her story
Kris tells
On love, enmeshment, marriage as a laboratory, and finding the center of her own life force.
I was raised Mormon in South Carolina. There was love in the house, but also chaos. Lots of chaos, and very few boundaries. Shame and power battles were the main disciplinary tools. My siblings and I didn't learn emotional regulation, respect for personal space, or how to recognize abuse when it was happening to us.
My dad pulled me aside when I was young and told me he had the most hope for me out of all the kids. That I'd be the one most likely to marry in the temple. It was as if he was saying, "Make my dreams come true, kid. You're the one."
When I was bullied (repeatedly, almost daily some years, by girls I called my closest friends) I carried it like a dark secret. Never went to my parents. To this day, it boggles my mind why. Why did I feel I had to hold that in and deal with it on my own when it was so crushing? On repeat?
Then my parents divorced abruptly when I was 13. My mom left the church. I asked her about it and she said calmly, "I don't know if any of it is true, honey." My world crumbled in an instant. I had no foundation to stand on.
That year, I split. One part of me became that girl my dad had bet on. The people pleaser, good girl, caretaker, fixer. The one whose job it was to keep up appearances and make it all look okay. The other part of me was living a completely different life he couldn't see. In high school, I stayed in a relationship with someone who broke my bones, threatened my life, and killed my puppies to hurt and control me. I told no one.
I split in two when I was thirteen.
In college, I developed an eating disorder that lasted for years.
Exercise, calorie counting, the size of my jeans, how well you could see my abs. Those became my measuring sticks for control and personal worth.
Finding psychology at university (I read my textbooks like steamy novels I couldn't put down) and getting certified to teach yoga helped me see myself a little clearer, more compassionately. 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.
For about fifteen years, I managed to function like a mostly healthy adult. I stayed busy, immersed myself in personal development and entrepreneurship, and felt reasonably confident and grounded most of the time.
Then came my forties — which hit me like a tidal wave.
Our 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. At the same time, our business was too. My husband and I shut it down so we could turn our full attention to getting our daughter healthy and strong.
Almost overnight, I went from business owner with sixteen employees to full-time mom, while my husband rebuilt our income from scratch. I was learning to parent mostly solo, without the nannies, the community, the identity, or the sense of purpose and accomplishment my work had given me. I felt terribly ill-equipped and deeply alone in my new role. I fell quickly into a dark depression and became chronically anxious. But I was too scared and ashamed to name either. So I pretended I was fine.
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 Utah.
That beach house was my dream situation. We'd built the life together, but living on the coast near my family had always been my dream more than his. He'd never wanted to stay long term.
He was thrilled to be back in his home state. I was gutted. That became its own loop in our marriage. We moved cross-country multiple times over the next few years because we couldn't agree on where to live. Every move was another argument, another compromise that didn't feel like compromise, another piece of myself I swallowed to keep the peace.
In the middle of all of it, our daughter needed emergency open heart surgery.
She recovered fully, but the hits kept coming.
Fire evacuations in California, my son in the ER for asthma, grad school for Marriage and Family Therapy that I had to abandon when Covid hit. My depression and anxiety worsened in waves. The longing became all-consuming. I felt like I'd done my life all wrong and couldn't see how to get it back on track. I couldn't access my own desires. I was scared of what I might uncover. Terrified of all the pain I might cause. Terrified to make the wrong decision. To be alone. To try and make it on my own financially. Terrified but not ready to say any of it.
Not slowly. In an instant.
For over twenty years, I had been with the same man. Raising children, building a life, confronting the long arc of what real partnership demands. And inside that marriage I had been living a paradox I couldn't name: deep love alongside resentment. Devotion alongside erotic starvation. Loyalty alongside a quiet, relentless question of whether staying meant self-betrayal.
I searched everywhere for guidance. Therapy, medicine journeys, somatic work, BDSM training, coaching frameworks, spiritual teachings. No single approach held the full complexity of what I was living.
When the marriage blew up, I let go. Probably for the first time ever. I had no defenses. No choice but to let it play out however it was going to. I wasn't in control of my reputation, of anyone's perspective, of keeping anyone from getting hurt. I could only be there for myself. Not abandon myself. So that's what I did.
And then my marriage blew up.
What detonated it, ultimately, was truth. Mine. Finally refusing to stay buried.
I went searching for every way I had abandoned myself over the years and made a promise to stop. The hidden gift in the explosion was the revelation of just how codependent my husband and I had become.
Dangerously so.
It wasn't a therapist who named it. It was a close friend. And the second he did, I knew he was right. It took naming the problem to begin the process of taming it.
The marriage didn't end. We took the pieces and started building a new one. It became the laboratory.
Some ruptures nearly broke us. Some forced us to grow. Others led us to an intimacy and pleasure we’d never yet known. Over time I discovered something few relational frameworks address directly: that clarity doesn't come from forcing decisions, but from reducing the noise of shame, fantasy, fear, and conditioning until the body's deeper signal can finally be heard.
That discovery became the foundation of the Slow & Wild Method.
It wasn't built from a tidy ending. It was forged inside the mess. The patterns, the loops, the reckonings, and the repairs. What I offer, I had to synthesize myself, because no single resource I found went deep enough, or held enough, or told the truth quite hard enough. From the somatic to the relational, the shadow work to the power dynamics, the ruthless to the tender... I distilled it all into something wholly my own.
It took a lifetime to build. Now it's yours.
Interested in working with me privately?
You’re worth fighting for, you know. Take yourself back.
♥
My work integrates coaching, relational energetics, somatic movement, and private Domme sessions to reach the places talk alone can't touch.