Julie Hilsen (00:06)
Dear God, goddess, source, creator, thank you so much for bringing Katrina and I together in this container we’ve created to bring forth a message for the highest good. I opened my heart and I ask that my guides, my angels, my higher self and my akashic team all collaborate to help us bring forth a message with clarity.

and intensity to reach the ears that need to hear and soften the hearts which wish to soften to this message. I also invite Katrina’s team as they feel they want to collaborate. It’s just an open time for this kind of extra dimensional and earthly collaboration. So I’m just honored. I’m honored to have Katrina share her story and her vision. And I’m just

delighted to share and bring forth this message for the highest good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Katarina Polonska (01:04)
Thank you so much for having me here.

Julie Hilsen (01:06)
my goodness. Hello dear friends and welcome to another episode of Life of Love where we gather each week to bring forth a message of hope, of inspiration, of collaboration, and however your life of love looks on this day, we’re going to honor that. Like I always say, we’re going to honor the bumps with grace and we’re going to cherish the smooth sailing with

delight because when it comes easy, that means you’ve laid the path for an easy time and you need to celebrate the wins as always. So this week is, delighted. Katrina Polonska is here and she’s a high performance relationship coach and gender dynamic social scientist. And she studied at the University of Oxford. So Katrina, thanks for being on Life of Love. can’t wait to pick your brain.

Katarina Polonska (01:52)
no, I’m excited to be here

Julie Hilsen (01:54)
I have joined your YouTube channel and I do want to shout out your, you have successfully in love podcast. So our messages are right in alignment. So that’s always fun.

Katarina Polonska (02:06)
Absolutely. Yeah. I know I have a podcast of my own. It’s called the Successful in Love podcast. And it’s really all about what it means to be successful in love and in every other arena of your life, right? Though my perspective is you can’t really be successful in every other arena of your life until your love life is sorted, right? Like that really is the linchpin upon which everything else hangs. And that podcast is also available on YouTube.

Julie Hilsen (02:33)
Yay. So you’ve really dug in and I want to share your knowledge with my audience because it’s just so transforming when you can look at this. And I don’t want to delay it anymore because I’m so excited to talk about it. The idea that your attachment style

affects so much in your life. And when you have strong emotions, from what I understand from listening to some of your content, strong emotions tend to come from attachment styles and things that you were exposed to as a young child up to like the age of nine, I think you said, eight or nine, with your parents. And there’s no judgment, but I would love to pick your brain as to the different styles of attachment, of bonding.

because I know things probably have changed since I took Psychology 101 in 1997. Yeah, so what’s the latest and greatest on attachments? And let’s get into that.

Katarina Polonska (03:30)
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny how trendy attachment theory is right now, right? Like, it’s kind of nothing new. We’ve been talking about this in psychology for so long. I think what I really like about attachment theory though, is that it kind of simplifies the complex, right? And I’m all about simplification and creating kind of containers and strategy and…

making the enigmatic and otherwise very complex and potentially quite scary and overwhelming, kind of that like Freudian mysterious, you know, psychology stuff out there into something that we can understand, get our head around, digest and work with. And so I know for me, I’ve been, you know, in the world of kind of doing therapy and reading about psychology and studying it for like 17, 18 years now. And

I still struggled with my romantic relationships. No matter how much therapy I did, no matter how much meditating I did, no matter how much prayer, whatever I did, sorry about that, whatever I did, it always felt so complex. It felt so kind of scary, right? And the relationship side of things was like this, I don’t know, I just kind of figured it would always work out for me. But of course it wouldn’t. And so when I was engaged to my ex-fiance, and at the time I was 29, early 30s, and…

Julie Hilsen (04:30)
No worries.

Katarina Polonska (04:51)
I had this whole bedrock of knowledge behind me and I still struggled in that engagement. I still couldn’t get it right. I still ultimately kind of messed it up and we ended up parting ways. It was really attachment theory that helped me kind of understand where I’d gone wrong in that relationship and really just kind of simplified the complex into something that I could work with. And so once I really understood it and I understood what are my patterns, where did I block myself? Where was I blocking intimacy and love?

trust and connection, where was I self-sabotaging? And then using a work in kind of the subconscious mind, which is something else that I love to do, I managed to become securely attached. And it wasn’t actually that hard. It just required a step-by-step process that I followed, that I kind of pieced together myself. I had one year of pure exploration where I was just trying to figure it all out and trying everything and trying all the modalities, kind of like this Frankenstein year.

but ultimately became securely attached, met my husband, and then ever since then built a methodology that I call the successful in love method that really pulls in the best tools and techniques that I found over the years to help people become the best version of themselves in order to have the best relationship. So it’s more than attachment theory, but attachment theory is kind of like a really big piece of it. And yeah, I kind of went off on a ramble there.

Julie Hilsen (06:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

well, what sparked me was when that engagement failed, to me it was clarity for you, but he wasn’t the right guy. I want to honor your 27, however old you were at that time, that part of you that didn’t know the answers, didn’t have the clarity, but there was something to learn. But I don’t want…

Katarina Polonska (06:22)
Yes. Yeah.

Julie Hilsen (06:42)
that Katrina to own and say it was a failure because it led to where you are now. And I just want to honor your path in that way because it wasn’t all you. He could have supported you some more. And I love that you’re empowered with it, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Katarina Polonska (06:46)
Yeah.

No, of course not.

Yeah,

no, no, no, it wasn’t meant to be we were fundamentally wrong for each other. And ⁓ there is so much that happened that, you know, I’m not going to go into publicly. But it still kind of begs the question to me of how did I end up in this situation? Right.

Julie Hilsen (07:08)
I’m

Right.

Right, right. Because you’ve done all the study and you’ve, and you know, I know what you’re saying about if you can get to the core, because emotions get so staticky and messy and, and your adrenal glands are pumping and you’re, you want to understand and you want to do better. You want to, you want to go through life with grace, but sometimes it’s just so freaking messy and you

Katarina Polonska (07:22)
Yeah!

Julie Hilsen (07:46)
don’t know where this is coming from. And so that’s why I think that’s why attachment theory is so big right now because it just makes it so much more simple. Like, okay. And okay, so maybe you oversimplified. Maybe there’s six categories or whatever and you’ve totally oversimplified. But you’ve gotten to a place where it’s so simple you can go from there. And to me, that’s easier.

Katarina Polonska (07:55)
It does.

Yeah, completely. Completely, right?

Completely. And often I actually think about, I wonder, because there are definitely psychologists out there who don’t like attachment theory, right? They’re like, it’s very simplified, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it is. But it works. It works. And it gives people tools, right? And I think that I don’t like this idea that the medical field or psychology

or understanding behavioral science has to be this big, mysterious, enigmatic thing reserved for, you know, like highly skilled professionals. I think it needs to be something that we make more accessible. And so, yeah, I don’t like people feeling dependent on a therapist or dependent on a counselor to help them. That doesn’t feel right to me. It makes much more sense that, yeah, if you have really complex psychological issues, of course you’re going to need a professional. But for the most part, does it not make sense to give people the tools and techniques to…

help themselves at least to some extent, right? So I love to teach my clients too. I love to kind of, know, everyone who works with me gets my curriculum and I train them how to become their own relationship coach so that ultimately they don’t need me in the future, but they can navigate forward.

Julie Hilsen (09:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, and just think they,

yeah, they can raise their children in a different way. They have a deeper perspective. It’s just, it’s very transforming to homes and then communities. I love it. It’s gooey. So I’m gonna put you on the spot. Like how many types, because I’m just really curious, how many types of attachments are there? And can you be a mix or is like,

Katarina Polonska (09:33)
Totally.

I see. Yeah.

Yeah

Yes, yeah.

Julie Hilsen (09:49)
Yeah, I’m just really curious about

Katarina Polonska (09:51)
Yeah, absolutely.

Julie Hilsen (09:52)
delineating the types of attachment.

Katarina Polonska (09:54)
Yeah, absolutely. So there are four primary attachment styles. That being said, most people are going to be a mix, right? So when I work with people, they tend to be a cocktail of all of them, but they will have one dominant one that’s kind of leading. And so when I’m working with a person, I typically look at the dominant and then the secondary. The four attachment styles are securely attached, which is what we will want to become. And you can become that through neuroplasticity. You can evolve to become that. You then have anxious attachment.

Julie Hilsen (10:07)
Okay.

Katarina Polonska (10:21)
which is when you experienced emotional neglect, abandonment as a child. It could be perceived, right? So doesn’t have to be physical. mean, my parents were with me, most of my childhood, the very early years, but I still grew up with a very anxious attachment because the perceived abandonment from my end was that they weren’t present for me emotionally, right? They weren’t really tending to me because they were busy. They had their own economic challenges. They had their own academic studies, their own professional lives.

through no fault of their own, I happened to feel abandoned. And I also had different wounds around not feeling good enough and wondering if I was like a bad kid because no one was there. All of that made me quite anxious, right? And later in life that manifested as being kind of, I would do think a lot. I would typically get into relationships and assume that it’s gonna end. And I would assume that that person’s gonna leave me and I would assume that they don’t really want to be with me.

Julie Hilsen (11:00)
That’s fair.

you

Katarina Polonska (11:15)
And so this would manifest as an anxiousness and this kind of like needy, clingy quality where I would often get into panic states and I would, you know, need a lot of reassurance and a lot of validation because I really believe that on some level that they don’t want to be with me because I’m fundamentally bad, right? Or I’m fundamentally like not enough of them. So that’s anxious attachment. You then have dismissive avoidant, which is kind of the opposite of that, but actually at the core of it, very similar, it’s a different way of showing up. It comes from another type of emotional neglect.

where the kid may well have been smothered and quite kind of molly coddled, right? And the parents were all over the kid telling the kid what to do, what to wear, what to think. I see this a lot actually in Southern European cultures and very religious households. And that kid really grew up kind of feeling emotionally neglected in the sense that they don’t really get an identity. They don’t really get to have their own thoughts. They don’t really get to kind of be who they really want to be. They have to conform to what the parent wants them to be.

And so it’s a different type of emotional neglect. And they end up growing up thinking, well, love and intimacy isn’t safe because it erodes my identity. And they end up feeling quite trapped and smothered when it comes to intimacy. So they prefer to be alone. And they really have this kind of this wound around feeling like maybe there’s something wrong with me because otherwise why would they be controlling me so much? Like what is wrong with me if they’re controlling me this way? Exactly, exactly.

Julie Hilsen (12:35)
They don’t trust themselves. Yeah,

okay.

Katarina Polonska (12:40)
So, and they also have this kind of wounding around intimacy, right? Like it doesn’t feel safe for them. So that’s dismissive avoidant. Then you have fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment. I prefer to go with fearful avoidant. And that’s when your parents, your upbringing was kind of volatile. Like it was a little bit hot, cold. At some point your parents were maybe really loving and really present and really stable and really there. And then the next they’re gone, right? Or maybe they’re angry. I know for myself,

I definitely had a little bit of this growing up because my dad was traveling a lot for work. So sometimes he’d be there. And when he was there, it was amazing. It was like Santa Claus is in town. When he was gone, it was heartbreaking. I couldn’t really access him. And that’s just my dad, like being a management consultant, traveling the world for work. And my mother also was really overwhelmed. So at times she’d be like very sweet, but at other times she’d be very overwhelmed and she’d often kind of explode with her own emotions, right? Again, through no fault of her own.

She didn’t know how to handle the situation that we were in. Like communism was falling apart and we were in Eastern Europe. It was a very stressful time. But that volatility made me grow up with this sense of, well, I can’t trust things because everything’s really volatile and I’m not safe. And at some point I’m probably going get betrayed. And this really boils down to this sense for the child that they are somehow not worthy of having constant love and stability, that they are somehow just an unworthy child.

And so it shows up with this kind of like deep mistrust of love. Like on the one hand, they really want it, but then when it comes near, it’s like, I don’t know if I’m safe here. So this kind of very hot, cold dynamic can show up later in life. A lot of movies actually are about fearful avoidance because they make good Hollywood material. Like, yeah, I’ve got the guy chasing the girl. As soon as he gets her, he freaks out, cold feet, runs, things are at the altar. Classic fearful avoidance, love bombing. So they’re the four main attachment styles.

And you can be absolutely a blend of all of these. So I know for myself, I was primarily anxiously attached, but I had fearful avoidance as my secondary one. I know my husband, he was also anxiously attached, but he had dismissive avoidance as his secondary one, right? So they can show up in different ways. And the final thing I wanna say is that you can change it. You can become securely attached over time. You just have to learn how to essentially recondition your brain or rewire, as they say kind of commercially.

You have to just recondition yourself to become secure. And that means tending to all of the different components that make you insecure. And the lovely thing about attachment theory is we can kind of break down the components that make you insecurely attached and then isolate them, work on them. And before you know it, you can become secure. It just takes a bit of time and discipline to do it.

Julie Hilsen (15:20)
Okay, so what would you say, like what are some symptoms that show up? Say for example, if you text your significant other and they don’t get back to you, like within two hours, and then you start getting paranoid, well maybe they’re texting someone else or maybe they’re not thinking of me or what kind,

Are there different attachment styles based on how you react to not getting the text back that are classic? I’m just trying to think of triggers that you could say, maybe that’s a sign that I’m anxiously attached. Or if you push it aside and say, I don’t really give a shit, whatever, he’s going to do what he’s going to do, then you’re avoidant. how could you just consciously

Katarina Polonska (15:54)
Yeah.

Julie Hilsen (16:09)
figure out where you when you’re being authentic with your emotions, which is a whole different thing. Like being authentic with your emotions is so hard because it’s, it’s painful. It’s painful to go through it. That’s why not a lot of people go there because it’s just like, you’re opening up this whole can of worms. But what would you say to somebody who really has trouble when, there’s significant other that they want to have an exclusive relationship with doesn’t respond to a text. ⁓

Katarina Polonska (16:17)
Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely. So every attachment cell will respond differently, right? And this is kind of where I think it gets really fun because you get to, like, you get to kind of see the different reactions. And I think the main takeaway is that everything is subjective, right? I think one of my favourite things in psychology and relational science is that there is no objective reality. My reality is going to be very different to your reality. My reality is going to be very different to my husband’s reality. And we’re all going to see things really differently.

Julie Hilsen (16:41)
Okay. Yeah!

Katarina Polonska (17:04)
And the really lovely thing about that means that you’re kind of all right. You’re all right and you’re all wrong at the same time.

Julie Hilsen (17:04)
Mm-hmm.

Right, there’s

no, everyone has their own take on it and it’s, that’s okay, yeah.

Katarina Polonska (17:12)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

So it means that when there’s like a conflict or when you have an opinion or an expression or an emotion, you’re valid. Like your experience is valid, right? And that kind of removes any room for, I mean, disagreement, not that it doesn’t in practice, right? In practice, it’s much harder to live this way because we all think that way, right? But to your point, you know, someone who’s anxiously attached, which was me, if I didn’t get a text back from, you know, my ex or someone I’m dating, yeah, of course I’d get paranoid. I’d be like, my goodness.

they’ve lost interest. They’ve lost interest in me, right? They don’t want to be with me anymore. They don’t care anymore. And I probably wouldn’t go to the betrayal. I probably wouldn’t be thinking there was someone else. A fearful avoidant would though, because remember fearful avoidance tend to have wounds around being betrayed and not trusting things because their childhood was so volatile that they couldn’t trust it. And so a fearful avoidant might be thinking there was someone else. They’re betraying me. I would never go to the betrayal, right? Which is how like, you know, I’ve experienced infidelity and was completely blind to it because

It would never dawn on me that someone would cheat. It’s not part of my reality. But someone abandoning me, yeah, right? All the time I was like, they’re gonna leave me, they don’t wanna be with me. Now a dismissive avoidant, if they don’t get a text back, they might either not notice, because they’re happy doing their own thing and they’re just kind of, you know, whatever, or they’re enjoying their solitude. Like, they’re probably actually pretty relieved not to have to message back and be involved in a conversation. They’re probably doing their own thing.

It’s the same way, you if someone’s late, the anxious person might be thinking, my God, they’re not going to show up. They don’t want to be here. Maybe I said something, maybe I upset them. Maybe they’re standing me up. That was always my thing. And then I would go and manifest it, right? And they would actually stand me up. Fearful avoidant might be thinking like, there was someone else. Like they’re betraying me or they lied to me. Like they were never going to come. A dismissal avoidant might be thinking, great, I’ve got more time to myself. I don’t have to, I don’t have to engage in this interaction.

And a secure person would be thinking, interesting, they’re late. I wonder what’s going on. I hope they’re okay. Probably the traffic, right? And equally a secure person, if someone’s not texting, would be like, they’re probably in a meeting or, maybe their battery died, whatever. Like, obviously you haven’t had them for a few days. And I’m thinking like, something’s probably up, but they’re not going to make it about them, right? They’re not going to make it personal. It’s going to be more of a, like maybe they lost their phone or I hope that they’re safe. I hope that they’re okay.

Julie Hilsen (19:12)
Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Katarina Polonska (19:34)
but you wouldn’t be jumping to catastrophic conclusions and you wouldn’t be making it personal. think that’s kind of the main thing, That securely attached people don’t make it personal. And I see this all the time with my clients. It’s something I’ve had to kind of learn to get my head around, right? Which is that I’m now very much securely attached, thank goodness. I I worked hard at it, but I feel very, very secure as is my husband, as is our marriage. But when it comes to my clients, I have to remember that actually they’re still very insecurely attached.

And so some of their kind of client behaviors are like baffling to me. I don’t really understand them, right? Because I’m like, I’m not in that world anymore. You know, like I had a client. Yeah.

Julie Hilsen (20:11)
You have to ask the questions like,

what did you think? Can you tell me more to get into their reality? it’s so fascinating.

Katarina Polonska (20:16)
Absolutely. It is

so fascinating, right? Like I took Thursday and Friday off last week because I, you know, I worked 10 days straight. I didn’t take a weekend before, I took 10 days, 10 hour days. And so I was like, I’m taking a long weekend. I’m going to take a break. Took that long weekend. I come back and one of my very anxiously attached clients, he’s like, he’s freaking out. He’s like, you’ve left me. You don’t want to work with me anymore. Like, what have I done? And I’m like,

I just took two days off. my God. We’re in separate countries. Like you’re in the UK, I’m here, I’m in Canada. You know, it’s just so interesting how people can have such different responses. Yeah.

Julie Hilsen (20:55)
Yeah, and so do you find that when you’re working with somebody and they’re changing their attachment style, are they able to tell their loved ones, say, hey, I’m working through my anxious attachment and, you know, can you help me? is it something, is like, does it become a talking point for that person? Or is it something they work on privately? And then I’m just curious how the process goes.

Katarina Polonska (21:19)
Yeah, great question. So when I’m doing work with people who are in relationship, I tend to start with people individually. And I mean, I always start with people individually. And often I just work with one individual at a time. I often actually don’t even do couples work though. I’ve got the reason I’ve got a hard stuff, I’ve got a couple coming over here and I’m going to do couples work. But when I’m working with someone individually, it really depends on the state of their relationship, whether they’re going to tell their partner they’re working with me.

Often I find that the dismissive avoidance, because their partner tends to be anxious, often we attract our opposite, The anxious partner has been going bananas the whole time and been really frustrated with the distance avoidance. They’re frustrated that this person’s quite cold and never present and not really investing to the relationship, that they need a lot of alone time. So actually when the dismissive avoidance starts to work with me, they will tell their partner because they’re kind of like, look.

I’m doing this thing. I’m like working on myself. I’m investing into the relationship. Like, look, I’m trying. So they will, right? It’s absolutely. The anxiously attached often won’t say anything to their partner because they’re worried that if they tell their partner that they’re doing work on the relationship, the partner will see it as like more pressure, right? They’re like, you’re putting more attention on us. You’re putting more pressure. There’s more anxiety coming to the table. So it really depends on the person. I think it doesn’t really matter whether you tell your partner or not. What will happen though in my experience is that

Julie Hilsen (22:18)
Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Katarina Polonska (22:42)
Let’s say we work together for five sessions and you are becoming more secure. You have more vocabulary of your behavior patterns. You understand where you might be self-sabotage and going wrong. You understand how you need to heal and be more secure. You’re gonna start doing that. And as you start showing up differently in the relationship, your partner is gonna feel it, right? Your partner is gonna see it and feel it and be like, what’s wrong with you? Why you being weird? Why are you being different? Right? And that’s when often the conversation comes very organically of like, oh yeah, you’re feeling a change.

Well, this is what I’ve been doing. And then it’s really welcomed, right? Then the partner said, cool. Yeah, I like this new version of you. This is like, this is really interesting. This is really lovely. And often at that point, there comes this very organic moment where the partner’s like, I’d be interested in learning about this too. Can you tell me more? Right. And then I might work with a partner or we might do couples work together. Or sometimes I just like, cool, I’m doing my own thing, but they start working on themselves. So my, guess my point with this is that it really takes one person to transform the entire relationship.

You don’t need to do couples work. You don’t need to drag your partner to do couples work because often that can be very, very uncomfortable, right?

Julie Hilsen (23:48)
Mm hmm. And I imagine there’s such clarity once you can be secure in your attachment and be like, well, maybe I’m just asking too much or this person can never meet me there or I’ve had this beautiful person and I’ve just been putting layers on everything he or she does. And and I’m going to stop doing that because I’m switching timelines. I’m on this new timeline. I’m not attached to my old attachment style. I’m

Katarina Polonska (23:58)
Yeah.

Yeah,

Julie Hilsen (24:16)
I’m showing up in my

Katarina Polonska (24:16)
absolutely.

Julie Hilsen (24:17)
new reality, because it is a new reality.

Katarina Polonska (24:19)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. It’s completely a new reality. It’s a whole new relationship that you’re building, which again, I think is the really exciting thing, right? I think it’s, I love the fact. I know for me, like the biggest qualm that I had with, with couples work was, you know, when I was in previous relationships and they weren’t working very well and I’m pretty anxiously attached and I’m like, I’m leaning in, I want to fix it. I want to make things better and I’m online and I’m looking for programs and I’m looking for people to help me.

And everything’s like couples work, couples work, couples work, couples work. And I’m thinking my partners never want to go to this stuff. I might bring it up and they see it as me nagging them or criticism. Right. And it just, never really got my partner to go. And so in the end, I was like, why can’t there be something geared at me, the individual who wants to transform, who wants to be better that pertains to the relationship? And so I ended up doing all these couples programs on my own, you know, and it’s frustrating because I want my partner to do this. It’s all geared at couples stuff.

So when I created my program, what I was really adamant about doing was I wanted to create something that the individual who wants to be better gets to do on their own without having to involve their partner. Because truly everything shows that you can do the work solo too, for the most part, to transform the relationship. Because when you’re different, you’re gonna be different in the relationship and then the relationship’s gonna be different and your partner’s gonna respond differently, right? So it’s much more empowering that way, I find.

Julie Hilsen (25:45)
And then you don’t have to deal with your ego as much. You can just be completely raw and honest and you know, it’s humbling, right? Like deciding if you want to be right or happy. Yeah, and I know we’re coming up to our time, but I wanted to touch on one more topic if you’re okay.

Katarina Polonska (25:48)
Yep.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. I’m like, how does the time fly so fast?

Julie Hilsen (26:08)
I I know, I love it.

So, okay, so I wanted to touch on the idea that some relationships are transactional. And this is coming to my consciousness more and more because I think that I’m expecting too much out of some relationships. ⁓ And how do you help your clients define what type of relationship it is?

Katarina Polonska (26:20)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Julie Hilsen (26:35)
And I know spiritually, if you put an expectation on someone or something, that’s a limitation. It’s better to be like, hey, let’s show up for the highest good, or I’m ready to receive love and I’m just going to be open to whatever. But sometimes it becomes very clear that you’re doing all this ascended living and other people are working on transactions.

Katarina Polonska (26:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Julie Hilsen (27:02)
You’re just like a teller machine for them. And how do you coach your clients to like, number one, recognize that that’s a dynamic that’s, you know, and I think it’s more like, to me, it’s more like in family dynamics. And I know that everyone’s coming from a different point, but how do you deal with somebody who, it’s very clear when you meditate, when you get quiet, you’re not using your ego, that it’s transactional and that’s okay, but how do you…

How do you still show up in love and light knowing that that person is, that’s where they are?

Katarina Polonska (27:36)
Yeah, so few things come to mind. I think my kind of first thought is that a lot of relationships are to be transactional. That’s not a bad thing inherently, right? I kind of think, and this is not me being a capitalist because I’m not, but I think most things are a little bit transactional in the sense that we get into, we’re always getting something.

And even if what you’re getting from that relationship is the pleasure and the artistic joy of the experience of living this life with another being, which is a very evolved type of transaction, right? But it’s not even really transactional in a traditional sense. It’s kind of like this, like in David Dada’s terms, it’s kind of like a third stage relationship where you’re with someone because…

you just love them and who they are. And there’s a curiosity. If I think about me and my husband, I don’t need him. I say that in the most loving way, but I don’t need him. I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him physically. I just love him as a human being. And I find him interesting. And I want to see him grow. And I believe he wants to see me grow. And there’s this deeper evolution of I’m getting pleasure and fulfillment from this.

dynamic from this relationship. And that’s what I’m getting out of it. I’m getting like love and like richness, right? There’s like joy of being with him. That’s a type of transaction I think we all kind of want to move towards in the relationship. It’s a very freeing type of transaction. It’s a very like higher type of, to the extent that some people wouldn’t even call it a transaction, right? It’s just kind of like love.

Julie Hilsen (29:21)
Mm-hmm.

Katarina Polonska (29:22)
Then there’s

the kind of the more lower transaction, which is like, I’m getting X, Y, and Z from this dynamic. I’m getting financial security. I’m getting, you know, validation. I’m getting sexual intimacy. I’m getting like parental support in raising these kids. Like whatever it might be, I’m getting, you know, power and status because I’ve got this bombshell of a wife, or I’ve got this like big wig of a husband who’s, you know, like whatever the kind of the exchange is, I think that there can be kind of a lower version of it.

that’s less conscious, right? Does that make sense?

Julie Hilsen (29:51)
Okay.

but

still valid, like no judgment because, know, it’s, yeah.

Katarina Polonska (29:58)
Still valid, absolutely, absolutely.

And I think that the process of evolution for a couple is to kind of go from like, okay, we have this very baseline dynamic. And I think that baseline dynamic is often very much where we start in relationships, right? We kind of start in this dynamic of like, well, I want to have a family and you’re to be the person I’m to do it with, or I want to have a partner. You’re going to be the person that’s going to kind of fill that void for me. There’s a lot of void filling, right? But I think that as we…

become the most secure, grounded, self-loving versions of ourselves and become whole within ourselves, which we already are, just gonna feel it. Then I think that our kind of grip on the attachment of what we’re getting out of the relationship loosens. Because I think that we kind of then begin to see our partner from a more freeing lens of, well, what I’m really getting out of this is like the pleasure of seeing you thrive, the pleasure and the joy of seeing you someone I really love and care about, like.

ascend to new heights. Does that make sense? I’m kind of being very like, vaguer, I think. I think it’s okay to be at that transactional stage. There’s nothing wrong with it. The question is, are you going to stay there? Or are you looking to evolve to a place where it’s more than just that transaction, and the transaction has a kind of a bigger and more conscious feel to it? Does that make sense? It’s less about like what I’m getting. It’s more about like,

Julie Hilsen (31:23)
Yes.

Katarina Polonska (31:26)
What am I? It’s still like what I’m getting, there’s a difference, right? There’s a difference to feeling that I’m getting this like just joy from seeing this human being live and evolve as opposed to I’m getting like finances and someone to.

Julie Hilsen (31:44)
Yeah, seems what you’re

describing is more like soul nourishment. It’s feeding your higher self, your values and your joy. it’s just like a different, like you said, it’s an elevated level and no judgment. But I love that we put that in the space and challenge accepted and.

Katarina Polonska (31:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Julie Hilsen (32:09)
And I put it out there to anyone who wants to elevate their relationships to that kind. And I think the first part is just identifying, like, maybe I’m the one who’s being transactional and I want to catch myself and elevate my love to that, my relationships.

Katarina Polonska (32:14)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think

I’ll add one more thing to that just in terms of the transactionality. I think if you catch yourself being transactional to the sense in the sense of like your keeping score, right? I’ve like belated this and I did that. It’s okay to be in that like here and there. But if you’re going to stay in that space, that becomes the red flag. Because there’s a lot of science to show that when we become when we start to go into that very transactional space of, well, he gave me this, I’m going to give him that and

Julie Hilsen (32:38)
Yeah.

Katarina Polonska (32:55)
and it becomes very like tit for tat, that’s when relationships start to die, right? Because you’re taking all of that kind of a higher consciousness and that soul nourishment out of it. It goes from being, and I don’t believe that adult love should ever be unconditional, truly, right? But it kind of leans away from that unconditionality and goes more to that, well, I’m gonna do this if you do that for me. And that’s a very scarcity mindset to be within in your relationship, right? It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Julie Hilsen (33:20)
Right, right. It’s

competition basically. That’s, it’s, and like you said, it’s against the universal law of abundance. And when you go against universal law, you are, you aren’t going in the flow. You’re going in deficit. So we have free will and choice to say, I want to believe that I don’t need to compete to be worthy, that I’m valid as my divinity myself.

Katarina Polonska (33:24)
Literally. Yeah.

Yes, precisely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Julie Hilsen (33:48)
Thank you so much for this insight and I just, I’m excited for you and the lives you’re changing and I’m really honored to share your work. So thank you for your time today.

Katarina Polonska (33:59)
Thank you so much for having me.