Interview with Kim Korven, The Conflict Queen

Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop: I had the pleasure of speaking with Kim Korven, on the topic of navigating divorce in a non-traditional way, or what she originally called ‘The Gentle Way Divorce’.

Susan Dunlop: Welcome to Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop. Hello, I’m Susan Dunlop, a self- leadership coach and 3 Vital Questions facilitator living in Noosa, Australia.

People passionate about what they deliver to the world intrigue me and make me want to know what, how, and why they do what they do.

I choose to surround myself with people who set magnificent visions, take risks to do good things in service of others and are kind-hearted, purposeful and wise. Guests joining me on the Coffee and Contemplation Podcast are invited to share their personal stories with vulnerability for the benefit of others and are people with either or professional and experiential knowledge of the theme of each episode.

Today’s guest is Kim Korven, founder of The Conflict Queen, which was formerly The Gentle Way Divorce. Kim believes that divorce can be a gift for children. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, in Canada’s Treaty 4 Territory, with her second husband, one adult child from her first marriage, rescue greyhounds, and cats. Kim is the third generation of her family to steward 160 acres of natural prairie.

Kim is a family mediator, a peaceful divorce strategist, and a trainer and speaker, who combines her experience as a lawyer, judge, mediator, judo coach and parent to help people in conflict remember that they are the CEOs of their lives and create fair and family focused results. This even happens when one spouse is a narcissist.

Speaking of which, since our introductory chat a few weeks ago, Kim has spoken publicly for the first time on her experience in a relationship with a narcissist. Not her husband, but a former partner. This will be a valuable discussion today. Based on that intro, we have plenty to cover, and we’ll let the conversation flow one way or the other, or both.

Kim’s a treat, and her message is one of hope, peace, and transformation. So let’s get started. Welcome Kim!

Kim Korven: Thank you, Susan. I’m so happy to be here and thank you for that glowing introduction. I’m like Oh, wow.

Susan Dunlop: That is you! It was hard to come up with something short and succinct, there was so much that you’ve done!

Kim Korven: Well, you know, we tend to just live without thinking, oh, I’ve done this and this and this and this. And so it was, oh, okay, yeah, this is true.

Susan Dunlop: So Kim, I looked at your website and how you’ve articulated what you do. I think let’s start there and weave our way forward. I’m going to take a sip of coffee. If you wouldn’t mind sharing that part. It feels better when it comes from the person who is doing the work rather than me saying it.

Kim Korven: Well, it’s interesting because I was raised to value my intellect. That was my role in the family. So I’ve tended to think I am my degrees, my three degrees, because I went back and got my master’s in law after my divorce. And what I’ve realized doing this work is it isn’t about those Letters after my name at all. I mean the legal experience helps but when I was thinking about ending my own marriage, and I had practiced family law I realized I was terrified of divorce.

I remembered the family who had fought over spices and so it’s much more really about how I show up in the world and interact with people and this deep empathy and strategic brain and building community. And it creates this space for people to be themselves without judgment, and the transformation, just lifting them up, is fabulous.

Susan Dunlop: And the judo element?

Kim Korven: So I was this fierce judo competitor. Here is my bronze medal from the nationals when I was a kid. The 15 and 16 year olds. I keep it here to remember I can be fierce. But judo in English means the gentle way. The gentle way divorce.

There’s two main principles for judo: one is mutual welfare and benefit and the other one is maximum efficiency with minimum effort. Those principles really encapsulate how I live and how I approach my work, right? Part of the tension for me with law was I was supposed to represent one person, and when I could see ways that everybody could benefit and grow from the conflict, it didn’t fit.

Susan Dunlop: Were you just observing that in your day to day, going, I can’t do it this way anymore?

Kim Korven: I think I denied knowing. Like, I love the intellectual challenge of law. And when the Magna Carta was touring for its 800th anniversary, we drove 600 kilometers so I could see the Magna Carta and completely nerd out.

And so, I love the law so much, I never really saw who I was, right? I was living in my head, and it was once I started to know me more. I’d never thought about what I did, and it was like, oh, yeah, I’m actually really committed to peace and to everybody winning.

I remember in 1987, and my grandfather was dying, and I was running off to live in the Caribbean for a few months and my father said to me, you know, your grandpa, you’re the only one he talks to and I just said something like, that’s because the rest of you never shut up. So the seeds were there, but they weren’t being watered for a long time.

Susan Dunlop: Also, you’re very capable of saying what you feel!

Kim Korven: Oh, when I need to. When I went to law school, I thought law was the perfect vehicle for solving disputes and early on my first ever trial, we won, and I’m ecstatic, like, this is the best. And my client was mad, because the judge didn’t award him the taxes. It was about building a fence. My client built the fence and the landowner was supposed to reimburse him for the materials and then didn’t want to.

And I was just completely aghast, like, you should be happy the court… and my client was the judge didn’t listen to us. And it was horrible. I studied some William Glasser theory around that time, and I remember the first conversation I had with that gentleman. He told me it was his daughter and his grandkids lived on that lot, and it was a busy street, right? So he’d built the fence to keep his grandchildren safe and in the whole legal process, that had been lost. Right? And it wasn’t until I said to him the next time we’re having a conversation, he was wanting to appeal over two figures, that’s how long ago this court case was, and I said, well, didn’t you build that fence to keep your grandkids safe?

And he stopped and he said, yeah, and then he was calm. He was perfectly fine with the outcome. So that was one incident that started to shift my perception and the other one was about the same time.

I was this baby lawyer, able to send Christmas cards to my client list. My itty bitty client list. I had represented four gentlemen in an appeal of a labor standards matter. They represented themselves at the hearing. We lost at the appeal. Three of them paid me. The fourth one didn’t. Well, I wanted to sue him and I knew he had this vintage muscle car, okay, in his garage. I wanted to sue him and get a default judgment and send the sheriff to get that car.

But I knew the partners would go, Kim, that’s complete overkill. But that’s what I wanted to do to him. And meanwhile, the Christmas card list, right? I was so thrilled, and I wanted to send cards to his three friends. I didn’t want to send one to him, but I didn’t want to appear like a jerk. So I sent this fellow a Christmas card.

I don’t know when the cards went out, but I ended up one afternoon getting a call from the receptionist. Kim, can you come out here, please? And it was that man. He said to me, Kim, I was being a jerk to you and you know, you’re the only lawyer who’s ever sent me a Christmas card, and you did it when I was being a jerk. I am so sorry. Right? He came in to apologize to me personally and to pay his bill. So it was this powerful lesson, too, of when you do the right thing, how conflict can be transformed.

Susan Dunlop: Right? Both of those stories, they’re not like a simple I’m going to do this. It was you had to really sit with your own feelings and see how you were going to be just you in how you approached it?

Kim Korven: That was the seeds to this empathy and in terms of the area of divorce, like I said, I was terrified of traditional divorce, so I didn’t do it that way. I stick handled it. You know, we didn’t use lawyers and people who knew both of us would ask me, well, Kim, how did you do it? Right? Because he was known to have a temper. How did you do it? And I was just like, Oh, anybody can do this.

And it wasn’t until my second cousin was in a really ugly traditional divorce battle and he walked off the face of the earth for three months, right? His body was discovered three months later. That was when I realized, not everybody can do this, and perhaps I need to start helping others in this area.

Susan Dunlop: Yes, definitely. And just I think with all of that combination that’s you, you know, your professional experience and you coming from basically mind and heart, that’s an amazing support that you can lend to other people getting through this.

So you are outcomes focused, you seem like you have become much more focused on what you do want, on better ways, gentle ways of approaching something like divorce. Can you share about what that way does look like? You’ve just said you’ve done it through your own divorce. How does it look to walk through that?

Kim Korven: So what happens in how I approach this, be it as a mediator, or a consultant, or with my group programs, it’s based on the notion that people are the experts of their families and that really law is just the government saying, what are the base standards for relationships, right? And when you think about divorce, well, that’s a marriage is ending. It’s a life event and you think about child support. Well, it’s how are we going to pay for things for the children? Division of property. How are we going to divide our possessions?

And when you treat people that way, and I spend time working with them to basically craft a eulogy of the relationship, to help process the feelings, you know, at the start. And it’s a really beautiful thing and people get really, really clear about what’s important to them. Usually it’s the children and how can we do this in a way that benefits our children? That’s kind of at its base.

Now, what’s interesting, of course, when narcissism is part of it, is a narcissist always has to win, and a narcissist understands the traditional adversarial divorce court system. So they do very, very well in the court system. What’s really fun for me, and this is the old strategic brain, and it’s part of the judo brain of using the other person’s momentum against them, is helping to craft, to figure out, what does this other person really want?

The traditional approach when you have a narcissistic partner and you’re ending the marriage is I just want to get this done. I’m going to be reasonable and fair and then they’ll be reasonable and fair and we will be done. But in reality what happens if you start out reasonable and fair, this other person has to win and so they’re going to make you take less. If you’ve started with your baseline, there’s no place to move, and you end up very, very unhappy.

I actually work with my clients about what’s going to be important for this person, and are there some issues that really don’t matter to you, but you can get excited about, so that we have them in the mix, to protect what’s really important to you, so that there’s room to move. The more you can get people in discussion, the more likely you are to get a settlement. So it’s actually quite fun.

Susan Dunlop: Interesting. So, is it a narcissist really just wants your reaction? They don’t want to close necessarily, they want a reaction from you? Is that what a narcissist is like in a divorce?

Kim Korven: Well, they need to win. They need to be in control. The most dangerous, of course, is coercive control. We call them all narcissists, but that’s when it gets very, very dangerous. Right? It’s just a really beautiful thing to work with somebody who is a complete hot mess at the start, and can hardly trust like what kind of toilet paper to buy. To be able to be making these decisions and standing and saying Oh yeah, he’s doing this again well, whatever.

Susan Dunlop: A really good transition, isn’t it? I think often people focus on what the goal is, as if there is a golden ticket at the end of going done, I’ve got the divorce, but the feelings are such a big part of it aren’t they? Then, even grief would be in there?

Kim Korven: Oh, it’s huge. I mean, the tendency is, when you’ve had difficulty communicating with somebody and they don’t treat you nice, it’s like, I don’t want to talk to this person, we’ll go to lawyers right away. Well, that just amps up the conflict. Lawyers have their place, you need to know what your legal rights and responsibilities are, so you can make really good decisions, but there’s a healing if you and the other person can actually talk. And the grief is really real. And that’s part of why I have people almost craft a eulogy.

Susan Dunlop: Beautiful.

Kim Korven: I’ve also created a divorce ritual that I do with my clients. Because all significant life events, have a ritual, accept divorce. Going to court is not a ritual where people are actively participating. The lawyers actively participate. Right? And basically you’re silenced because it’s your lawyer who speaks for you. So the ritual is powerful.

Susan Dunlop: True, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. It’s quite a beautiful idea to bring into it.

And I think communication has been such an issue I’m seeing. All of us have been brought up the way we’ve been brought up generationally and communication isn’t a strong element in a lot of relationships. So if you’ve already come from a space of not even being able to navigate what you could have before the divorce became the obvious solution. That’s a really tricky path to try and travel by yourself without someone like you, who’s coming from the space you’re coming from.

Kim Korven: It’s interesting, of course, our natural response to change is it’s difficult, it’s hard, I feel awkward, I feel stupid, right, and we get angry. Divorce is a significant change, so for people going through it, they start poking fingers and going, well, he’s the problem, or she’s the problem, when really, it’s their response to change.

 If you can start with that realization, and then the other thing is, if you’re a parent, there’s a common point. It’s interesting, in my community, there’s a woman, she’s 95 at least now, and she was the first ever female real estate broker in Canada. So she knew lots and lots of success, and was an international speaker, and I asked her one time, what’s your best memory and it was the birth of her first child. If you ask most people what are your best memories? It’s the birth of the children. So when people have space to have that discussion first, it makes talking about these issues much simpler.

Susan Dunlop: Gosh, that’s very interesting. Just to contemplate that, to get people to shift their mindset that early in what is just historically what’s known to be nasty, divorce can be nasty.

Kim Korven: I had a legal case once where people had been to mediation, wife’s legal counsel prepped a separation agreement, and it came with spousal support in it. And I’d already said to my client, you’re not going to pay spousal support. And he said, yeah, we’re not, there’s no spousal support and I had said, good, you never want to do that.

So this agreement comes with it and I’m like, well, if you want to fight it, I don’t go to court anymore. Huh? I thought about it, and it was like, and this is where the conceptual brain, what’s underneath this whole notion of spousal support. She had stayed home and looked after the children so I said to him, Would you be okay with giving her a cash gift instead of spousal support and he was. So I proposed it to the other lawyer who was like, Well, how do we put that in the agreement? And I said, We don’t. It’s a gift. But you’ll get a bank draft with the signed agreement. Well, I don’t know about… but her client said yes. So that’s how we got around the emotional attachment to spousal support. Her needs were met.

So, when I talked about me and my relationship with the law, that’s a really good example. The traditional approach, I should have just been a zealous advocate to say, No. Spousal support. Absolutely not, but instead, it’s like, well, she looked after the kids and if they can get along, that’s better for them and their kids.

Susan Dunlop: So, I’m not divorced, obviously. Not obviously. That’s not obvious. Is there a standard usual outcome that people want from a divorce, in the way you’re doing it compared to the court system way of doing it?

Kim Korven: A lot of the people who come to me still love each other, right? They still recognize that there’s some love in their heart for this other person and they really want what’s best for their kids. They want a fair result, what’s best for their kids. Because what happens, of course, when you go to court, it’s all about your legal rights and responsibilities.

And it’s also healing, it’s like when you think of a funeral. If the government came in, or there was some third party who came in and said this is how you’re going to run this funeral, this is what we’re going to do, you wouldn’t be very happy about it. No. And it would take you longer to process the grief, whereas if you’re directly involved, it really helps with the processing and moving forward.

Susan Dunlop: I think it’s just amazing. I’m so glad I’ve come across you to talk about this. I’ve heard many stories of people that are edging towards divorce and, there’s been the eras before us where divorce just wasn’t the thing. I thought maybe we might talk about that next.

How did divorce end up in Court? Can you talk about that for a moment?

Kim Korven: So, divorce used to be an act of parliament. So you had to go to your member of parliament, private member’s bill, so they’re still in the record books, these old, let’s say it was Joe Smith and Jane Smith. Well, John Smith, he had sexual relations with Rebecca George named, and so they’re getting a divorce and there they are for everyone to see. And in 1857, the British Parliament said, no, no, no, divorce belongs in court. When you think of passing a piece of legislation in government, there’s three readings in each house and committees. It’s a lot of resources.

So in court, it passed the cost on to the people involved, and there had to be something bad had to have happened before you could apply for divorce, and they just plunked divorce into civil law, as opposed to criminal law, which is adversarial. It’s based on property. They adopted some of the property terms, like custody is a property term.

And so that is how divorce ended up in court in 1857. So this using court it’s a 19th century institution. And I know before Canada got no fault divorce in 1985, and we didn’t have one federal divorce act until 1968, once there was a fit, like some of the provinces like Ontario, they were doing the Act of Parliament, those colonies existed before 1857. History, legal history, division of powers. So that’s how we ended up in court.

Of course, when you go to court, if you and I are in an automobile accident and I run into you and total your car and you end up with whiplash your statement of claim is saying, well, Kim was on her phone, she was speeding, all of these things.

You’re not saying, well, you were actually looking down to find your coffee cup or whatever, right? You had taken no responsibility. It’s all pointed at Kim’s at fault and that’s fine in that car example, where you don’t really know each other. But when it’s somebody who you loved at one time, or who you still kind of love, and you’re doing that, and just the way the wording is, it’s like, you’re completely rejecting this other person. It’s really hurts the heart.

Susan Dunlop: It’s like you’re being pinned on a pin board, isn’t it? It’s going, look at us! We’re going out there in front of you all.

Kim Korven: And you know, in Canada now, it’s around 40 percent of all marriages end in divorce. But we still treat it like it’s this taboo and that I find amazing, it’s just, it’s part of life.

Susan Dunlop: It’s not till death do us part. Which, that leads me to the idea around the Catholic Church’s influence. My parents were part of that. We were strict Catholic, mum and dad grew up, fell in love, got married with good faith that they’d stay together. But you know, at some stage that all fell apart, four kids, whatever and Dad left Mum, when I was married, so I was 20 by then. But it just shattered Mum, not to be expected. She just hoped, wishful thinking that we can make things right. Because it is always till death do us part, because that’s what the church said.

So maybe, can we just cover some of that, what you know about that?

Kim Korven: Well, it’s interesting, because my mum was raised Catholic, and didn’t get married in the Catholic Church, but when I got married the first time, our compromise church was Roman Catholic Church. And I mean, I expected to get married for life. Like, you know, that’s the commitment. I think for my in laws, that was a really, really difficult thing when our marriage ended. It’s interesting because it’s okay if you’re unhappy in your job to find another job but we still have this stigma, from the religious and the vows even that are said, right, the till death do us part.

There’s also, of course, our fairy tales. They get married and they live happily ever after and when it would be much more accurate to say they got married and that’s when the work started and if they kept talking and they kept being able to talk to each other and appreciating each other and they lived happily ever after.

Susan Dunlop: You can look back at it now and see it being that era that’s gone by and we can talk about it more comfortably now, but you think, gosh, it was such a change for them. It would bring out all your fears, fear of not being loved, fear of not being good enough, fear of abandonment, and that can then obviously trigger everything else that may be from the way that era was raised and the era before where it was going back to the child that’s in you, and it’s the child that was, we should remain silent unless we’re spoken to.

So I think there’s no real chance for them to come together and go, Hey, let’s just proactively go out there and see what we can do to make this marriage just sing. You just had to keep on being quieter and quieter towards the end.

Kim Korven: Well, and it’s, and usually there’s one person who has stayed quiet to be the peacekeeper. It’s interesting like when we’re crafting the eulogy, I usually draw a circle and we start with when did you meet? What did you like about each other? And go through the high points. This one couple, they’d been married for 12 years and they had three kids. And at the end of that exercise, they looked at it and went, we’ve been together 12 years. We have five really, really good memories and three of them are the birth of our kids. I think we’re making the right decision.

Susan Dunlop: It’s good to just discern that isn’t it?

Kim Korven: And it is. I mean I used to think, oh, I’d love to get married, right? I wanted a career, too, but it’s part of that. That’s what we do and have kids and it’s actually a really good career aspiration. It gets back to your comment about conflict and conversations and if people had some training in it, because what it takes for a marriage to work really is for people to be brutally honest with each other, again, and again, and again.

Susan Dunlop: I feel like the brutally honest part too, though, is what I came to understand in the type of work I do is that unfortunately, brutally honest has maybe been demonstrated to us from more of a persecutor aspect and we maybe don’t express it in a way that is kind or challenging or something we have not learned to do either.

So often I think a lot of us will feel, we’ll go into victim very quickly and go, He’s attacking me. He’s saying this, and that’s not the way forward. It’s like learning to communicate in that beautiful space of, you know what, let’s just work through this together. What you’re talking about is the key.

Kim Korven: When I was wanting to end my marriage, I actually thought about how much time had I spent, had we spent together that was really good, and how much was okay, and how much was really horrible.

And I thought back to what were my best memories and when it came time to ask him to leave, and I actually have this available on my website, the script that I used, and the questions I used to figure it out, it was all about, starting from the positive perspective of this is one of my best memories, it was a long time ago and the truth is, we are not bringing out the best in each other anymore and that isn’t fair to us, and we’re not setting a good example for our children, they deserve more.

I could have said, you’re a complete jerk, I can’t stand the sight of you. Right? Which is, I think, what some people say. I knew that that would just inflame everything, and then we’d be in that horrible divorce world that I knew that terrified me.

So, I treated him with respect and I also remembered when we did the Catholic marriage prep and we had to fill out these questionnaires, so when the priest met with us after we did our questionnaires, the priest said that we shouldn’t get married. It was like we were on two separate railroad tracks and we thought, what does a priest know? He’s never been married. But I remembered that, and so I couldn’t blame my husband. I wanted to blame him, let’s be perfectly, perfectly straight. I wanted to blame him, but I remembered that and went, I can’t.

Susan Dunlop: What did the railway tracks look like? How did he see that?

Kim Korven: Well, he saw us on separate railroad tracks, never coming together. That was the analogy he used. Just that we were two very different people.

Susan Dunlop: So from experience he could see that. Interesting.

Kim Korven: Or from the results of the questionnaire, I guess so.

Susan Dunlop: Wow. Go priest. Gosh, okay.

Kim Korven: But about the whole thing, about how you communicate this is so important.

Susan Dunlop: It all comes down to communication, doesn’t it? And if you can’t communicate comfortably just between the two of you, at least if you’ve got someone to be that guide or mediator, that’s the key.

Kim Korven: One of the things that fear does to us that makes me so sad is the parents who turn their children into confidants.

Susan Dunlop: Ah, yes!

Kim Korven: Because mom and dad, you’re the adult, the child is not responsible for your emotions. And you’re just creating way too much stress and putting them in the middle, and it always, always breaks my heart, when I hear a parent, when I know that’s happening.

Susan Dunlop: Mm, and it’s definitely, again, same type of thinking in terms of that drama cycle, the roles, making your child become your rescuer.

Kim Korven: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Susan Dunlop: I’m very much like, please let me deal with this my own way. I don’t want my children to be my rescuer in anything that I’m trying to work through. I didn’t give birth to these girls to expect that of them.

Kim Korven: And it’s one thing for us to be real with our children and to admit when we’ve made mistakes and apologize and everything, right?

Susan Dunlop: Yeah.

Kim Korven: That’s healthy modeling for what it means to be human. But no, no, no, you don’t need to know that I miss you so much when you go to your dad’s, no.

Susan Dunlop: Your article on Medium that you shared yesterday was brilliant for that and I’ve shared that out to my Facebook, the, the points. Again, it just makes you look through and think be the adults in this and just think about the children.

Kim Korven: Well, think about the children as human beings and not as extensions of you.

Susan Dunlop: Okay.

Kim Korven: And that might sound harsh, and I think we want to do that, but I think that court system was developed for property, not for humans and that might not be a popular thing to say, but I think we could be much kinder to the children who are in the middle of this.

Susan Dunlop: One thing that’s just coming up for me is when we’re talking about narcissists, and maybe we’ll try and catch that a little bit now about what your experience of that was personally.

When you get divorced from a narcissist, or someone, whatever the description is of someone who’s not terribly nice and you’re protecting yourself from. How does it then play out that your child is expected to go back to that person in shared custody? What does that do to the kids? I find that so sad to see kids have to go back to this asshole on a regular basis.

Kim Korven: When I was practicing way back when, one of the lawyers was working on this really ugly custody file. And so there was a child psychologist, did a custody and access assessment and it came back that our client had the better home for the child and they went to trial and the court said shared parenting which completely astounded me because you have this expert. The psychologist says this is the better home and usually the court gives weight to an expert, because that’s not the judge’s area of expertise.

The law is the judge’s area of expertise. And so I was like, what in the heck is happening here? I’m very curious, right? So I did Continuing Professional Development, a seminar on family law, and a judge presented, and she shared about Why shared parenting was the best, kids need same quantity of time with both parents, or they won’t do as well in school. Little girls, they’re going to become more promiscuous, and she shared the authors of this report.

So I, of course, go to the Law Society library and say, I want to see… I couldn’t find this journal article in the library. So I asked the librarian and she’s, well, we don’t have it. And I said, well, I know the judges are using it because this judge referred to it. And she said, let me see what I can do. So one of the judges agreed to copy his his article and she shared it with me. She also shared another article that had been published in a peer reviewed journal. They were very different. Right?

She looked at the first one and went: There’s no hypothesis. There’s no assumptions. They’re citing themselves. It’s not published in a peer reviewed journal. So these alarm bells with this experienced librarian. So she’s, and you might want to look at this article too, Kim. And I was like, Oh… I think that’s where it started. And the interesting thing about the article that they all picked up on it never mentioned the affect of conflict on kids. Like that is completely absent from it. And of course, conflict harms kids.

There’s a really great TEDx talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, she was a pediatrician in California and was seeing all of these kids with ADD and ADHD, and she’s like, well, it can’t be in the water. What is going on here? And so she asked the question, not what’s wrong with the children, but what’s happened to the children, and she came across the research on adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, and divorce is one. I say it’s high conflict divorce. because I’ve seen, like my kids with how we divorced, turned out much better than I ever thought they would when I was with their dad.

 That’s part of my passion for helping people in this area is, I live with this is the impact of doing this right, of being empowered.

Susan Dunlop: For me, it’d be presumptuous of me to think every divorce is the same. Obviously, there is this high conflict divorce. There’s loving divorce. There’s all types. I imagine it’s not like a one size fits all at all.

Kim Korven: No, exactly. We haven’t talked about my group program.

Susan Dunlop: No. So did you want to go to that? Because I was thinking that I wanted to make sure we did include it. We haven’t really spoken about your narcissist experience. We have got time if you’d like to do that now.

Kim Korven: So, my experience with a narcissist was actually a fellow I dated, and I had I’d broken up with him, and I’d gone home to the farm, came back, a diligent little worker bee, I stopped at the law office. I’d done my work, I was turning off the coffee pot, I came back and the light was flashing on my desk phone, and so I listened to the voicemail, and it was him. He had no business being anywhere near my office, but he knew I was there. He’d seen my car out front and that was when I realized he was a stalker.

Of course part of that time is blurred because of the fear, but I know it came to be Valentine’s Day and this beautifully wrapped parcel was delivered to the office for me, no card on the outside, and I immediately went into…, my heart was pounding, like, I was completely panicked. Half of the women in the office are, oh Kim, open it, let’s see what it is, and I’m like, I can’t open it. I just wanted to throw up.

This was before privacy laws. So, I asked the receptionist what courier company delivered it, and we represented that courier company, and I knew the owner. I phoned him and said, did you pick it up from this guy’s place of work, can you find out? And that’s where it came from. So I knew for sure it was from him. And one of my co workers and I went to the police station that evening. I don’t usually show a lot of emotion, but it was pretty clear, I think that in my own quiet way, I was really, really scared. We shared this fellow’s name with the police officer, and he came back in, and the look on his face and how he was moving, like my gut, it just dropped.

Susan Dunlop: Gives me goosebumps.

Kim Korven: He was like, um, what I’m going to tell you, you can never share with anybody. And based on what he said, I hid my car for about two months. I immediately changed the locks where I lived and he also said, give him back absolutely everything that’s his and everything he’s ever given to you, everything he has of yours, it’s gone. Right? And he had my favorite sweatshirt. He had some of my favorite CDs. He had pyjamas my mom had made for me. Almost, 25 plus years later, I remember these things. So that’s what I did. And he also said, when he phones, just hang up. Do not even say hi.

So I got this really, really great advice from the police and things actually were going pretty well until my male housemate went away skiing and one morning at 7 a.m. the phone rang and guess who it was? And the office was actually really great. Like one of the partners, I think the day after that, he sent me out in the country to get a signature that could have waited, could have gone out in the mail, but he just knew that I needed to be out in the country.

The fun thing was, after I hid my car and had the locks changed, I actually hosted this potluck, for everybody who was supporting me through this, like the friend who’d gone to the police station with me, she had always referred to this guy as a weenie. So, I had this, sausage. We had this potluck, and we didn’t have a fireplace or anything and this is February here, so it’s cold. We can’t be outside with a barbecue. I took a candle, I lit a candle, and I stuck a weenie, like a smokey, on a fork, and I roasted the weenie over the candle flame. Ceremonial roasting, a ritual it was so much fun.

Susan Dunlop: Nothing like ceremony, I think!

Kim Korven: Yeah, and I moved. I was at a training session and these people who were there who they’d rented a car from his rental business, they said oh your friends with… and they mentioned his name like a year after I’d moved. Then I got married and stuff so thank goodness.

Susan Dunlop: So many people would be not feeling comfortable about how to manage that type of situation. I know what that type of phone call is like.

Kim Korven: Thank goodness we met with the officer we did because he was so supportive. And I suspect it was likely because of my professional background, but also my demeanor. If I had gone in there hysterical and just Blame, blame, blame, it would have been easy to brush me off.

Susan Dunlop: Exactly, which I think unfortunately may be the case a lot too, which would be a sad thing to think that position makes a difference. We won’t go there. Let’s talk about the Divas because you’ve obviously disentangled yourself from him, let alone a lot of other stuff. Tell me about it. That’s a program that you’re running and is it available globally?

Kim Korven: So Divas is available globally, Susan, and what I’ve discovered is where the true healing happens is in community. I ran Divas with four women, it is very intimate, I ran a beta group starting in February. It’s a mix of a lecture every week and then what is traditionally called a mastermind.

So it’s peer support where everybody has a chance to say, Hey, this is the issue I’m facing. Have you dealt with it? Do you have any suggestions? Lift each other up. So, I thought they’re going to want to know the history of divorce and how to negotiate and how to figure out your best alternative to a negotiated agreement and an explanation of what all these legal terms mean in plain language. That was good for them, but what they loved was the sister circle, was the mastermind every week.

To see the growth, and the quick growth, because it’s one thing to talk to an expert and it’s still this power imbalance. I’m needing help and you’re the expert. But to be with your peers and going, ‘I am so… yeah, I understand completely, I’ve been there. I feel so badly that that is happening to you’ is complete and utter magic for them. I don’t really have the words to describe just how wonderful and transformational it is for them. There are some quotes on the page on my website and It’s strictly online, so it’s anybody, anywhere, and we’re starting the week of January 8th.

It’s 24 women. That’s all who’s in the program and that is so everybody will attend the lecture and have some discussion time together because that’s part of it. I don’t know everything. Then there can be four pods, four or five pods of women who are together every week to do that sister circle.

Susan Dunlop: It sounds very smart how you’ve pulled that together because yes, you have experience, but you’ve also got that professional level that, I would feel if it was me, for that type of circle I’d like to know that it is being facilitated, moderated, that there are guidelines, but I love the idea of turning up as a peer. The experience of what these people have been through that you can sit there at the same level as them and go I’m gonna be open with you about as much as you’re gonna be open with me… I think that’s the the magic of a group.

Kim Korven: Well, and the women who are in it, right, they’re in difficult relationships, very difficult partners, and they’re incredibly vulnerable with each other. These, of course, as women, you don’t show the problems, and you try to protect everybody else. And of course, when you’re going through divorce, and if you have a partner who’s a narcissist, and he’s gaslighting you, and everybody around you thinks he’s such a great guy, and they’re like, Oh, no, it can’t be that bad, it’s really, really hard to get your feet under you. Whereas if you’re with people who go, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, I understand and we laugh.

So many people think divorce like that is a tragedy and the divas are not victims. Like they know they’re in really challenging situations, but we laugh. You know, we talked about the batshit crazy game that I tell them to play. Well, I haven’t had any bat shit crazy for a while, but this last week, let me tell ya.

Susan Dunlop: And I love that you said something about if anyone’s been through something and you’re thinking, oh, I’m just waiting for this person to die. And then you said something like that.

Kim Korven: Yeah! So, you know it’s interesting you mentioned about just wishing he’d die, right? Like that is a solution to the conflict because that was me in the last couple of years of my marriage. I remember thinking he liked to ride his bicycle and I remember thinking, Oh, if he just would get hit by a truck riding his bicycle on the highway, and I would get the life insurance, and that was the perfect solution, like I just thought it was elegant and easy. And then one day I took an elderly neighbor to a doctor’s appointment, and I told her that, and she looked at me and said, oh. And I said, is that bad?

I was in such a bad space, I couldn’t see just how horrific that was. Was that bad? And she just nodded her head, uh huh. And that was when I started thinking about, oh, I need to do something different. I need to figure out something different. I felt such shame for years, for almost 10 years, no, I bet it was 10 years that I had thought that would be a really good solution.

And so I never shared it with anybody until the summer of 2016 and I was running an in person divorce support group once a month and, I shared this with the women one session, and they all had similar stories, and the shame, the shame then just evaporated. All of a sudden, I knew I was human, and that was a completely human reaction. That’s what people get in divas.

Susan Dunlop: It’s okay to have these thoughts, just to be able to share that with someone and laugh about it, that makes you feel human, that you’re not nuts, is pretty amazing,

Kim Korven: I’m so thankful it didn’t happen. My kids have a dad, and they’ve got a really good relationship with their dad and he’s a decent human being. It was just the two of us being together didn’t work but we’re both good people. Yeah, to have that space, to be that honest, and to let that negative emotion out, to release it

Susan Dunlop: Divas is a program. How do people access it? I know you said it’s online, but how do people get to it? Is it on Mighty Networks?

Kim Korven: No, I’m doing it on zoom right now. There’s a tab at the top of my website Divas so people can get on there. The lectures are going to be recorded. So if people can’t make the lectures, then of course they have access to it but the sharing circle is too deeply personal. There’s no recordings.

Susan Dunlop: No. Okay. So aside from the Divas of Disentanglement, do you support people with their family mediation and training outside of Canada?

Kim Korven: I haven’t to date because of course there’s court requirements. Well, I shouldn’t say that I have done mediation with people in the United States.

Susan Dunlop: I would have thought it would have been not so much the legal, but more of a coaching facilitation?

Kim Korven: I have with people in the United States with the consulting working just with one spouse.

Susan Dunlop: We’re in that lead up to the holiday season and you mentioned people tend to wait until Christmas has passed before they raise the topic of wanting a divorce. Maybe can we just go through some tips for getting through that period because I can imagine that’s intensely stressful to go through when you know you want something else.

Kim Korven: I think it’s to commit to being happy. If you’re focused on, I just want this to be done, it’s going to be horrific, it isn’t going to be any fun for your children. It’s kind of to commit to, if nobody’s going to die from this, it’s okay. Right? And perhaps every day to go, oh, I just love seeing my children with smiles on their faces, or this is enabling this to happen.

The other thing is, of course, if your spouse is a gaslighter, and you don’t know the difference up from down, the batshit crazy game, I love it, my batshit crazy game. How it works is, your spouse says something to you that you’re like, but that didn’t happen, right? Like you can’t engage with the facts. Just let it go, let it go, and instead you stop and think if my best friend was telling me this, Where would it be on the batshit crazy scale? Would it be one just a little bit? Or would it be a 10? Hmm. Okay. Because it engages the frontal cortex. You’re being curious. So that pull to respond emotionally decreases.

Susan Dunlop: That’s it. And you go away from reacting to response. That’s great.

Kim Korven: It gives you a reason to get curious.

Susan Dunlop: Hmm. I think curiosity is a pretty amazing gift also that we have that if we can approach what’s perceived to be hard, transitions, from a place of curiosity, we can learn so much and just get that little bit stronger.

Kim Korven: The other thing that has helped me when I’ve been in really, really bad spots is Wayne Dyer did a meditation and one of the verses was, In nature, no storm lasts forever. And when I’ve been in dark places, that’s what I say to myself. In nature, no storm lasts forever. This isn’t going to be forever. Treat this like a dream. It’s okay.

I’m just thinking, the other thing that would actually be really useful to help cope, if people are thinking I’m interested in divas, you sign up before Christmas. Because then you’ve taken action. And that takes some of the pressure off.

Susan Dunlop: It’s a nice feeling, that isn’t it? Feeling that you’ve reached out and you’ve got your hand on the framework of some type. I’ve got something to support me. I know I’m walking with that support. I like that. Okay. So we’re going to wrap up in a minute.

With regards to living your true self, what would be the most valuable advice you could give seven year old you that you wish you’d have received from your own mum when you were seven?

Kim Korven: I think it was don’t worry about what we want of you or what we expect of you. Be you. Our expectations are based on how we grew up and were raised. Be you. It’s okay. You’re a fabulous human being.

Susan Dunlop: Lovely. It is lovely. Kim, thank you. I’ve learned so much from our conversation and as we said in our prep chat, our episode probably needed to be four hours, but I’m pretty amazed that we made it within about an hour. I’ve learned a lot also from what you share on your social media. Your posts are interesting and different. So that’s something that would help people too to reach out and find you there.

So listeners, seeing this is an audio podcast, I’ll share with you that I’m recording this in the morning here in Noosa on a day that has an extreme heat warning. The morning sun is blocked by my curtains, otherwise I’d be blinded and cooked.

Kim’s smile is genuine and it makes me feel so comfortable to be in her presence. She’s beaming. I hope that what Kim has shared can ease some anxiety for you if this is a transition you’re making or have made and I’ll be sharing the episode description how to make contact with Kim. Thanks again, Kim.

Kim Korven: Thank you, Susan. It has been a pure joy. Wonderful to speak with you.

Susan Dunlop: Thank you.

The transcript of today’s conversation will be shared on my website, susandunlop.com.au within the next week and Kim’s episodes will be broadcast across seven or eight streaming sites, including the one you’re listening to.

You can also watch for opportunities to pose your own questions on my Facebook and Instagram profiles: @susandunlopleadbelievecreate.

I am forever thankful to my beautiful guests for allowing me to understand them more and to share their stories. Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself and I look forward to being back soon. Bye for now.