April 20, 2025 • 43 mins
What happens when the stories we’re raised on become the shackles we need to break?
Today's guest, Dima Ghawi was born in Turkey, raised in Jordan, and is now living in the US... Her journey is one of defiance, resilience, and rebirth. From escaping an abusive marriage to shattering generational expectations (and quite literally, the metaphorical vase she was taught to be), Dima shares how she found freedom, purpose, and identity on the other side of survival.
We talked about the silent weight of shame, the power of questioning inherited norms, and what it really means to take the pen and rewrite your own story. Whether you’ve ever felt like a misfit, carried the invisible scars of conformity, or questioned who you truly are beneath the roles you've played… this one’s for you.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the punches and we're
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(00:29):
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Speaker 3 (00:51):
Dem it Gowie. Welcome to Roll with the Punches. Hey, Tifany,
I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I feel like I've just connected with an other soul
sister across the globe.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Thank you. I feel the same, And yes, you're we are.
We are on two other sides of this world.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Isn't weird but kind of cool? Like I still can't
get like, what what is the day and time where.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
You are right now? It's eight thirty five pm. Yes, yeah,
that's a little a little minor detail. Yes, eight thirty
five pm. Yeah, lunch time.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's lunchtime on day? Is it's Tuesday? Is it Tuesday? There? Wow?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I forgot what day it does. No, it's Monday anywhere
day eight thirty five pm on a Monday. Yeah, you
are in my future.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah. It blows my mind. And every time, like, I
feel like my listeners will be like, are you if
I like, come on, it's been years now, you're still
having this conversation about the time difference. But I'm like,
if it's my birthday now, which is not part of way,
but if it was like, it's not my it's my
birthday here, but it's not my birthday there yet, it's
so funny to me.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
It is. Well, I love it during New Year's Eve
when you're able to see New Year's Eve shifting across
the globe and their celebration every hour, it's I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
You could literally just jump on a plane and follow
your birthday around. Good idea.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Past.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Can you give my listeners and myself the little I
guess elevator beach if we want to call it that
elevator pitch of who is Dama GOWI?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, So I'll summarize it with one phrase. I am
Middle Eastern in my jeans and a global citizen in
my spirit. So I was born in the Turkey, raised
in Jordan. I moved to the US when I was twenty,
and my world opened up for me with education and work.
(03:04):
And I realized the more I connect with people just
like yourself from all around the world, there's no boundaries
or borders when we talk about us at a spiritual side,
we're all global citizens, and I believe I am one
of those global citizens.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Did you I love that? I love that so much.
Did you feel like you went to seek that. Did
you expect to feel like that? Did you have a
Middle Easting connection that we strongly took a bit of
moving or how did that all unfold?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Wow, that's such a good question. I never thought about
how it unfolded. I feel that I did not fit
in in any country I lived in and traveled to,
and I lived in so many different countries. I didn't
fit in the Middle East, I didn't fit in the US.
I was always in the middle And when I started
thinking about myself, I don't fit in because I believe
(04:01):
my spirit is so much bigger than just be limited
to borders of a country. That's when I felt, what
for the first time, here I am. I fit in
in the globe. I may not fit in in a
specific geography. So that's how it started.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
I love that I just wrote down. I don't even
know why. Maybe I'll ponder it later, but I just
wrote down the sentence. Is there an end to fit?
I was talking yesterday this week to Bill van Hippo
and about evolution, and we were talking about that human
drive to belong but also to paradoxically stand out, like
(04:43):
we want to be special, but we also want to
fit in, and it's such a paradox.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
He yes, it is. You know, it's nice to belong.
I would love to feel that I belong to a
specific group or community, but that also comes with the
sense of conformity and also losing part of ourselves in
order to fit in. So it is as society and
(05:10):
as individuals, as a matter of finding the balance of
how can we keep our individuals side and appreciate being
a misfit, but at the same time discovering our value
by being part of the bigger picture, bigger community. So
in my situation, I felt as I was growing up
in the Middle East, I was losing who I am,
(05:32):
even though I was so young, because I had to
fit in with what was the expectations and to follow
and to obey, and because that was what was expected
of me. And since I was growing up, I didn't
have an identity. I didn't have a sense of self.
I was part of the family. Any behavior I did
(05:52):
reflected on the family. If I did well in school,
great for the family. If I did a mistake for
the family. So it was absolutely terrible because I never
made a choice for me as dema, as an individual.
It was always the fear and the worry about how
it is going to be perceived by others. And when
(06:15):
I came to the US, I sense the same thing
as well. Where it is let's say, in a corporate environment,
I am part of the bigger picture. Everything I did
reflected on the bigger picture, so bigger like the culture
work culture. So that's why I feel I am a misfit.
I don't fit anywhere. I love it. It gave me
(06:36):
the chance to discover my advantage. It gave me the
chance to be able to discover who I am and
not to try to conform just to be accepted by
others and yes, there are consequences, but I'm okay with them.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Oh, I love this conversation already. You talk about about
breaking visis, Can you tell us?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So I was five years old in my grandmother's home
in Amman, the capital of Jordan in the Middle East.
And she was such a fun grandmother. Always she had
all kinds of games for me. But that specific day
she was not fun. She was serious. And we were
arranging flowers in a glass vase. She held a glass
(07:24):
vase and looked at me in a very serious way,
and she said, do you see this perfect glass vase?
A girl is just like it. If it gets cracked
for any reason, you can never fix it. You can
never glue it back. It will always be seen as broken.
And then she said, and who would want a broken vase?
(07:45):
That's the one we throw in the trash. So I
was five years old. I didn't understand what that meant.
I didn't understand why my grandmother was so serious, and
what is the meaning of a crack on the vase?
And why why is she even telling me the story?
But she was preparing me. She was preparing me to
the expectations of the society that I have to be perfect.
(08:09):
I have to worry about how I am being perceived
by others. I have to do what I'm being told.
Otherwise I would be thrown away and I would not
be good enough. And that turned out to be my life.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Did you carry that story with you or did you
return back to it at some point, because that something
that you that we stayed in your mind from that point.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
So that's so interesting because I don't remember. So I
did not remember the exact story, but in my subconscious
mind it was the messages were there. Isn't it interesting,
Like we're told a story. I may not remember the
words of the story or the specific image the metaphors
(08:55):
she gave me. But I did end up living my
life following, obeying, doing everything that I was told. I
got married very young, when I was twenty, to a
much older man, and then we moved together to San Diego.
This is how I moved that to the US. And
I was absolutely following the expectations of the vase. I
(09:16):
was doing what was expected of me, how I was
raised and what I was taught. But then that marriage
turned out to be abusive, and I was so scared
to leave. I was scared to even consider it, because
even when I called my mom in Jordan and I
told her, I'm not happy, like I'm so depressed. Imagine,
(09:38):
I was early twenties, alone in the US, extremely depressed,
not having an identity. But so when I told my mom,
she said, oh, like, just have have kids, have kids,
and then and then everything is going to be okay.
Isn't that hilarious? Yeah? Like, is it bad marriage? Bring
more kids to it. So so that was the moment
(10:02):
where I started to question everything, to question the stories
I was taught. And that's when I started remembering the metaphor.
So even though I was living with it, the image
of the vase started coming back to me. And I
remember one day I was so depressed I couldn't even
get out of bed. I was staring at the ceiling
for hours and hours because I was feeling so hopeless.
(10:27):
So I wanted to I wanted somebody to tell me
what to do with my life. So I called my
mom in Jordan. It was the middle of the week,
and part of the marriage, I was not allowed to
call my mom in the middle of the week. I
was only allowed to call her fifteen minutes a week
on a Saturday, and he had to be next to me,
so I couldn't just talk to my mom. But that
(10:48):
day I broke the rules. I bought a I had
with me a phone card at that time, I used
to buy them, and I called my mom and I
couldn't get her, Like the phone just kept drinking, ringing, ringing.
I couldn't get to my mom. So I called. I
dial to speak to my best friend and I couldn't
get her. I dial to speak to my uncle. I
(11:10):
couldn't get him. And I was at the lowest point
in my life, just hoping that somebody would tell me
what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed
to live my life? At that time, I was twenty
four and at that moment, I even though I was
feeling so terrible, I was on the floor crying. But
(11:34):
I believe now it was the best thing ever, because
that was the moment that made me realize that I
have a choice. I can choose to continue to live
to satisfy everybody around me and keep losing myself. And
the worst part is to move the vase story and
these other stories forward to the next generation and expect
(11:56):
the same thing from them. Can you imagine how horrible
that would be, or my other choice is to choose me,
And just the idea that I have a choice, just
the concept that was like a brand new concept in
my life. That's when, as if a little crack in
the vase was created, because that was like a whole
(12:19):
new thing. I wasn't ready to leave or any of that,
but just the idea was so empowering, and that's when
I realized that I need to focus on my education.
I need to be able to make money and be
financially independent. There's a phrase in Arabic that says when
(12:41):
jehan ud lam, and that means knowledge is light and
ignorance is darkness. So imagine I was raised in a
way in the darkness. The more I was kept ignorant,
the more I was kept with fear and insecurities and
worry about perfection, the more I was being controlled. But
I needed knowledge and that was my only condition when
(13:03):
we got married. So that's like from the beginning, since
I met him, I said I wanted to be the
first educated woman in my family, and he agreed, and
thank goodness he agreed, because of course he has full
power over my life. But he agreed and by getting
the education and graduating and getting my diploma, that also
(13:28):
created another crack in the vase because now I have
my education, and knowledge is power, knowledge is light. And
then around that time, his business wasn't doing well and
usually he would not let me work because like again
the control, but he needed help. He needed help financially
and even with simple little things of paying utility bills,
(13:53):
and he allowed me to work and it was such
a blessing. So even though he was self serving his need,
but at the same time, it reflected positively on me
because it was I was able to find a job.
I was working minimum wage as a teller, just ten
hours a week, but that gave me some financial ability
(14:16):
where I was making money. And then years later I
got a better job, I started making more money, and
that created another crack in the vase. So when we
talk about my life and this vase, once I discovered
that I have a choice, and by the way, I
love on your website because you talk about the choice too,
and I wrote it down. You have a choice of
(14:36):
fighting or fleeing. And I fought, but I didn't fight
by fighting physically or verbally. I fought by connecting internally
getting my education, becoming financially independent, and then I escaped.
By escaping that was not accepted by my family. That
(14:56):
entire community in Jordan disowned me, and my father DI
decided to have me killed because if a woman and
it's still happening.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
WHOA Okay, but that's so horrible. Yeah, oh wow, okay.
I was about to ask, that was so left field
for me. I was about to ask, do you feel
like at this at this point of I guess just
before making these choices, you, when you look back, do
(15:29):
you think that you were your your actions were derived
from possibilities that you were aware of or could could
see your dream up, or the pain of where you were,
what you were in and that you just didn't want
to be there, or an amalgamation of both.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
It was both. It was the pain of where I was,
but it wasn't just the abuse of relationship. It was
the depression that I was experiencing. So I was in
such deep depression and every time I would think about
the future, I would see total darkness. I would not
have a hope that things are going to get better.
(16:12):
But at the same time, whenever I looked at people
around me, I would see that they had dreams and
they were working towards them, and I would say to myself,
I wish I can do that too. They were working
hard to get promotion, and I knew that eventually I
would not be allowed to work. They had dreams, maybe
to work on their masters or to start a business,
(16:34):
and I knew I would not be allowed to do that.
So even though I had glimpses of things that I
would hope I could do, I knew I wasn't allowed
to in the future. So I had to block it.
And that increased the depression that I was experiencing. So
it's like a horrible cycle that was going on.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
What did you what were you studying?
Speaker 3 (16:57):
What did you choose the economics?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
So in the middle of that, you're experiencing depression, you're
experiencing conditioning, cultural conditioning, and expectations and beliefs and biases
and huge limitations, and you're experiencing shitty circumstances. How does
(17:23):
one because I'm thinking of people listening, I'm thinking thinking
of people who are wanting to do better or change
or strive or be empowered. How in the middle of
what could have only have been a pretty funky situation.
Funky as in not great, funky as in crap? What
did it take to in that state? Strive and get
(17:43):
out of there and actually reach for possibility and make change.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Wow. The first thing that helped me was to question
the norm, because these stories were told early on, and
they're so ingrained in our lives and in our head
and many times we start doubting ourselves, thinking maybe there's
something wrong with me. Why can't I be quiet like
everybody else? Why can't I just be like everybody else?
(18:14):
So the first thing I would tell everybody to start questioning,
questioning the norm, questioning why you're doing certain things, even
questioning the depression. The depression was an amazing teacher because
it was teaching me that I did not fit in
in that environment and I deserve something better. Of course,
(18:34):
at that time, I cannot say yay, I'm depressed. It
was terrible. It was horrible. But now when I look back,
I don't think I would have done what I ended
up doing, which is escape, if I did not have
that depression. So questioning the norm and then also start
start analyzing, what are the phases in your life? What
(18:56):
are the stories that you've been told that have shaped
you and shaped your decisions or maybe shaped your choices,
but at the same time, think about the goals of
the future. In my situation, what I wanted part of
the goal was that I wanted to work on my
master's and I wasn't allowed to do that. So all
(19:16):
I started doing was envisioning myself with a cap and
gown and I was walking to get my like my
diploma for my masters, so that every time things got
so bad, I would keep imagining that day. So imagine
what the vase is, Imagine the dream of what you're
trying to achieve, and start listening to the voice and
(19:39):
our heads. Because most of the time we're not telling
ourselves good things. So maybe what's wrong with me? I
am not good enough, I'm going to fail, I'm going
to regret this decision. All of these voices were in
my head constantly, so it's a matter maybe write them down.
Write down all these negative things that we tell ourselves,
(20:01):
and then on a second column, write down what do
you want to start telling yourself. Recently, I hired a
coach and she's been helping me with this because this
is something that I'm still dealing with until today that
when the shame and the negative programming start in our
life early on, even though we become in our forties, fifties, sixties,
(20:23):
it's still playing in our head and it's still continue
to make us small and push us down. So these
are some of the things that I did. But in
my situation, it wasn't just that I sat down and
I said, Okay, what is my base, what are my thoughts,
what is my vision? I just needed to get out
because I just I knew I would not be able
(20:45):
to survive in that environment anymore. And it's just sometimes
when we make big decisions like this, the universe starts
lining up for us. In my situation, I started meeting
people that were helping me, my team and my team members.
They discovered about what was going on and they started
(21:07):
totally supporting me. So it's amazing how the community comes
to us when we are in such a law and
law place. But that's the time where we need to
accept the help, which was so difficult for me to
open ourselves and put our ego aside and be okay
to accept as much help as we can.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
How did you cope with the transition of I think
one of the hardest things when we choose change is
the ecosystem around us created us that we are, and
so we've chosen and been around certain types of people
might be family, friends, work, colleagues, and we conform to that,
(21:52):
and then we choose change in One of the biggest
forms of pushback can be people not liking the change
they see, and then sometimes the discomfort of either difficult
conversations or breaking ties, or realizing that even walking away
from non helpful situations or sometimes even toxic situations can
(22:13):
still hurt or feel scary to us. How did you
cope through those types of situations?
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, and that is part of the consequences. That's why
most of us we don't take the right choice that
serves us because we're afraid of people looking down at
us or gossiping about us. In my situation, my entire
community disowned me in Jordan. So it was very painful
because initially like, these are people that I loved, these
(22:45):
are family members that I respected, these are my friends,
and to them I was not good enough. And it
was extremely painful because to me it wasn't as at
that time I was twenty five by the time I escaped,
it was twenty five. It wasn't in a place where
I would tell myself I made the right decision and
(23:06):
they're wrong. I started blaming myself and thinking why did
I do that? And I started getting all kinds of
sense of shame and regret, initially because who would want
to be thrown away like that? So yeah, so to
me it was I guess my community made it easy,
(23:27):
and they're all like, we're done, we don't want to
deal with you. But for anybody that is listening to
this and they're worried about the people's reaction, my advice
to you is put yourself first. Listen to your intuition.
If you're having a sense that you're not in the
right place, if you are having a sense that you're
not surrounded with the right people that are uplifting you,
(23:50):
that believe in you, then why should we even worry
about what they think? Right?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
If I got to ask you at t who is
Dema at twenty? Yeah, at twenty years old? If you
or if Dema asked herself at twenty who am I?
What would that answer look like?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Yeah? So I was a bride. I felt like Cinderella.
I was getting married to the most eligible bachelor in
our community who had tons of money, and we had
this amazing wedding. At that time. Dima was the bride
(24:33):
and then the wife of this person. Dima was the
daughter of my father. Dima was the sister and sister
for my siblings. But Dema was nobody as an individual.
I was something for other people. I was defined by
the family name. I was defined by my husband. I
(24:53):
was defined by my father. That's why I was.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
And if I asked you today, who is.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
So Diva is a very happy person today I am.
I am living my purpose and it continues to evolve.
I believe I am here on this earth to make
a difference in people's lives. I believe that my story
and all the terrible things that I experienced in my
childhood and also in my marriage, they have a purpose.
(25:23):
They have a purpose so I can influence people from
all around the world, give them a sense of hope,
and also give them the empowerment to realize that they
have the ability to shatter the vase and it's okay.
So that's who I am today and I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And in a transition period between twenty year old Dema
and escap escaping that identity and sense of self. I
am imagining there was a stage of well, if I'm
not the wife, the bride, the child of the daughter,
if I'm not those things, who am I? What did
(26:02):
that look feel like? And how did you then go
from there to developing a new sense of self?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Yeah, so what happened was after I escaped. The story
gets more complicated because the abuse extended to my mom
and my sister and they had to escape from Jordan
and they had to come and live with me in
San Diego. So I imagine I was twenty five responsible
for myself, for my mom and my sister, and dealing
(26:29):
with all of the mess related to the emotions and
depression of everybody, and being able to pay the bills,
which was like I can't even believe how we did that.
My uncle, I have a wonderful uncle in the US,
and he helped us. I think he was one of
very few people. My uncle in the US my aunt
in Canada were the only two that helped us, and
(26:51):
they would even send money to support us. So the
reason I'm sharing this there was so much stuff that
was going on I could not handle it. So I
blocked all my emotions, my anger, my frustration, all of this,
and I called that I blocked it all in a big,
(27:11):
invisible black box because I needed to survive. I needed
so I started working so hard. I was working day
and night so I would be able to pay the bills.
We were living in a one bedroom apartment in a
very unsafe area, and for like initially, we didn't even
have furniture until my manager discovered and she gave us
(27:34):
a love seat that her dead dog used to love
to sit on, and so it had all the dead
dog hair. So we had to keep cleaning and a
little TV. That's all we had. And we lived like
this because we couldn't afford any of that. So I
was working, work and working, and I called it ambitious,
(27:54):
like I am so ambitious, I'm going to work. Really,
what I was doing is I was escaping from the
because I knew I could not handle them. So many
years later, so let me count seven years later, I
got very sick and I had fever for ten days
(28:15):
straight and ended in the hospital. And even though it
sounds terrible, I believe it was the best thing ever
because I was forced to stop like stop. I wasn't
able to work and to just keep myself occupied and
frame it as a positive thing. I was on a
(28:36):
short term disability for a month and a half and
I was laying on the couch unable to move because
the fever attacked my liver, like whatever was going on
attacked my liver. And I am so grateful that that happened,
because that's when I started reflecting about the emotions that
I was hiding. And I started reflecting related to this
(28:56):
anger and the fear of survival, and the regret and
the shame because I was still living with all of that.
And that's when I decided that I need to start
seeking healers and asking for help and asking for some
experts to help me this identify these terrible emotions and
(29:17):
get them out of me. There's a book called Buried
Emotions Never Die, and that's what happened to me. I
was trying to bury all of these emotions, and even
though I thought they were all buried, what once in
a while this little or big, big, black, invisible box
which it would open up and all these horrible emotions
(29:40):
would come out. So I was forced for the first
time to go through deep healing. And I went through
this healing for ten years, and sometimes I would have
like two or three sessions a week. One of those
sessions it was three hours to just help me look
at my father's picture. I could not look at his picture,
(30:03):
so we took three hours for me to just be
able to look at his picture. So after ten years,
I felt I was in a good place, but there's
always things that come up. So because I did all
of the healing and the forgiveness, that was the hardest thing.
Not just forgiving my dad and forgiving my ex husband
(30:23):
and the community. The hardest part was forgiving myself because
many times we're blaming ourselves, like I was blaming myself
about what was happening and the divide that happened in
like in my own family, what happened to my mom,
what happened to my sister. So I had to forgive
myself and that was really difficult. But then I was
(30:46):
because I was able to release all of these things,
I started feeling lighter, I started feeling happier. I started
getting promoted for some reason. It was strange because I
became more confident. I wasn't doing work because I was escaping.
I was doing my work because I was passionate about
what I was doing. I was able to speak up
in meetings instead of instead of hiding myself all the time.
(31:10):
So that's what happened, and the journey never ended. So
I wrote the book my breaking basis, and because I
went through ten years of healing, I was in a
better place to write it. But it was still difficult.
I was I Sometimes I would write for half an
hour and then I would need three hours of sleep.
And what was even harder was audible because I recorded
(31:34):
the whole story, and that was that was intense because
I was hearing my story and I had to deal
with all the emotions. So it never ends, and I'm
still going through therapy and healing and all kinds of stuff.
But it's okay. And anybody who looks at these things
(31:55):
and say I don't need healing, I believe we all
need it. It's not easy being human in our world.
We all had something that happened in our childhood. We
all had something, if not childhood, something that happened when
we're a teenage that keeps making us think that there's
something wrong with us. And trust me, there's nothing wrong
with us. We just need to clean it up.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Oh, I love it so much when you in the
writing of your story, like what was the experience like
one writing it down and two I guess reading over that,
but then three speaking it out loud for audible and
(32:38):
then maybe listening back with their versions of feeling like oh,
listen to that, like getting separation and perspective on your
own story, like what sort of what was the emotional
process of that?
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah? Wow. So as I was writing it, as I mentioned,
a lot of things would come up and they would
not be positive. A big part of the messages that
kept coming up for me is, for some strange reason,
I was scared that people would not like me when
(33:14):
they read the story, or they think that I made
a wrong decision, or all these fears that I had.
I was internally. I started projecting it on the reader
before there was even a reader, and I was worried
about how they're going to perceive me. And I hired
many editors and creative like creative coaches and all kinds
(33:37):
of people that helped me with this book. So even
though it's just like you look at it at it
as a book, it did take a village. So many
people were involved in it, and I would keep asking them,
I would say, like, I don't know if the reader
would even care about the story. I don't know if
I would if I would come across as like as
the bad person, the bad character, And the messages kept
(34:00):
coming up, dema, the reader is going to love you,
which I'm so grateful for. I like to be loved.
But at this at the same time, anytime I would
ask would anyone care about the story, the messages that
I kept the receiving was yes. Because we all have
a vase, we all have something that is stopping us.
(34:22):
We are we are all dealing with the sense that
we have to be perfect, or the fear of shame.
And so when I realized that there's a purpose behind
the story, that's when I totally put my heart and
soul to get the book out.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Let's talk about shame a bit, because I like, for me,
shame has been on long journey and I found it
a really interesting thing because sometimes it feels like I'm
the surface. But we could we intellectualize everything, and I
kind of for myself, I understood the logic of mind
(35:00):
background and he keeps using the term little black box,
and that's how I talk about my childhood trauma is
I was aware of it. It was in a little
black box for thirty years until it popped out through
boxing and getting into my body. It was kind of like, oh,
here's this box, you should open it. And then subsequent
(35:20):
from that, I mean, it's taken a decade of realizing
that shame was a thing and it was driving a
lot of things, and I've worked on it a lot,
and I had an experience late last year, went to
the Himalayas on a beautiful retreat with a group. We
did some deep work there and we were told to
figure out what we wanted to leave on the mountain.
(35:41):
So obviously I was like a pack of shame with me,
and it's coming and I'm leaving it there. And I
had the most profound experience where I burned shame on
the mountain and in the moment before burning it, I
thanked shame for those not knowing what its purpose was,
(36:02):
believing and trusting and being grateful for it. And I
was like, obviously, I've carried this for a reason, but
I no longer need it. And I came back and
just pondered this idea of I've tried to purge myself
of this shame for so long, and it feels like
(36:22):
it doesn't shift, but then it shifts in a heartbeat.
But it's kind of like also it's been shifting the
whole time. It's like that idea of doing the work
and thinking it's not working, and then you know, it's
like becoming an overnight success taking ten years. That was
a long question, wasn't it was that even a question? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Well, I'm so glad that you got to have that experience,
and I'm so glad that you're working with your invisible
black box as well. And the shame, it's like sometimes
I wonder where did it come from? Are we born
with these starts about shame or are we being programmed?
(37:02):
I know in my story, I was programmed because I
was programmed to respect the elders, to do whatever the
elders say, and then I was taught if I did
not do that, there's something wrong with me. I am
not good enough and I'm going to be thrown away.
So I believe that's where the seed of the shame
(37:23):
in my life. And it's so interesting that it stayed
with me even though I truly did the right thing
by escaping. How for many many years, I was feeling
internally shameful. I felt that there's just something wrong with me.
Why can't I just deal with the situation like everybody else?
(37:43):
So maybe we need to all reflect and go back
and figure out where where did where did it originate?
What is the voice of shame in our head? And
then that's where we can go back and identify the
vase that is associated with all of that. But every
body I interact with, we're all dealing with this shame,
regardless of what culture we're living in.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
What are your as current aspirations? What's next? What's current?
What are you aspiring to and working on?
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Yeah, so there's multiple things I'm working on. One of
them is the second book. So book number one was
Breaking Vases, which is the memoir, the story about everything
that happened and all the details related to the experience.
Now the book number two is about the reader, so
it's less of the story and more tips related to
(38:39):
identifying the vase. How can we rise from these bad experiences?
So so far, the title of the book that's in
my head is rising from the shards. So you have
the shards of the broken vase, and we can either
keep them broken on the floor and maybe feel like
(39:00):
a victim or feel that we're broken, or we can
build something beautiful from them based on how we want
our life to look like. So that is what the
book is, and it's going to include a lot of
messages related to my healing journey and what I had
to do with that, and also it's going to include
information about the healthy feminine and how many times we
(39:24):
lose the healthy feminine and we turn into being a
toxic feminine just to survive. So that is that's part
of the book number two, and I have been talking
to two directors to turning Breaking Vases into a movie.
So the journey is, it's taking time. It's not as
(39:44):
fast as I would like it to be. But this
is a big part because I believe that I want
this message to be with people all around the world,
regardless of their culture, regardless of their language. It is
something that applies to everyone. So this is far. These
are two of the things I'm working on. I'm working
also on creating retreats to come and for us to
(40:08):
come together and support each other as we are shattering
these vases in our lives, and also doing an online
leadership program to bring all the leadership messages that start
with self discovery, start with what are we telling ourselves?
Why do we think we're not good enough? And build
ourselves as leaders. So there's just so much stuff going
(40:30):
on and I love it.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
What does last question, what does toxic femininity look like?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, so let me share how it looked in my life,
because many times we're talking about healing or we're talking
about the bad men in our lives. But what we
don't realize that in order to be in order to survive,
maybe we need to change from being the healed, balanced
feminine into maybe lying or manipulating or getting things our way.
(41:04):
And this is how my mother in law was. So
my mother in law, externally she looks so perfect. She was,
she said the right thing, she dressed the right way,
she bought beautiful gifts for other people. But she had
to get her way by lying, manipulating, trying to act
(41:25):
like someone that she's not truly who she was, just
to be accepted and just to be loved and to
get things the way she wanted them. So many times
and I see it all all over where we're being hurt,
let's say as a child or our feminine side, our beautiful,
flowing feminine side gets hurt, and what we end up
(41:47):
doing in order to survive, we start masking who we
are and we start manipulating to get our way. So
what we need to do is to heal that part,
and we all anybody who got hurt in our lives,
we learn that we cannot be who we are. We
need to change. We need to play a game in
(42:07):
order to get things our way, and the game sometimes
is not pretty, and what we end up doing is
hurting other people in the process as well, because we're
losing our beautiful, feminine and we end up doing things
that are not aligned with our identity and our true self.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
So good. Where can people follow you and find you on?
Get your books?
Speaker 3 (42:31):
So my website is my name Dmagowi dot com, so
it's d I m a Ghawi dot com and then
they can get my book on Amazon. They can also
get it there's a website called breaking Basis dot com,
so they're able to get it there as well.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
I've loved this. This has been great. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Thank you, Tiffany, I love talking with you.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Gotta quite a coast, Gotta little, gotta lotta cost, got it.
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
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(00:29):
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Speaker 3 (00:51):
Dem it Gowie. Welcome to Roll with the Punches. Hey, Tifany,
I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I feel like I've just connected with an other soul
sister across the globe.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Thank you. I feel the same, And yes, you're we are.
We are on two other sides of this world.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Isn't weird but kind of cool? Like I still can't
get like, what what is the day and time where.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
You are right now? It's eight thirty five pm. Yes, yeah,
that's a little a little minor detail. Yes, eight thirty
five pm. Yeah, lunch time.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's lunchtime on day? Is it's Tuesday? Is it Tuesday? There? Wow?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I forgot what day it does. No, it's Monday anywhere
day eight thirty five pm on a Monday. Yeah, you
are in my future.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah. It blows my mind. And every time, like, I
feel like my listeners will be like, are you if
I like, come on, it's been years now, you're still
having this conversation about the time difference. But I'm like,
if it's my birthday now, which is not part of way,
but if it was like, it's not my it's my
birthday here, but it's not my birthday there yet, it's
so funny to me.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
It is. Well, I love it during New Year's Eve
when you're able to see New Year's Eve shifting across
the globe and their celebration every hour, it's I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
You could literally just jump on a plane and follow
your birthday around. Good idea.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Past.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Can you give my listeners and myself the little I
guess elevator beach if we want to call it that
elevator pitch of who is Dama GOWI?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, So I'll summarize it with one phrase. I am
Middle Eastern in my jeans and a global citizen in
my spirit. So I was born in the Turkey, raised
in Jordan. I moved to the US when I was twenty,
and my world opened up for me with education and work.
(03:04):
And I realized the more I connect with people just
like yourself from all around the world, there's no boundaries
or borders when we talk about us at a spiritual side,
we're all global citizens, and I believe I am one
of those global citizens.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Did you I love that? I love that so much.
Did you feel like you went to seek that. Did
you expect to feel like that? Did you have a
Middle Easting connection that we strongly took a bit of
moving or how did that all unfold?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Wow, that's such a good question. I never thought about
how it unfolded. I feel that I did not fit
in in any country I lived in and traveled to,
and I lived in so many different countries. I didn't
fit in the Middle East, I didn't fit in the US.
I was always in the middle And when I started
thinking about myself, I don't fit in because I believe
(04:01):
my spirit is so much bigger than just be limited
to borders of a country. That's when I felt, what
for the first time, here I am. I fit in
in the globe. I may not fit in in a
specific geography. So that's how it started.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
I love that I just wrote down. I don't even
know why. Maybe I'll ponder it later, but I just
wrote down the sentence. Is there an end to fit?
I was talking yesterday this week to Bill van Hippo
and about evolution, and we were talking about that human
drive to belong but also to paradoxically stand out, like
(04:43):
we want to be special, but we also want to
fit in, and it's such a paradox.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
He yes, it is. You know, it's nice to belong.
I would love to feel that I belong to a
specific group or community, but that also comes with the
sense of conformity and also losing part of ourselves in
order to fit in. So it is as society and
(05:10):
as individuals, as a matter of finding the balance of
how can we keep our individuals side and appreciate being
a misfit, but at the same time discovering our value
by being part of the bigger picture, bigger community. So
in my situation, I felt as I was growing up
in the Middle East, I was losing who I am,
(05:32):
even though I was so young, because I had to
fit in with what was the expectations and to follow
and to obey, and because that was what was expected
of me. And since I was growing up, I didn't
have an identity. I didn't have a sense of self.
I was part of the family. Any behavior I did
(05:52):
reflected on the family. If I did well in school,
great for the family. If I did a mistake for
the family. So it was absolutely terrible because I never
made a choice for me as dema, as an individual.
It was always the fear and the worry about how
it is going to be perceived by others. And when
(06:15):
I came to the US, I sense the same thing
as well. Where it is let's say, in a corporate environment,
I am part of the bigger picture. Everything I did
reflected on the bigger picture, so bigger like the culture
work culture. So that's why I feel I am a misfit.
I don't fit anywhere. I love it. It gave me
(06:36):
the chance to discover my advantage. It gave me the
chance to be able to discover who I am and
not to try to conform just to be accepted by
others and yes, there are consequences, but I'm okay with them.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Oh, I love this conversation already. You talk about about
breaking visis, Can you tell us?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So I was five years old in my grandmother's home
in Amman, the capital of Jordan in the Middle East.
And she was such a fun grandmother. Always she had
all kinds of games for me. But that specific day
she was not fun. She was serious. And we were
arranging flowers in a glass vase. She held a glass
(07:24):
vase and looked at me in a very serious way,
and she said, do you see this perfect glass vase?
A girl is just like it. If it gets cracked
for any reason, you can never fix it. You can
never glue it back. It will always be seen as broken.
And then she said, and who would want a broken vase?
(07:45):
That's the one we throw in the trash. So I
was five years old. I didn't understand what that meant.
I didn't understand why my grandmother was so serious, and
what is the meaning of a crack on the vase?
And why why is she even telling me the story?
But she was preparing me. She was preparing me to
the expectations of the society that I have to be perfect.
(08:09):
I have to worry about how I am being perceived
by others. I have to do what I'm being told.
Otherwise I would be thrown away and I would not
be good enough. And that turned out to be my life.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Did you carry that story with you or did you
return back to it at some point, because that something
that you that we stayed in your mind from that point.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
So that's so interesting because I don't remember. So I
did not remember the exact story, but in my subconscious
mind it was the messages were there. Isn't it interesting,
Like we're told a story. I may not remember the
words of the story or the specific image the metaphors
(08:55):
she gave me. But I did end up living my
life following, obeying, doing everything that I was told. I
got married very young, when I was twenty, to a
much older man, and then we moved together to San Diego.
This is how I moved that to the US. And
I was absolutely following the expectations of the vase. I
(09:16):
was doing what was expected of me, how I was
raised and what I was taught. But then that marriage
turned out to be abusive, and I was so scared
to leave. I was scared to even consider it, because
even when I called my mom in Jordan and I
told her, I'm not happy, like I'm so depressed. Imagine,
(09:38):
I was early twenties, alone in the US, extremely depressed,
not having an identity. But so when I told my mom,
she said, oh, like, just have have kids, have kids,
and then and then everything is going to be okay.
Isn't that hilarious? Yeah? Like, is it bad marriage? Bring
more kids to it. So so that was the moment
(10:02):
where I started to question everything, to question the stories
I was taught. And that's when I started remembering the metaphor.
So even though I was living with it, the image
of the vase started coming back to me. And I
remember one day I was so depressed I couldn't even
get out of bed. I was staring at the ceiling
for hours and hours because I was feeling so hopeless.
(10:27):
So I wanted to I wanted somebody to tell me
what to do with my life. So I called my
mom in Jordan. It was the middle of the week,
and part of the marriage, I was not allowed to
call my mom in the middle of the week. I
was only allowed to call her fifteen minutes a week
on a Saturday, and he had to be next to me,
so I couldn't just talk to my mom. But that
(10:48):
day I broke the rules. I bought a I had
with me a phone card at that time, I used
to buy them, and I called my mom and I
couldn't get her, Like the phone just kept drinking, ringing, ringing.
I couldn't get to my mom. So I called. I
dial to speak to my best friend and I couldn't
get her. I dial to speak to my uncle. I
(11:10):
couldn't get him. And I was at the lowest point
in my life, just hoping that somebody would tell me
what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed
to live my life? At that time, I was twenty
four and at that moment, I even though I was
feeling so terrible, I was on the floor crying. But
(11:34):
I believe now it was the best thing ever, because
that was the moment that made me realize that I
have a choice. I can choose to continue to live
to satisfy everybody around me and keep losing myself. And
the worst part is to move the vase story and
these other stories forward to the next generation and expect
(11:56):
the same thing from them. Can you imagine how horrible
that would be, or my other choice is to choose me,
And just the idea that I have a choice, just
the concept that was like a brand new concept in
my life. That's when, as if a little crack in
the vase was created, because that was like a whole
(12:19):
new thing. I wasn't ready to leave or any of that,
but just the idea was so empowering, and that's when
I realized that I need to focus on my education.
I need to be able to make money and be
financially independent. There's a phrase in Arabic that says when
(12:41):
jehan ud lam, and that means knowledge is light and
ignorance is darkness. So imagine I was raised in a
way in the darkness. The more I was kept ignorant,
the more I was kept with fear and insecurities and
worry about perfection, the more I was being controlled. But
I needed knowledge and that was my only condition when
(13:03):
we got married. So that's like from the beginning, since
I met him, I said I wanted to be the
first educated woman in my family, and he agreed, and
thank goodness he agreed, because of course he has full
power over my life. But he agreed and by getting
the education and graduating and getting my diploma, that also
(13:28):
created another crack in the vase because now I have
my education, and knowledge is power, knowledge is light. And
then around that time, his business wasn't doing well and
usually he would not let me work because like again
the control, but he needed help. He needed help financially
and even with simple little things of paying utility bills,
(13:53):
and he allowed me to work and it was such
a blessing. So even though he was self serving his need,
but at the same time, it reflected positively on me
because it was I was able to find a job.
I was working minimum wage as a teller, just ten
hours a week, but that gave me some financial ability
(14:16):
where I was making money. And then years later I
got a better job, I started making more money, and
that created another crack in the vase. So when we
talk about my life and this vase, once I discovered
that I have a choice, and by the way, I
love on your website because you talk about the choice too,
and I wrote it down. You have a choice of
(14:36):
fighting or fleeing. And I fought, but I didn't fight
by fighting physically or verbally. I fought by connecting internally
getting my education, becoming financially independent, and then I escaped.
By escaping that was not accepted by my family. That
(14:56):
entire community in Jordan disowned me, and my father DI
decided to have me killed because if a woman and
it's still happening.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
WHOA Okay, but that's so horrible. Yeah, oh wow, okay.
I was about to ask, that was so left field
for me. I was about to ask, do you feel
like at this at this point of I guess just
before making these choices, you, when you look back, do
(15:29):
you think that you were your your actions were derived
from possibilities that you were aware of or could could
see your dream up, or the pain of where you were,
what you were in and that you just didn't want
to be there, or an amalgamation of both.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
It was both. It was the pain of where I was,
but it wasn't just the abuse of relationship. It was
the depression that I was experiencing. So I was in
such deep depression and every time I would think about
the future, I would see total darkness. I would not
have a hope that things are going to get better.
(16:12):
But at the same time, whenever I looked at people
around me, I would see that they had dreams and
they were working towards them, and I would say to myself,
I wish I can do that too. They were working
hard to get promotion, and I knew that eventually I
would not be allowed to work. They had dreams, maybe
to work on their masters or to start a business,
(16:34):
and I knew I would not be allowed to do that.
So even though I had glimpses of things that I
would hope I could do, I knew I wasn't allowed
to in the future. So I had to block it.
And that increased the depression that I was experiencing. So
it's like a horrible cycle that was going on.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
What did you what were you studying?
Speaker 3 (16:57):
What did you choose the economics?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
So in the middle of that, you're experiencing depression, you're
experiencing conditioning, cultural conditioning, and expectations and beliefs and biases
and huge limitations, and you're experiencing shitty circumstances. How does
(17:23):
one because I'm thinking of people listening, I'm thinking thinking
of people who are wanting to do better or change
or strive or be empowered. How in the middle of
what could have only have been a pretty funky situation.
Funky as in not great, funky as in crap? What
did it take to in that state? Strive and get
(17:43):
out of there and actually reach for possibility and make change.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Wow. The first thing that helped me was to question
the norm, because these stories were told early on, and
they're so ingrained in our lives and in our head
and many times we start doubting ourselves, thinking maybe there's
something wrong with me. Why can't I be quiet like
everybody else? Why can't I just be like everybody else?
(18:14):
So the first thing I would tell everybody to start questioning,
questioning the norm, questioning why you're doing certain things, even
questioning the depression. The depression was an amazing teacher because
it was teaching me that I did not fit in
in that environment and I deserve something better. Of course,
(18:34):
at that time, I cannot say yay, I'm depressed. It
was terrible. It was horrible. But now when I look back,
I don't think I would have done what I ended
up doing, which is escape, if I did not have
that depression. So questioning the norm and then also start
start analyzing, what are the phases in your life? What
(18:56):
are the stories that you've been told that have shaped
you and shaped your decisions or maybe shaped your choices,
but at the same time, think about the goals of
the future. In my situation, what I wanted part of
the goal was that I wanted to work on my
master's and I wasn't allowed to do that. So all
(19:16):
I started doing was envisioning myself with a cap and
gown and I was walking to get my like my
diploma for my masters, so that every time things got
so bad, I would keep imagining that day. So imagine
what the vase is, Imagine the dream of what you're
trying to achieve, and start listening to the voice and
(19:39):
our heads. Because most of the time we're not telling
ourselves good things. So maybe what's wrong with me? I
am not good enough, I'm going to fail, I'm going
to regret this decision. All of these voices were in
my head constantly, so it's a matter maybe write them down.
Write down all these negative things that we tell ourselves,
(20:01):
and then on a second column, write down what do
you want to start telling yourself. Recently, I hired a
coach and she's been helping me with this because this
is something that I'm still dealing with until today that
when the shame and the negative programming start in our
life early on, even though we become in our forties, fifties, sixties,
(20:23):
it's still playing in our head and it's still continue
to make us small and push us down. So these
are some of the things that I did. But in
my situation, it wasn't just that I sat down and
I said, Okay, what is my base, what are my thoughts,
what is my vision? I just needed to get out
because I just I knew I would not be able
(20:45):
to survive in that environment anymore. And it's just sometimes
when we make big decisions like this, the universe starts
lining up for us. In my situation, I started meeting
people that were helping me, my team and my team members.
They discovered about what was going on and they started
(21:07):
totally supporting me. So it's amazing how the community comes
to us when we are in such a law and
law place. But that's the time where we need to
accept the help, which was so difficult for me to
open ourselves and put our ego aside and be okay
to accept as much help as we can.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
How did you cope with the transition of I think
one of the hardest things when we choose change is
the ecosystem around us created us that we are, and
so we've chosen and been around certain types of people
might be family, friends, work, colleagues, and we conform to that,
(21:52):
and then we choose change in One of the biggest
forms of pushback can be people not liking the change
they see, and then sometimes the discomfort of either difficult
conversations or breaking ties, or realizing that even walking away
from non helpful situations or sometimes even toxic situations can
(22:13):
still hurt or feel scary to us. How did you
cope through those types of situations?
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, and that is part of the consequences. That's why
most of us we don't take the right choice that
serves us because we're afraid of people looking down at
us or gossiping about us. In my situation, my entire
community disowned me in Jordan. So it was very painful
because initially like, these are people that I loved, these
(22:45):
are family members that I respected, these are my friends,
and to them I was not good enough. And it
was extremely painful because to me it wasn't as at
that time I was twenty five by the time I escaped,
it was twenty five. It wasn't in a place where
I would tell myself I made the right decision and
(23:06):
they're wrong. I started blaming myself and thinking why did
I do that? And I started getting all kinds of
sense of shame and regret, initially because who would want
to be thrown away like that? So yeah, so to
me it was I guess my community made it easy,
(23:27):
and they're all like, we're done, we don't want to
deal with you. But for anybody that is listening to
this and they're worried about the people's reaction, my advice
to you is put yourself first. Listen to your intuition.
If you're having a sense that you're not in the
right place, if you are having a sense that you're
not surrounded with the right people that are uplifting you,
(23:50):
that believe in you, then why should we even worry
about what they think? Right?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
If I got to ask you at t who is
Dema at twenty? Yeah, at twenty years old? If you
or if Dema asked herself at twenty who am I?
What would that answer look like?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Yeah? So I was a bride. I felt like Cinderella.
I was getting married to the most eligible bachelor in
our community who had tons of money, and we had
this amazing wedding. At that time. Dima was the bride
(24:33):
and then the wife of this person. Dima was the
daughter of my father. Dima was the sister and sister
for my siblings. But Dema was nobody as an individual.
I was something for other people. I was defined by
the family name. I was defined by my husband. I
(24:53):
was defined by my father. That's why I was.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
And if I asked you today, who is.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
So Diva is a very happy person today I am.
I am living my purpose and it continues to evolve.
I believe I am here on this earth to make
a difference in people's lives. I believe that my story
and all the terrible things that I experienced in my
childhood and also in my marriage, they have a purpose.
(25:23):
They have a purpose so I can influence people from
all around the world, give them a sense of hope,
and also give them the empowerment to realize that they
have the ability to shatter the vase and it's okay.
So that's who I am today and I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And in a transition period between twenty year old Dema
and escap escaping that identity and sense of self. I
am imagining there was a stage of well, if I'm
not the wife, the bride, the child of the daughter,
if I'm not those things, who am I? What did
(26:02):
that look feel like? And how did you then go
from there to developing a new sense of self?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Yeah, so what happened was after I escaped. The story
gets more complicated because the abuse extended to my mom
and my sister and they had to escape from Jordan
and they had to come and live with me in
San Diego. So I imagine I was twenty five responsible
for myself, for my mom and my sister, and dealing
(26:29):
with all of the mess related to the emotions and
depression of everybody, and being able to pay the bills,
which was like I can't even believe how we did that.
My uncle, I have a wonderful uncle in the US,
and he helped us. I think he was one of
very few people. My uncle in the US my aunt
in Canada were the only two that helped us, and
(26:51):
they would even send money to support us. So the
reason I'm sharing this there was so much stuff that
was going on I could not handle it. So I
blocked all my emotions, my anger, my frustration, all of this,
and I called that I blocked it all in a big,
(27:11):
invisible black box because I needed to survive. I needed
so I started working so hard. I was working day
and night so I would be able to pay the bills.
We were living in a one bedroom apartment in a
very unsafe area, and for like initially, we didn't even
have furniture until my manager discovered and she gave us
(27:34):
a love seat that her dead dog used to love
to sit on, and so it had all the dead
dog hair. So we had to keep cleaning and a
little TV. That's all we had. And we lived like
this because we couldn't afford any of that. So I
was working, work and working, and I called it ambitious,
(27:54):
like I am so ambitious, I'm going to work. Really,
what I was doing is I was escaping from the
because I knew I could not handle them. So many
years later, so let me count seven years later, I
got very sick and I had fever for ten days
(28:15):
straight and ended in the hospital. And even though it
sounds terrible, I believe it was the best thing ever
because I was forced to stop like stop. I wasn't
able to work and to just keep myself occupied and
frame it as a positive thing. I was on a
(28:36):
short term disability for a month and a half and
I was laying on the couch unable to move because
the fever attacked my liver, like whatever was going on
attacked my liver. And I am so grateful that that happened,
because that's when I started reflecting about the emotions that
I was hiding. And I started reflecting related to this
(28:56):
anger and the fear of survival, and the regret and
the shame because I was still living with all of that.
And that's when I decided that I need to start
seeking healers and asking for help and asking for some
experts to help me this identify these terrible emotions and
(29:17):
get them out of me. There's a book called Buried
Emotions Never Die, and that's what happened to me. I
was trying to bury all of these emotions, and even
though I thought they were all buried, what once in
a while this little or big, big, black, invisible box
which it would open up and all these horrible emotions
(29:40):
would come out. So I was forced for the first
time to go through deep healing. And I went through
this healing for ten years, and sometimes I would have
like two or three sessions a week. One of those
sessions it was three hours to just help me look
at my father's picture. I could not look at his picture,
(30:03):
so we took three hours for me to just be
able to look at his picture. So after ten years,
I felt I was in a good place, but there's
always things that come up. So because I did all
of the healing and the forgiveness, that was the hardest thing.
Not just forgiving my dad and forgiving my ex husband
(30:23):
and the community. The hardest part was forgiving myself because
many times we're blaming ourselves, like I was blaming myself
about what was happening and the divide that happened in
like in my own family, what happened to my mom,
what happened to my sister. So I had to forgive
myself and that was really difficult. But then I was
(30:46):
because I was able to release all of these things,
I started feeling lighter, I started feeling happier. I started
getting promoted for some reason. It was strange because I
became more confident. I wasn't doing work because I was escaping.
I was doing my work because I was passionate about
what I was doing. I was able to speak up
in meetings instead of instead of hiding myself all the time.
(31:10):
So that's what happened, and the journey never ended. So
I wrote the book my breaking basis, and because I
went through ten years of healing, I was in a
better place to write it. But it was still difficult.
I was I Sometimes I would write for half an
hour and then I would need three hours of sleep.
And what was even harder was audible because I recorded
(31:34):
the whole story, and that was that was intense because
I was hearing my story and I had to deal
with all the emotions. So it never ends, and I'm
still going through therapy and healing and all kinds of stuff.
But it's okay. And anybody who looks at these things
(31:55):
and say I don't need healing, I believe we all
need it. It's not easy being human in our world.
We all had something that happened in our childhood. We
all had something, if not childhood, something that happened when
we're a teenage that keeps making us think that there's
something wrong with us. And trust me, there's nothing wrong
with us. We just need to clean it up.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Oh, I love it so much when you in the
writing of your story, like what was the experience like
one writing it down and two I guess reading over that,
but then three speaking it out loud for audible and
(32:38):
then maybe listening back with their versions of feeling like oh,
listen to that, like getting separation and perspective on your
own story, like what sort of what was the emotional
process of that?
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah? Wow. So as I was writing it, as I mentioned,
a lot of things would come up and they would
not be positive. A big part of the messages that
kept coming up for me is, for some strange reason,
I was scared that people would not like me when
(33:14):
they read the story, or they think that I made
a wrong decision, or all these fears that I had.
I was internally. I started projecting it on the reader
before there was even a reader, and I was worried
about how they're going to perceive me. And I hired
many editors and creative like creative coaches and all kinds
(33:37):
of people that helped me with this book. So even
though it's just like you look at it at it
as a book, it did take a village. So many
people were involved in it, and I would keep asking them,
I would say, like, I don't know if the reader
would even care about the story. I don't know if
I would if I would come across as like as
the bad person, the bad character, And the messages kept
(34:00):
coming up, dema, the reader is going to love you,
which I'm so grateful for. I like to be loved.
But at this at the same time, anytime I would
ask would anyone care about the story, the messages that
I kept the receiving was yes. Because we all have
a vase, we all have something that is stopping us.
(34:22):
We are we are all dealing with the sense that
we have to be perfect, or the fear of shame.
And so when I realized that there's a purpose behind
the story, that's when I totally put my heart and
soul to get the book out.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Let's talk about shame a bit, because I like, for me,
shame has been on long journey and I found it
a really interesting thing because sometimes it feels like I'm
the surface. But we could we intellectualize everything, and I
kind of for myself, I understood the logic of mind
(35:00):
background and he keeps using the term little black box,
and that's how I talk about my childhood trauma is
I was aware of it. It was in a little
black box for thirty years until it popped out through
boxing and getting into my body. It was kind of like, oh,
here's this box, you should open it. And then subsequent
(35:20):
from that, I mean, it's taken a decade of realizing
that shame was a thing and it was driving a
lot of things, and I've worked on it a lot,
and I had an experience late last year, went to
the Himalayas on a beautiful retreat with a group. We
did some deep work there and we were told to
figure out what we wanted to leave on the mountain.
(35:41):
So obviously I was like a pack of shame with me,
and it's coming and I'm leaving it there. And I
had the most profound experience where I burned shame on
the mountain and in the moment before burning it, I
thanked shame for those not knowing what its purpose was,
(36:02):
believing and trusting and being grateful for it. And I
was like, obviously, I've carried this for a reason, but
I no longer need it. And I came back and
just pondered this idea of I've tried to purge myself
of this shame for so long, and it feels like
(36:22):
it doesn't shift, but then it shifts in a heartbeat.
But it's kind of like also it's been shifting the
whole time. It's like that idea of doing the work
and thinking it's not working, and then you know, it's
like becoming an overnight success taking ten years. That was
a long question, wasn't it was that even a question? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Well, I'm so glad that you got to have that experience,
and I'm so glad that you're working with your invisible
black box as well. And the shame, it's like sometimes
I wonder where did it come from? Are we born
with these starts about shame or are we being programmed?
(37:02):
I know in my story, I was programmed because I
was programmed to respect the elders, to do whatever the
elders say, and then I was taught if I did
not do that, there's something wrong with me. I am
not good enough and I'm going to be thrown away.
So I believe that's where the seed of the shame
(37:23):
in my life. And it's so interesting that it stayed
with me even though I truly did the right thing
by escaping. How for many many years, I was feeling
internally shameful. I felt that there's just something wrong with me.
Why can't I just deal with the situation like everybody else?
(37:43):
So maybe we need to all reflect and go back
and figure out where where did where did it originate?
What is the voice of shame in our head? And
then that's where we can go back and identify the
vase that is associated with all of that. But every
body I interact with, we're all dealing with this shame,
regardless of what culture we're living in.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
What are your as current aspirations? What's next? What's current?
What are you aspiring to and working on?
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Yeah, so there's multiple things I'm working on. One of
them is the second book. So book number one was
Breaking Vases, which is the memoir, the story about everything
that happened and all the details related to the experience.
Now the book number two is about the reader, so
it's less of the story and more tips related to
(38:39):
identifying the vase. How can we rise from these bad experiences?
So so far, the title of the book that's in
my head is rising from the shards. So you have
the shards of the broken vase, and we can either
keep them broken on the floor and maybe feel like
(39:00):
a victim or feel that we're broken, or we can
build something beautiful from them based on how we want
our life to look like. So that is what the
book is, and it's going to include a lot of
messages related to my healing journey and what I had
to do with that, and also it's going to include
information about the healthy feminine and how many times we
(39:24):
lose the healthy feminine and we turn into being a
toxic feminine just to survive. So that is that's part
of the book number two, and I have been talking
to two directors to turning Breaking Vases into a movie.
So the journey is, it's taking time. It's not as
(39:44):
fast as I would like it to be. But this
is a big part because I believe that I want
this message to be with people all around the world,
regardless of their culture, regardless of their language. It is
something that applies to everyone. So this is far. These
are two of the things I'm working on. I'm working
also on creating retreats to come and for us to
(40:08):
come together and support each other as we are shattering
these vases in our lives, and also doing an online
leadership program to bring all the leadership messages that start
with self discovery, start with what are we telling ourselves?
Why do we think we're not good enough? And build
ourselves as leaders. So there's just so much stuff going
(40:30):
on and I love it.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
What does last question, what does toxic femininity look like?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, so let me share how it looked in my life,
because many times we're talking about healing or we're talking
about the bad men in our lives. But what we
don't realize that in order to be in order to survive,
maybe we need to change from being the healed, balanced
feminine into maybe lying or manipulating or getting things our way.
(41:04):
And this is how my mother in law was. So
my mother in law, externally she looks so perfect. She was,
she said the right thing, she dressed the right way,
she bought beautiful gifts for other people. But she had
to get her way by lying, manipulating, trying to act
(41:25):
like someone that she's not truly who she was, just
to be accepted and just to be loved and to
get things the way she wanted them. So many times
and I see it all all over where we're being hurt,
let's say as a child or our feminine side, our beautiful,
flowing feminine side gets hurt, and what we end up
(41:47):
doing in order to survive, we start masking who we
are and we start manipulating to get our way. So
what we need to do is to heal that part,
and we all anybody who got hurt in our lives,
we learn that we cannot be who we are. We
need to change. We need to play a game in
(42:07):
order to get things our way, and the game sometimes
is not pretty, and what we end up doing is
hurting other people in the process as well, because we're
losing our beautiful, feminine and we end up doing things
that are not aligned with our identity and our true self.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
So good. Where can people follow you and find you on?
Get your books?
Speaker 3 (42:31):
So my website is my name Dmagowi dot com, so
it's d I m a Ghawi dot com and then
they can get my book on Amazon. They can also
get it there's a website called breaking Basis dot com,
so they're able to get it there as well.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
I've loved this. This has been great. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Thank you, Tiffany, I love talking with you.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Gotta quite a coast, Gotta little, gotta lotta cost, got it.
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