her story

Kris tells

On love, enmeshment, finding the center of her own life force, and lighting it up.

My ache is my superpower

I have a superpower. It’s that my body lives to discover, understand, purify, express, and empower herself through a ritual of Slow and Wild movement –– and bringing women together to bear witness and hold space for such a beautiful ritual is one of my greatest joys.

Despite my having a shy, highly sensitive side which naturally compels me to introvert, and despite my cerebral, analytical nature that drives me to understand and makes sense of things (especially human behavior on an obsessively deep level), each time I turn the music on and slow way down to tune into my body, there it is again:

This wild and reliable ache to drop out of my head and into my primal self –– letting this body show me her wisdom, desires, impulses, power, and longings.

In that space, I find a 3-dimensional blank canvas where I can explore how my body longs to move; what she needs to honor, awaken, stretch, contract, stoke, quench, acknowledge, and feel; what she has to say with her curves, sounds, emotions, and movements; what truths and secrets she’s ready to reveal to me.

So I dance to attune myself to her, this feminine force of nature, and immerse myself in the sweetest embrace of radical self-acceptance. I dance with other women offering themselves the same attunement and acceptance so we can drop into a shared space of discovery and nourishment and gradually, tenderly cultivate a truly safe and supportive sisterhood.

Through repetition of this ritual, our collective offering of sensual dance becomes a place as much as it is an invitation, reclamation, and recalibration. It becomes our incubation grounds, our sacred temple, our portal back home to ourselves and our own source of truth.

How my history led me to create this method

I was raised Mormon in SC. There was love and affection in the house, but also chaos. Lots of chaos… and very few boundaries. Shame and power battles were the main disciplinary tools at play. Since both parents worked, my three siblings and I had a lot of time and freedom to govern ourselves. Mom parented one way, dad another. Rarely were they on the same page, and even more rarely did I ever witness any affection or intimacy between them.

They were and are wonderful human beings, both of them, and they’re loving and generous grandparents to my kids today. I adore them and don’t fault them for my past, present, or future because I know they love me now and forever and did their best with what they had. But parents can’t teach their children anything that they aren’t fully aware of or equipped with themselves.

So, my siblings and I didn’t learn things like emotional regulation, respect for personal space and property, and how to recognize and protect ourselves from bullying and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. When I was bullied (repeatedly, almost daily some years, by girls I called my closest friends), I carried it like a dark secret, never going to my parents for help, clarity, or comfort. Years later, in high school, I stayed in an abusive relationship with someone who broke my bones, threatened my life, and took the lives of my innocent puppies in order to hurt and control me.

I denied, hid, and buried the pain and shame of it all, becoming more and more disembodied as I got older.

As a parent myself now, I find it so hard to fathom that young me felt it necessary to bear this burden alone. Did I not know I was worthy of protection and support? Did I not think it would be safe or worthwhile to go to an adult I trusted? Did I not trust the adults around me, including my parents? Was I too afraid to be seen as weak or be a burden on anyone?

My parents divorced abruptly when I was 13. My mom moved out and denounced the Mormon religion. I remember specifically the day I noticed she was no longer going to church and asked her about it. She answered calmly, “I don’t know if any of it is true, honey.” I had no ability to process her response. It just felt like my world crumbled in an instant and I had no foundation to stand on.

I split in two that year.

One part of me became the people pleaser, good girl, caretaker, enabler, and fixer in my house, whose job it was to keep up appearances and keep the family happy and (mostly) intact. The other part of me looked to my friends, partying, boys, and doing whatever it took to maintain my place in the popular group at school to shore up my low self-esteem and keep myself distracted and disembodied.

My houses (my mom’s and my dad’s, which I sort of bounced back and forth between) became the hot spots where all my friends spent their weekends since I had the least parental oversight. It’s a wonder we made it out alive, considering the kinds of risks we took and shenanigans we got into––weekend after weekend, year after year. I have no shortage of crazy stories to tell.

But between the continued indoctrination of the religious beliefs, practices, and standards I was expected to abide by (though rarely did) and being regularly compared to other church kids and families who were better at all of it than my siblings and I were, I came to believe I’d never be good enough or lovable as I was.

A set of silent rules looped in my mind.

These became core beliefs, the new “foundation” I stood on:

- It’s not safe to be myself (no one would love or accept the real me). I must hide or deny the parts of myself that would bring my parents shame in order to not be neglected, shunned, or abandoned.
- I’ll be picked on if I’m different or I’m not who others expect me to be. Even my best friends could turn on me in an instant so I always have to be likable and on guard.
- There’s something fundamentally defective about me that makes me attract negative attention.
- It’s not safe to talk about problems and feelings. Best to pretend they don’t exist.
- Anything and everything having to do with sexuality is dark, evil, shameful, and not to be discussed. Best to pretend it doesn’t exist. I cannot be a sexual being because I could be disowned and deemed impure, sick, and unlovable.
- I better marry a rich, preferably Mormon guy one day because I have expensive taste, won’t be capable of providing for myself, and won’t go to heaven otherwise.

Turns out my inner messaging had everything to do with that too. Exercise and calorie counting, the size of jeans I could fit into, how well you could see my 6-pack, how much attention my body got me… those became my measuring sticks for feeling in control and having personal worth.

Falling in love with Psychology at University (to the point of reading my textbook like a steamy novel I couldn’t put down) and finding and getting certified to teach yoga helped tremendously with body acceptance, which enabled me to cope pretty well throughout my twenties and thirties, all things considered. I became a successful yoga, fitness, and dance teacher; then later, a life coach and coach trainer in a business I founded with my husband (an ex-Mormon, go figure).

I stayed busy with work and immersed myself in the world of personal development, psychology, entrepreneurship, and self-care, which effectively buffered my previous self-defeating tendencies. For that 15-year stint and the all-encompassing first few years of parenthood that came after, I managed to function like a (mostly) healthy adult, afford a comfortable lifestyle, and feel reasonably confident, content, grateful, and grounded the majority of the time.

In college, I developed an eating disorder that lasted for years.

Our second child, a daughter, was born with a severe heart murmur. Doctors said she was “failing to thrive”, evidenced by her labored breathing and inability to gain weight. I doubled down on breastfeeding and even gathered extra breast milk from girlfriends. My husband and I quickly realized we’d need to shut our business down. Our hearts weren’t in it anymore, for a number of different reasons, and I needed to pour all of my energy into getting our daughter healthy and strong.

Almost overnight, I went from business owner with 16 employees (including two nannies and a housekeeper) to full-time mom. Without the sense of community, identity, leadership, and security my business had given me, and because I felt terribly ill-equipped for and deeply alone in my new role, I quickly fell into a dark depression and became chronically anxious. But I was too proud and ashamed to admit either. So I pretended they didn’t exist.

Then came my forties––which hit me like a tidal wave.

With no income, we sold everything and moved our 4-person family from our SC beach house into a 1-bedroom apartment at my sister-in-law’s house in UT.

It took us 18 months to reset while my husband reinvented himself. Two years and multiple moves later, after countless arguments with my husband about where we each wanted to live (me in SC and him in CA) and several family and financial crises, we faced the inevitable shock and trauma of our daughter’s emergency open heart surgery.

Thankfully, she experienced a full recovery.

There were moments of respite after that, but they were brief. Several fire evacuations in CA sent my asthmatic son to the ER. I plowed my way through two and a half years of grad school for Marriage and Family Therapy (mostly in pursuit of correcting what felt unhealthy about my own family’s dynamic), but then stopped abruptly when Covid hit (which meant lockdown and homeschooling).

My anxiety and depression (which I slowly allowed myself to acknowledge and face) went in waves but progressively worsened. I was in therapy myself, partly because it was required for schooling but also because I was desperate to understand what was going on with me––why I felt so crazy, so unwell, so not myself… so sad.

Soon after, some tests revealed that I was positive for the antibodies that indicate Lupus and other autoimmune diseases, so I went under the care of a rheumatologist to “watch and see”. A year after yet another cross-country move back to SC, my 17-year marriage blew up in an instant––and I suddenly found myself in a deep state of surrender.

I let go. Probably for the first time ever.

It was all I could do. I had no defenses; no choice but to let it all play out however it was going to. I wasn’t in control––of my reputation, of anyone else’s perspective of me or the situation, or of keeping anyone from getting hurt, including my kids. I was powerless in those areas, the most obvious being that I had zero control of anyone else’s actions or choices, period. I could only be there for myself… not abandon myself. So that’s what I did.

I went searching for all the ways I had abandoned myself over the years and made a promise to stop doing it immediately. The hidden gift in the marital blow-up was the revelation of just how codependent I had become with my husband, and him with me.

Dangerously so.

In the end, it was a close friend who called us on our codependency, not a therapist, and the second he did, I knew he was right. I’d learned about codependency in grad school and it was briefly mentioned in therapy, but even with all my constant answer-seeking regarding the feeling of unwellness I couldn’t shake, it had never really registered that this might be the root of all of my problems. It took NAMING the problem to begin the process of TAMING it. And I’m still on that journey.

If you’re like I was not long ago…

You might know the term codependency as a sort of buzzword for describing relationships with high drama and weak boundaries, but don’t really understand how it works and the kind of damage it can do. As it turns out, the tendency toward codependency is an individual thing that follows a person from relationship to relationship until and unless it is exposed and dismantled.

As it was for both my husband and me, it’s typically rooted in unresolved childhood traumas. One thing leads to another over time and, if not identified and addressed through a process of recovery (especially if the person pairs with another codependent, narcissist, or someone facing addiction or mental illness), the tendency will progress into a compulsive, destructive, and debilitating pattern, albeit invisible (hard to pinpoint) in a lot of cases. It’s not a diagnosis or disorder on its own, but it can lead to serious mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and more––and almost always severely complicates matters.

a set of learned dysfunctional, and self-defeating perspectives and behaviors that emerge in stressful, highly emotional relationships as a means of survival (coping); as stress increases and the individual gets stuck in these less-developed ways of relating (such as having no boundaries, prioritizing others over ourselves, basing personal worth on the judgments of others, and being perfectionistic), it diminishes his or her capacity to initiate or participate in loving, healthy relationships; until the cycle is broken, these patterns of immature relating are typically passed down from generation to generation whether alcoholism and addiction are present or not; often, codependent people do not take care of themselves because they’re so wrapped up in caretaking others; they will become dangerously enmeshed with those they are obsessed with keeping safe (or controlling) so that they can feel safe.

I’ve come to understand codependency as:

The birth of Slow & Wild

Slow & Wild was birthed out of my longing to reclaim myself as an individual; my body, sexuality, power, voice, and wholeness. I have always loved music and dance. They have brought me home to myself again and again when nothing or no one else could. Drawing upon their power now, through this tender, liberating, and recalibrating practice I created for my own healing, is helping me dislodge the codependency from my system. I’m learning new, healthier, more empowering, and authentic ways of being and relating to myself and others.

The practice that Slow & Wild has evolved into is a ritual in which I grant permission for the real me to show up, feel what is real and alive in me, and take up space unapologetically. This is time that I carve out for myself to receive only love, only acceptance, only kindness––from myself––where I bravely reclaim all the parts of myself I had previously ripped apart, exiled, denied, or disowned. Because ultimately, no one can do that for me but me!

I knew when this method was trying to come through me that it wasn’t just for me. Like me, you might find that this movement and self-care practice unbinds you, brings you back to life, and shows you what really matters to you––what is worth fighting for.

You don’t have to identify as a codependent (or any label for that matter) to be drawn to, or benefit from, this practice. Every woman on the planet, to some degree, has suffered from power imbalances in relationships; from silencing her own voice or denying her needs. Our patriarchal society has made sure of that, whether we’ve been aware of it or not.

Each of us has, at some point, forgotten our power, worth, and innate beauty, or abandoned ourselves in an attempt to control a situation, avoid rejection, or keep someone else happy. Now is as good a time as any to commit to a ritual of nurturing, taking full responsibility for, and empowering ourselves to ensure that won’t happen again.