for me to learn. What is it? What am I supposed to know right now that I missed before? And I also find that I used to be very scared and fearful of what I didn't know, right? Oh, I don't know that in my career. Oh, I don't know that. And that would scare me. And now I've gotten to the other side of healing where I have this authentic, deep love for myself and this compassion. I am no longer afraid of what I don't know. I love what I don't know.

Teach me something. Like, oh, I'm so glad to meet you. You just taught me something, right? There's this whole different view you have about life and your life and the world when you can come from a place of, I don't see anything as a setback. I see it as an opportunity. There you go. In Stoicism, there's a great quote I pulled up here from Marcus Aurelius. It says, it's unfortunate this has happened. He's quoting something. And then he says, no, it's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it,

not shattered by the oppressor or frightened off by the future. It could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. And so it's a great way of looking at adversity that comes at you. And sometimes it takes us a while to resolve that because as children, we're not really equipped like Marcus Aurelius was as an adult when he wrote that. But, you know, retelling your stories. And so is a good exercise to maybe sit down and spend some quiet time with yourself and say, what are the stories that I tell myself? Or why do I tell myself this story?

Is it true? Did I perceive it properly or what are some variations of this? How does this maybe this story limit me? Yeah, absolutely. And that's the most crucial initial part of healing is that exactly what you're talking about is this acknowledging it and this becoming aware of, and, oh, let me really explore this. Because you can often see it, right? When you're talking to certain people and you're thinking, oh, the, oh, it was me.

This didn't go my way again, right? You can see it in other people. It's not always so easy to see it in yourself. So there's, I share a lot of these exercises that I'll always in yourself. So there's, you know, I share a lot of these exercises that are always in the chapters in the book, you'll find them everywhere. But in the beginning, especially where I'm really having the reader dive in into this idea of, there's a lot for me to uncover, and acknowledge and work through and understand about being honest with myself about what is this frame that I have put around this story? What is this narrative that I have created about me or about my life

and what happened or what I went through? And so really understanding that. And I like to explain it like there's a subjective way to look at it and there's an objective way to look at it. So for me, it was like, here's a great example. I'm unworthy because my father went to prison and nobody's ever going to like me and they're going to think that I'm some terrible person I'm never going to fit in. That's the story I carried around. When I really got objective about it and my healing, I thought, okay, what factually happened? My father went to prison. Fact, right? And in fact, statistics are that I think it's like one in five people in the United States have had a family member incarcerated.

So truly, I wasn't so alone on that either. But that's the story. So objectively, factually, what happened? My father went to prison. Yes. What story did I write about it? Because my father went to prison, I wrote a story for myself that I was unworthy of friendship or love, right? So when you start to flip it and say, what's the objective view of this? How can I objectively talk about this? You start to dig in and say, wow, like a light goes on. This is what I've been telling myself all because this thing happened that wasn't even

about me, right? Yeah. And you didn't even choose that. You were thrust into that life. It's not like you were, it's not like you, you know, whatever, you're a kid. You're just like, you're just, you know, that's not technically your story. That's his story. Right.

Exactly. So, you know, and that's just an exercise, a powerful exercise we can all do about our own personal situation is to start stepping back from it and looking at it like almost like you're looking, you're watching a movie, right? You're watching a movie, a movie of your life. What are you seeing? As if it's not even your life. You're just watching it on film. What happened? It's what I loved about yoga. When I started doing yoga and meditation and this idea of being the observer, right? In meditation, they teach you to be the observer, to watch your thoughts. You're going to have thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. You can't just shut your brain down. But when they happen, watch them like they're playing on a movie screen. They're not really happening to you. They're just thoughts, right? So this idea of being an observer can be used in this healing

journey of how do I observe what happened to me, what I went through and how do I observe the story I wrote about it? Now here's the truth. Here are the facts. Here's the objective layout. Now what do I do about it? There you go. Well, it's,

this book is going to be very insightful and helpful for so many people. And also, you know, like we said at the beginning of the show, sometimes the first step is realizing you're not alone. And that there are other people that have the tools that can help you because they've been through what you've been through. And that seems to be a real awakening for a lot of people. Give us your final pitch out and thoughts as we go out on people ordering at the book and dot coms and wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs.

Yeah, the book is sold. You can buy it anywhere books are sold. And you'll find me on, you can read more about the book, more about me on my website, which is riseaboutthestory.com. You can sign up for my newsletter, which I send out twice a month. And I share all kinds of insightful tips, my own personal stories. I love telling stories and using them to help people. So that's a wonderful newsletter.

And you can find me on social, Instagram and Facebook, Karina Kilcoyne. There you go. Thank you very much, Karina, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It was wonderful to chat with you. Thank you. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold, folks.

Rise above the story. Free yourself from past trauma and Create the Life You Want January 23rd, 2024 Great book to have to launch you into the new year for your New Year's resolutions if you haven't broken them by then. But you can do it once and tell new stories. You don't have to

do it on the first. You can do it anytime you want all year long. Thanks for tuning in everyone. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Christmas, LinkedIn.com Fortress Christmas, YouTube.com 4chesschristmas linkedin.com 4chesschristmas youtube.com 4chesschristmas chrismas1 on the tickety tockety thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time