TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’re talking with Barry Adkins after losing his 18-year-old son, Kevin, to alcohol poisoning. Barry saw that he had two choices. He could curl up in the corner and allow himself to become a victim, or he could get out and tell as many people as possible about what happened to his son, Kevin.

Barry chose the latter in an effort to raise awareness of the dangers of binge drinking. Barry set out on an Epic 1400 mile journey on foot from Arizona to Montana. His son’s ashes in his backpack, stopping at numerous schools, churches in treatment facilities along the way to share his story. Larry’s presentation describes in powerful detail the night his son died.[00:01:00]

The quiet morning that he got the knock on the door and how he came up with the idea to walk from Arizona to Montana.Barry’s message is both powerful inspiration and a warning about the consequences of even one night of binge drinking.

Barry has shared his story with over 200,000 students and parents. He has been a featured speaker at numerous high schools, community events, and town hall meetings. Barry has also been featured in numerous media outlets, including Reader’s Digest, the Dr. Gina Show and the Leon Fonte Show. Please join me in welcoming Barry.

Hi Barry.

Barry: Oh, thanks for having me on. Gissele

Gissele: Ah, thank you for being on the show.

I was wondering if you could share with the audience a little bit about the story of your son’s passing and how that led you to actually decide to become this powerful messenger on the dangers of pitch drinking.

Barry: Well, Gissele, I probably should start by kind of telling you, you know, what led up to that.

[00:02:00] Yeah, let’s start with that. So he had just graduated from high school. He struggled in high school. He was actually flunking his English class in March of his senior year in high school. And he needed it for graduation, right? Mm-hmm. And I would always talk to him about it and, you know, he would tell me to quit bothering him about it.

He’d take care of it. But at the end of the day, he did graduate, and I remember at his high school graduation ceremony, he gave me a hug and whispered, thanks for not giving up on me, dad.

Gissele: Hmm.

Barry: And shortly thereafter suffice to say he saved up enough money and I agree to co-sign a loan so he could buy a new truck.

And if you have listeners that work at dealerships, I apologize, but I have a healthy dislike for that process, right? Mm-hmm. Because they’re gonna try to sell me something I don’t want or need. He found one of the dealerships, so I gotta go in and sign papers, right?

Gissele: Mm-hmm. I

Barry: sit down in the, the dealerships.

You know, in their [00:03:00] office, and the first thing this guy says to me is, how about some life insurance? And I’m like, 18-year-old boys don’t need life insurance. They don’t die. But I was wrong. They do die. He wouldn’t live long enough to make a single payment on that truck. So a few weeks later.

I remember him sitting down in our living room and talking about how he couldn’t believe his life was finally beginning and he wanted to move out, and I did my best to discourage him because we honestly never really had any problems with him. His high school principal didn’t even know who he was. I didn’t have any luck talking out of it.

So a couple weeks later, his buddy Craig came over and they sta

Ep. 82 – Transforming Grief Into Love with Barry Adkins

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Gissele : [00:00:00] Was Martin Luther King Jr. Right? Does love have the power to turn an enemy into a friend? Does it have the power to heal? We are creating an inspiring documentary called Courage to Love. The Power of Compassion explores the extraordinary stories of individuals who have chosen to do the unthinkable, love and forgive even those who have caused the most deep harm.

Through their journeys, we will uncover the profound impact of forgiveness and love, not only on those offering it, but also on those receiving it. In addition, we’ll hear from experts who will explore whether loving compassion are part of our human nature and how we can bridge divides with those we disagree with.

If you’d like to support our film, please donate at www MAI tt R-I-C-E-N-T-R e.com/documentary. [00:01:00] Hello and welcome to The Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’re talking about not feeling good enough and what we can do to start feeling better. Our guest today is Sabrina Trobak Based out of Fort St. John BC Canada is a registered clinical counselor and author of the book, not Good enough, understanding Your Core Belief in Anxiety. She’s also a clinical supervisor, public speaker, and holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology.

Before establishing her practice, she dedicated over 20 years to education, serving as a teacher, vice principal, school counselor across three school divisions. Sabrina, has extensive training in addressing trauma in its effects on daily life, [00:02:00] including anxiety and the core beliefs.

Of not being good enough, not important, not valued. Her counseling agency Trobak. Holistic counseling aims to help individuals identify, challenge, and transform these core beliefs into being good enough, important enough, and value. Please join me in welcoming Sabrina. Hi, Sabrina.

Sabrina: Hi. Nice to be here.

It’s nice to meet you.

Gissele : Oh, nice to meet you too. Thank you for being on the show. I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience what sort of led you to do this sort of work?

Sabrina: I always wanted to be a teacher, you know, even in kindergarten, I was the kindergartner helper that helped other kids tie their shoes.

Just was always something I wanted to do is be a teacher. Towards the end of my teaching career, I was a school counselor. And even as a teacher, I was a learning assistant teacher, so I did a lot of work in smaller groups, working more individually with students. So you get [00:03:00] to create a much deeper connection because you’re working one-on-one as opposed to a class size of, you know, 25, 30, 35, whatever it might be.

And so then I went into counseling. Same thing. You really get to build that relationship. And then I went to a workshop on suicide. That was looking at suicide, more of a symptom of that core belief. Feeling not good enough. Not important, not valued. At the end of the workshop, I just thought, this is what I need to do.

So the presenter, Tony Martins taught me his model of therapy. I quit teaching and started my own private practice, which really uses that as the focus point. So really going back and helping people understand and support and challenge that core belief. I started my own private practice in 2010.

And within about six months I had a waiting list and I hated having to turn people away. The model I practice where we’re really addressing that core belief is a long-term model of [00:04:00] therapy. So a lot of my clients are with me a year and a half, two years, sometimes even longer. And so I decided to write the book not g

Ep. 81 – Why We Feel “Not Good Enough” with Sabrina Trobak

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Gissele : [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele.  We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re talking to Krysti Beckett, who’s a passionate plus size personal trainer and pelvic fitness specialist.

Her goal is to get moms to move with confidence and build strength at any size without worrying about their size or weight. Krysti resides in Burford, Ontario with her husband, three children and beloved dog Ozzy. Please join me in welcoming Krysti Hi Krysti.

Krysti Beckett: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Gissele : No, thank you for being with us.

I wanted to ask you if you could tell the audience how you got started in this business that you’re in.

Krysti Beckett: Yeah, I mean, as a young person, fitness was not [00:01:00] really on my radar. I’ve been a plus size my whole life, but I actually was a nanny in my early twenties and one of the women I was a nanny for had a fitness business and she said, you know, you’d be really good at this.

So I kind of started doing admin work and then I got certified as an instructor and really like, found movement that I liked. ’cause I think for a lot of women I grew up. Just doing fitness, like you exercise to be skinny. And it had to be hard and it had to be uncomfortable. But I kind of fell in love with it, trying different things and decided that that was the career path I would take.

So I became a personal trainer and I kind of did follow the grain for a long time with the fitness industry and selling weight loss and teaching people how to basically always be on the journey to lose weight And then I kind of understood and, and saw some research that showed that [00:02:00] most diets are actually designed to fail.

That’s how we make our money. And started to learn more about. The benefits of strength training for longevity to relieve pain. the benefits for your bones, all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the scale whatsoever. And through that, also becoming a mother at the, around the same time learning about pelvic health.

So as a pelvic fitness specialist, I’m working with women to overcome things like pain, leaking, painful sex something called prolapse, where your pelvic floor, if it’s not supportive enough, the organs can actually descend from your body. And it’s actually fairly common, but it’s, it’s something we just don’t talk about enough.

Gissele : Mm mm I love everything you just said.

Krysti Beckett: Thanks.

Gissele : The first thing is really that, you know, reflecting on as a society we’re very plus size phobic, right? Like we, we think that skinny is the place to [00:03:00] be in. When you think about. You know how much we try to get everyone to fit in a box, right? Even like plastic surgery, everything.

Everybody has the same nose, everybody has the same face, everybody has to have the same body, and that is such a disservice. What sort of messaging did you see around the fitness industry about people embracing their own sort of like body shape?

Krysti Beckett: So unfortunately, I think the industry as a whole doesn’t, if you were to Google Fitness, if you were to Google Gym, you’ll find young, white, thin bodies.

 that’s the general representation that comes to the fitness industry. But it’s interesting because first of all, we white people, I mean, I’m a white person. We are the global minority. It’s people of color, the global majority, and yet this [00:04:00] industry has only reflected that in, you know, visually esp

Ep. 80 – From Shame to Strength: Women’s Health, Pelvic Power & Compassionate Weight Loss with Krysti Beckett

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Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content today. We’re wondering can we be trained to be more compassionate?

And our guest today is Dr. Olga Klimecki who is a neuroscientist and a psychologist who earned her doctorate degree in the University of Zurich Olga’s, a psychologist and neuroscientist who’s interested in understanding the neural mechanisms that shape our social emotions in adaptive ways. Her doctoral research investigated neural behavior and emotional plasticity induced by training social emotions like compassion and empathy.

The results of these longitudinal studies in adults provided evidence for the plasticity of social emotions spanning the levels of neural function, emotional resilience, and helping behavior are her current interests include meditation and [00:01:00] promoting conflict resolution through compassion. Please join me in welcoming the amazing Dr.

Olga Klimecki. Hi Olga.

Dr. Klimecki: Hi. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for the invitation.

Gissele: Oh, thank you for being on the show. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a very, very long time. I was so excited when you published with Tanya Singer, your work on the difference between, empathetic distress and compassion and all of the work that you’re doing on aging.

I mean, it’s just, it’s just phenomenal work. I was wondering if you could tell the listeners what actually got you started on your journey. Like, what drew you to study empathy and compassion?

Dr. Klimecki: Yeah. Thank you for the question. it’s a longer journey. It’s started in my student years. I had a friend who was meditating and I found that idea of going to a place and being silent for a week.

Very intriguing and I felt like trying it out myself. And so with my background [00:02:00] interest in psychology and in neuroscience, I finally found a PhD possibility where I could study not only. Psychological mechanisms and the brain, but also with a link to meditation, which I found very exciting. And even though in the beginning of my PhD I tried out different forms of socio-emotional training, including nonviolent communication and others, I was most drawn to the meditation indeed, which I started at the same time practicing meditation as I started investigating meditation.

So That’s

Gissele: beautiful

Dr. Klimecki: background story. Yeah.

Gissele: in terms of your research, how have you found that meditation has helped you

 has your meditation practice helped you understand some of the findings

Dr. Klimecki: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s really interwoven.

Like sometimes I get ideas through the practice.

Gissele: And also about the [00:03:00] limitations. And sometimes the research I read or I do also informs me about potential limitations. For instance, what I learned from the research, which something I cannot never learn from my own practice, is the diversity of responses in our different participants.

Dr. Klimecki: So in the papers, we always report mean results, whereas the diversity of how people experience it. It’s very large. So in all our studies, there are people who improve, who get worse, who don’t change much. And working with the participants, I really got to hear their different stories, their different angles.

And over time, I, because we all go through different stages in life, I also experienced some of these benefits. Sometimes I experienced some of the adverse effects of me

Ep.79 – Can We Be Trained To Be More Compassionate? Conversation with Dr. Olga Klimecki

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Gissele: was Martin Luther King Jr. right? does love have the power to turn an enemy into a friend? Does it have the power to heal? This year, we’re creating an inspiring documentary called Courage to Love The Power of Compassion, which explores the extraordinary stories of those who have chosen to do the unthinkable, love and forgive even those who have caused them deep harm.

Through their journeys, we will uncover the profound impact of forgiveness and love, not only to those offering it, but also on those receiving it. In addition, we’ll hear from experts who will explore whether love and compassion part of our human nature, and how we can bridge divides with those we disagree with.

If you’d like to support our film, please donate at www [00:01:00] maitricentre.com/documentary. That’s Maitricentre documentary. Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’re talking about the power of play in relationships, and we’re chatting with Peter Anderson. Peter Anderson is our relationship mentor performer, an author of the Playful Couple love, laughter, and lasting con connection. He helps couples rediscover the joy, spontaneity, and emotional safety that keep love vibrant, growing on decades of coaching.

Neuroscience, improv theater and therapy tools like IFS and Holy Vagal Theory. He teaches partners how to transform communication, reignite intimacy, and co-create a playful, passionate bond. His journey spans from professional dance and comedy [00:02:00] improv to transformational leadership coaching, all of which now fuel the playful couple experience.

He believes love isn’t something you manage, it’s something you create moment to moment through laughter, curiosity, and trust. Whether helping partners shift from conflict into connection or routine into romance, he loves sharing practical, heartfelt tools that invite couples to fall in love again with each other and with life.

Please join me in welcoming Peter. Hi Peter.

Peter: Hello. Thank you so much for having me. A lovely introduction.

Gissele: Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. can you start by telling the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work?

Peter: Well, I suppose I’ve always been interested in the physicality, the connection with the body and that drew me to become a professional dancer and how that [00:03:00] connection, although on a performance level could really give to an audience somehow internally.

I didn’t quite have that wisdom yet. And as I went on and I had relationships that were very, fun, exciting, playful relationships, but there was a loneliness in there, a sense of, holding back that I wasn’t completely safe to be who I truly was. And to get to that point when I had to untangle many different, avenues within my own self.

And that led me to studying NLP, mindfulness,nonviolent communication, timeline therapy, Thai massage, craniosacral therapy. I just went just, I was like, I have to figure this out, because I felt that there was, in my family environment, which was very caring, there was an element missing that my mom and father weren’t really in love.

[00:04:00] And if that was my education, how do I go and find that for myself? There was something that was missing that I needed to untangle. And so. As I went along, I was doing the coaching for people and individual coaching. I did business coaching. I had events and networks and, and they were, they were fulfilling, but something I wasn’t really firing from my deep heart passion.

Mm-hmm. And it’s when I did the w

Ep.78 – Choosing Play in Relationships: From Conflict to Connections with Peter Anderson

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Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our worlds. Today we have Britton and Carolee back, and they’re talking to us about the education system.

Hello. Welcome back. Welcome back. Hi. Good to see you. Hello. Good. It’s been forever. It’s been, I know, it’s been like so long. I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience a little bit about yourselves and how you sort of left your world, decided to sell everything moved to other countries and what you did with the kids for the school system.

Carolee: Well, we are parents to four children and we were raised in the Mormon culture. And with that there’s a big emphasis and focus on family. Families are really, really important. And so, you know, we went through a lot of turmoil and challenge in regards [00:01:00] to our love relationship within this paradigm.

And truly didn’t actually have emotional intelligence and really lacked a lot of things we had a completely different idea of what we needed to accomplish as parents with our children too. Like everything was drastically different in that paradigm than it is now. So in our journey of healing, infidelity,

Like deconstructing from organized religion. We also had this complete awakening into how we were to raise our children and the paradigm of like what kids actually need as we also were going into healing of our own inner child. Right. As we became aware of the need to reparent ourselves, it fundamentally transformed how we approached parenting our kids.

 I’m curious about what you found you needed to heal your inner child [00:02:00] in what you discovered your children needed that was different from what we currently do.

So back in, oh goodness, it was 2019. You know, at this point in our story we had three children and we had not yet even been pregnant with the fourth. That would come later in 2020. But our oldest was in second.

 grade at this time. And I remember sitting down with his second grade teacher and she started explaining and expressing some awareness that she had of his emotional needs. He was already not liking school. He was already a pushback on learning. There was already some inclination towards depression and anxiety and like just emotional turmoil that this little second grader was experiencing.

And in a lot of ways. It mirrored to me my own disharmony in my own [00:03:00] life that I also had experienced. And so, you know, in the traditional sense I was like, oh, what do I do for my child? I’m really wanting him to succeed. I’m really wanting him to be emotionally intelligent. I’m really wanting him to love his life.

And we had done so much, I was the kind of mom that like, almost didn’t take care of myself because I needed to take care of everybody else first. You know? And so as I sat there, I, I was like, my child is too young to be carrying the heaviness of the world in his body.

Like at, at age eight. He really should actually just be joyful and having fun, like being a kid, why is he so weighed down? So there was this big question mark that I had about my children and about this one child specifically. That really kind of started opening my mind that there needed to be a different way, but, but I wasn’t quite sure what that [00:04:00] looked like.

And so what I did is I, I reached out and, you know, we were living in Utah at the time, and I, I started kind of looking into, okay, where, where are some therapeutic clinics that actually do therapy for kids? And I found a couple that were highly recommended, and I got him on a wait list. You know, there was no availability to like drop in for a session.

And so I put him on the wait list and I was just in th

Ep. 77 – Reimaging Education for Children’s Soul Development

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Carole and Britton Part 1

Britton: [00:00:00]

Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’re talking about, dealing with infidelity, with compassion. And my guests are Britton and Carolee Beckham raised in the strict dogma of the Mormon church. and with infidelity threatening their marriage and family, they found themselves at a cliff’s edge Through a deep commitment to heal these two left everything they knew to find themselves.

Over a period of five years, they rebooted their relationship and traveled the world seeking their truth with their four children in tow. They have emerged on the other side as an embodied and awakened couple with a powerful message to share. Please join me in welcoming Britton and Carolee.

Hello. Hi.

Thank you for having us.

Gissele: Oh, no. Thank you for being [00:01:00] on the show. I’m so excited to be talking about this topic because I think it’s a challenging one, especially around how you manage infidelity. Can you start by telling the audience a little bit about how you met and got together and then how kind of the relationship evolved to the point where there was some infidelity?

Carolee: Yeah, so, as you mentioned in the introduction, we were raised Mormon and in the culture of Mormonism there’s a pretty like common pathway of meeting your significant other. And so we met as like most Mormons tend to at a at church. And in the Mormon faith they have something called a singles word where only young single adults attend church together.

And the the main purpose is so that like they can foster the opportunity for young single people to meet and find who they’re gonna marry. So I had graduated from university already when Britton he was a [00:02:00] missionary for the church. And had just gotten back from that mission.

And we went to the same church in Orm, Utah. And we literally met in the, that the first meeting, it’s called Sacrament Meeting. And right after the meeting was over, he came up and introduced himself to me. Do you wanna add anything to that, that first meet?

Britton: There was a little sparkle in her eye when I saw her and the moment that I first saw her there was this like, connection.

I didn’t understand it. I didn’t even know what it meant. It just seemed intriguing. And and so for the first time and the only time I went up and introduced myself immediately to a woman and asked for her her number. So that was, that was how we met at church. That was how we became friends.

Gissele: That’s lovely.

So let’s fast forward a little bit. ’cause you have like four kids now, right? Because Is, yeah. Which is [00:03:00] amazing. Must be a very busy.

I’d like to get to the point where the infidelity happened. Was it that you guys were struggling in the relationship for a while or was it a situation where there was really no signs that, you know, like the relationship seemed to be going okay and then this sort of just happened?

Britton: I wanna actually, let me jump in on that. Yeah, you answered. So I believe the infidelity could be best described as the lack of total commitment from the beginning. part of our healing journey was we came to this point in 2022 where we realized we weren’t all in on each other and we had never been neither one of us.

Carolee: And we were married in 2009. Wow. So that

Gissele: I love that you guys are saying this because I think there’s many people in the relationships that have one foo

Ep.76- Addressing Infidelity with Compassion: Part 1 of a chat with Carolee and Britton

TRANSCRIPT

Interview with Parent’s Circle Forum

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Today we’re talking about reconciliation in the face of deep conflict, and we’ll be talking with Robi Damelin. Spokesperson and director of International Relations for the Parents Circle Families Forum joined the organization after her son was killed by a Palestinian sniper.

All her work on the ground in Palestine, Israel, and internationally is geared towards non-violence and reconciliation Robbie was named as a 2015 Woman of Impact by women in the world, Layla Alsheikh. lives in Bethlehem in the West Bank in 2002. Her six month old son.

 Sai became ill and Israeli soldiers prevented Lila from taking him to the hospital for more than five [00:01:00] hours. Sai soon died from the lack of timely treatment. Lila joined the Parents’ Circle in 2016 following her son’s death. She never thought about revenge, but rather has devoted her time and energy to ensuring a better, more peaceful future for her children.

The Parents Circle Families Forum is a joint Israeli Palestinian organization made up of over 800 bereaved families. Their common bond is that they have lost a close family member to conflict, but instead of choosing revenge, they have chosen the path of reconciliation. Through their educational activities.

These bereaved members have joined together to take tens of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis on journeys of reconciliation. it is often raw and always emotional, but out of these interaction comes change. Not the kind of change that makes headlines, but a more [00:02:00] personal and profound shift in perspective.

As a joint Palestine and Israeli peace organization, the PCFF models, constructive dialogue around shared values. Even since October 7th, 2023, its staff members and thousands of participants are still committed to peace in a way forward that centers around empathy and humanization. The PCFF focuses on the shared value of the sanctity of human life.

This conversation brings our attention to the values that Palestinians and Israelis can agree upon, even in the darkness of times. Please join me in welcoming Robi and Layla. Hello. Hi.

Robi: Thank you for Yes.

Gissele: Oh, no. Thank, thank you so much for being on the show. Your message right now is, is so, so important. I wanna to start by giving each of you an opportunity to share your [00:03:00] stories.

Layla: Thank you. First of all, we are so honored to be with you today. my name is Layla. Alsheikh, I live in Bethlehem, but I was born and raised in Jordan. ’cause my family, they are originally from Bethlehem, but they went to Jordan ’cause my father was a teacher and he went there to teach the children in the refugees camps.

But after that war started in 1967, so, The government during that time, take a decision not to allow the Palestinian to return back. So they lost their citizenship and they become, Jordanian. I didn’t visit Palestine before that, but my father have thousands of stories about Palestine.

Layla: So I love Palestine from what I hear from my father. And for me, it’s become like a dream to return back and to, to visit all the places, all the people that my father talk about. And that dream come true in [00:04:00] 1999 after I met my husband, he’s originally from Bethlehem too. And, I returned back, after we engaged to get married and to start our new life.

And I was really being so happy to be here to, to return back to my roots and, That happiness become much more after one year when we have our first dau

Ep. 75-Mothers Building Bridges: Israel, Palestine and The Path to Unity

TRANSCRIPT

Jenn Podcast Recording Forgiveness at Work

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re gonna be talking about forgiveness.

My guest is Jennifer Griggs. She’s a renowned oncologist, researcher, leadership coach, and a narrative medicine practitioner. After a traumatic event at work, she had to learn to forgive, and in the process became a scholar of forgiveness and dignity. She leads a brilliant and passionate team that works to improve the quality of cancer care in Michigan USA by making good trouble.

She hosts the podcast. The Dignity Lab collaborates widely with creative people. Mothers, her two young adult daughters, supports her husband’s theater ventures and takes delight in the oak trees and bird songs in the woods where they live. Please join me in welcoming Jennifer.

Hi, [00:01:00] Jennifer.

Jenn: Hi. It’s great to see you.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Gissele: It’s great to see you too. I’m so excited to talk about forgiveness. I’d like to start, by asking you to tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work.

Jenn: Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me.

 When I discovered dignity, everything fell into place for me. So I consider myself a scholar of both. I think without understanding dignity, it’s hard for us to know why something hurt. It’s hard for us to take accountability for our part when.

Applicable. And I think it’s hard to see a way out of that victim stance. when I learned to forgive, I actually looked back on my whole life and realized I’d been a person of grievance. I had grievances against people going back to early in my life and found that I was oppressed by my own stance towards what had happened.

So for me, forgiveness has meant freedom, [00:02:00] dignity has made it fall into place and it’s. Paved a path forward for me. So forgiveness to me is giving up all hope of a better past in search of a better future.

Gissele: Hmm. I love that. I love that. And it takes a level of courage to be able to look at yourself and your history and acknowledge that you are person full of grievances.

Right? It’s much, much easier it feels to blame other people for those grievances. So I applaud that courage. I wanted to ask you what dignity means to you.

Jenn: Dignity originally meant somebody of value and worth. What’s interesting is when the Human Rights Commission in the 1950s came out with their statement of human rights, dignity was reconceptualized as our inherent worth or value.

Unlike respect, it doesn’t have to be earned. We’re born with dignity. From the minute we’re born, we have worth and value. No one would argue that a little baby who I think has net [00:03:00] negative when they’re first born, before they smile, has value and worth.

Gissele: And and that’s certainly true. I mean, when I think of babies, you’re right,

 they’re just naturally deserving of love, and I feel that way about every human being. Can you tell me a little bit about the work that you do in terms of forgiveness at work? In my experience. There hasn’t been a lot of forgiveness at work. workplaces tend to use a very punitive approach instead of more curiosity.

how have you found the forgiveness at work piece has been received by workplaces?

Jenn: Really, I work mostly with people who’ve been hurt at work, and the thing that is very clear is that systems can violate dignity, a

Ep. 74-Dignity and Forgiveness at Work with Dr. Jenn Griggs

TRANSCRIPT

Conversation with Vivien

Gissele: [00:00:00]

Just wanna shout out to Feed Spot slash overcoming adversity for selecting our podcast as their top 10 podcasts.

Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging all our hard work. Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re talking about getting under the skin, journey from estrangement to forgiveness, and I’ll be talking to Vivien Kalvaria, whose creative journey began in Rhodesia, where she discovered a love for theater as a child.

Although she began her career on stages her true passion laid behind the scenes, producing and directing. She opened a drama studio for children and staged plays at the local theater. At 24, she was appointed news director for Rhodesia Television, the first television station in southern Africa.

After moving to South Africa and then to the United States, [00:01:00] Vivien turned her focus to writing. She’s the author of Break and Hold, and has just completed a deeply personal memoir. My Name is Not Rifka, about her mother-in-law, a Schindler survivor. The book explores tumultuous relationship, the scars of intergenerational trauma and what it truly takes to move from anger to forgiveness.

A lifelong student of Holocaust history and its psychological legacy, Vivien brings rare insight into the wounds of the past, echo through generations and what it means to heal them. Please join us in welcoming Vivien. Hi.

Vivien: Hi. Thanks for having me, Gissele. It’s good to be with you.

Gissele: Oh yes. It’s so great to be with you.

 I think this conversation is very, very timely.

 I was wondering if you could begin by telling the audience how you got to write this memoir for your mother-in-law.

Vivien: Well, in order to understand [00:02:00] the sort of genesis of all of this and to understand the forgiveness piece of this story, we have to go back to where it all began.

when I started dating Zach, that’s my husband, his mother, Rifka everything she could to sabotage our relationship for two years, she would randomly call me at all hours of the night hysterically crying, insulting, yelling, begging me to walk away from the relationship.

She refused to attend our wedding and turned much of the community against me. Only a handful of people actually showed up. I was devastated and furious, and for a couple of years we were estranged. What I didn’t understand then, but would come to learn much later, was that her behavior was rooted in her past.

Rifka carried wounds from traumas I knew nothing about. In fact, nobody knew about them, and that was the stumbling block. She [00:03:00] never spoke about her past for 50 years. It was this dark secret that everyone tiptoed around, her sons grew up, and knew nothing about what she’d gone through as a child. All we had was this tattoo on her arm, a daily reminder that she’d been in a concentration camp.

For me, her silence made it nearly impossible to understand her, let alone try and repair our relationship. So I stayed angry and resentful, not just because she had rejected me as a daughter-in-law, but because I had no frame of reference to understand what motivated her hostility. I couldn’t make sense of why she had waged such a fierce campaign to stop me from marrying her son.

There was nothing in my background or my family’s background to suggest that we had done something terrible. So for two years we were estranged.

Gissele: Did she ever tell you why, [00:04:00] specifically?

Vivien: She was just looking for an excuse. There wa

Ep. 73- Getting Under the Skin: Journey from Estrangement to Forgiveness with Vivian Kalvaria

Love and Compassion Podcast-Where Gissele talks with everyday exceptional people
who have overcome adversities and have wisdom to share.

Gissele Taraba

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