Episode 23 - Part 1:Shedding Shame and Embracing Authenticity: Krista Oakes' Journey

Are you holding onto something you are ashamed of? What would happen if you shared your secret? 

In this episode of 'Life After Fear,' host Courtney Schoch welcomes special guest Krista Oakes, a mindfulness coach, author, public speaker and yoga teacher who shares her journey of overcoming shame and embracing authenticity. Krista shares the profound impact of her book, 'Shedding Shame: Finding Freedom to Live An Authentic Life,' which explores her life as a child of two gay parents during a time of deep societal stigma and secrecy. Krista provides insights into the writing process, her emotional challenges, and the cathartic experience of revisiting her past.

Connect with Krista Oakes

Krista's Website 

Krista's Book - Shedding Shame: Finding Freedom to Live an Authentic Life

Facebook @yogawithkristaoakes

Instagram @daytonayoga

YouTube @DaytonaYogawithKrista

Learn more about your host Courtney Schoch

Transcript

Courtney: Hello, friends. Welcome to episode 23 of Life After Fear, Redefine Your Limits with Courtney Schoch. This is where you confront your fears and transform your life. 

Today I am excited for the evolution of the podcast. Occasionally, I'm going to be featuring people who have overcome fears, overcome obstacles, and have really made a difference. They're putting good back into the world and I will be sharing their stories.

I have a very, very special guest today. Her name is Krista Oakes. She is incredibly inspiring. For over twenty years, Krista has been guiding people on the path of mindfulness, self-discovery, and intentional living. As the author of Shedding Shame, Finding Freedom to Live an Authentic Life, an inspiring speaker, an experienced registered yoga teacher, and a mindfulness coach she's worked with thousands of individuals through classes, workshops, and retreats, helping them cultivate their inner peace, self-trust, and alignment in both body and life. Krista's approach blends the wisdom of yoga's philosophy, meditation, and lifestyle coaching with a practical down to earth style, always infused with warmth, humor, and a deep respect for each other's unique journey.

She believes that mindful living isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself with honesty, awareness, and compassion. I think that is absolutely beautiful.

Krista: Thank you. 

Courtney: Yeah, it just gives me chills. I wanted to make sure that I read that so I did not goof it up because there's so much packed in this.

Krista: Yeah, yeah. 

Courtney: That I wanted to make sure that we hit all the highlights.

Thank you. So, I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. Thank you so much. I'm sure that your insights and experiences are going to be well-received by the listeners, and they're going to share your story. Krista and I met through a mutual friend, Traci, she's also a pilot. 

I'm going to just dive right in. I read your book. It's titled, Shedding Shame, Finding Freedom to Live An Authentic Life. It came out 2024. I read this book and I think I told you in the email, I got all the feels.

Yeah. You know, I mean, I was saddened. I was, I was inspired, I was touched, I was outraged with some things. What brought you on the path, or what made you decide to write this book? 

Krista: Ah, it's definitely been a journey. I actually wrote the first draft of this book, after I got divorced, I had some time by myself.

My oldest son had gone off to school and it was therapy. I just started to journal and began to write. Now, I did have a desire to write a book. I did know that my story was unique, and so I always had this dream of sharing my story, but certainly at that moment I didn't know what that looked like. .

So I just started to begin to write my story from the beginning and it felt really good. 

Courtney: How long did it take you to write the book? 

Krista: Honestly, that first iteration, the first draft, probably a month or two. But then what happened was I set it aside. It was still too raw; it was too emotional.

My kids were young. I was in a transition time. And what happened over the next few years is every once in a while I would think about it, and I'd pull it out of my file 'cause I had printed a copy and I would read through it and periodically I just said, yep, now's not the time for me to do anything with this.

I was good to read it, put it back in the file, and do that several times. And then, I guess it was really 2023, about a year before it came out, I pulled it out and said, "It's time." I just knew that when I read it again, I said, "I need to do something with this." I was scared, and at that moment, I thought, "I want to find the courage to do this."

And so it took me about a year from then to publishing. It probably doubled, you know, just rewriting it now, writing it for the sense of somebody else might be reading this and really trying to connect the dots. And it was hard because when you write your own story, I found in order to really have it come through and be authentic.

I really had to kind of put myself back in those places again. And that was a really interesting challenge and caused me to then kind of reprocess everything and speak to other members of my family and people who were in the book. And so it was really cathartic all over again because it was like time to just really, bring it to reality.

And so that process was about a year and again, very therapeutic. And then a year later it came out.

Courtney: That's awesome. I remember writing my book and putting myself in that place and then having to pull out and almost cleanse yourself. It is cathartic and it oddly, it's kind of disturbing, you know, when you get back in touch with those emotions.

Krista: Yes, and some of those memories you didn't realize like how maybe dysfunctional or how hurtful or maybe how triumphant Yeah, they really were, but it ends up, really taken a toll on you. 

It does cause you to get this perspective, then, right? Years later it's like, wow, did that really, did that really happen?

Did I really feel that way? Like, did I really react that way? You kind of relive it and re-question it with a different perspective. And yet when you're trying to write it from, 'cause I did keep mine as I wrote it seven years before, so I kept it present day of when I wrote it. And so it was an interesting process of reliving, rehashing with that new perspective, but trying to keep it writing it authentically to the time that I wrote it. 

Courtney: Hmm. And I'm curious: how did you feel about the edits about that whole experience?

Krista: Yeah, uh, that's a great question. I was really, you know, it was okay. It was okay. I had somebody that I worked with, so first of all, I had a very dear friend who does some editing who read it first for me and gave me some reallybrilliant support and help about, okay.

Yes, I think you can do something with this, which was nice just to have that affirmation. And then, when I started sharing it to really get it out there, it was interesting to hear the questions that people had and the things that they didn't understand or wanted to know more, which was really interesting because I read it over and rewrote it before I gave it

to the editor, I would sort of write something and be like, ah, that's not very interesting. Or no one really wants to hear that story, so I'm just gonna kind of gloss over that. And so it was really interesting having her then say, "I wanna know more about that. Why didn't you tell me more about that?" And so it was actually kind of affirming in that way and like, okay, so I can tell you more and you do want to know more.

And, and that of course, also challenged me.

To really have to discover more about that story, whatever it was that, but it was, for the most part, it was a positive process. I remember myself saying to my friend, like, ah, maybe I shouldn't write about this. Maybe I should leave this part out.

And her saying, "No, this is important. This needs to stay in there." So it was more me just sort of questioning a lot of those pieces that I had written about originally and others sort of validating for me that they were important and that they helped complete the story. 

I think everyone has experienced shame or holds onto it and processes it differently.

Even if we don't call it that

Exactly.

Or aren't aware of that, that's what it is.

Courtney: What do you think that about shame is often misunderstood?

Krista: I think that the thing about shame is it's really what we are, what we wanna keep hidden from others because we worry about what others will think of us.

I think shame can be something. Some of us either naturally think about it as something we've done and sometimes it's also something that has been done to us. I don't know that when we think about shame initially, that both of those possibilities always come into play. None of us want to identify ourselves as having shame.

It was interesting even working with the title because most of us, I think wouldn't go gravitate and say, oh yeah, I have a lot of shame I'm holding onto. 

Courtney: Do you think sometimes people think shame is synonymous with victim? 

Krista: Yes. I think that is definitely a go-to. There's so many different ways to think about shame and when you shame somebody, you are putting them down, you're putting them in a closet, you're putting them in a negative light. Right? It's like, I'm shaming you, I'm pushing you away. You're not acceptable; you're not okay. You're not good. And that naturally makes that person feel victimized.

I think that the victim mentality goes definitely hand in hand with shame. Because usually, when we have shame, we blame ourselves. We feel insignificant, we feel not enough. We feel like we've done something wrong. We feel it's to blame for whatever it is. And so it's natural for us to feel like the victim and on the other side when we are the one doing the shaming you know, we're really pushing that person into a place of you're the problem. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question? 

Courtney: Yeah, it makes sense. And you definitely have, uh, lived the experience of holding onto shame for a long, long time, with some family dynamics.

Krista: Yeah.

Courtney: That we can either go into or not go into. 

Krista: Yeah. Oh, I think it's important. Yeah. 

Courtney: And so maybe you could just give a brief overview that kind of brought you to this, you know, you write this book, Shedding Shame. What was the shame that you were holding onto?

Krista: Yeah. So when I wrote the book, I realized there was a lot of shame that I was holding onto.

But the biggest shame that I felt was growing up. I am the biological child of two gay parents. So, what that means is both my Mom and my Dad are gay. They grew up at a time when barely people didn't even know or use the word gay and lesbian. And so when they were in college is where they met.

I think that the idea of identifying yourself as gay or acknowledging that in any way was just unacceptable.

So they got married because they really did care about each other. They were really good friends, and they kind of, I think, thought, well, this must be what it means to be in love, right? Because, and again, I'm not gay, I don't have those feelings, but what I understand from my parents is that you just push all those feelings aside, so you don't really acknowledge 'em.

So when they met, and they really fell in love, they realized, okay, well, I guess this is what we do, and this is what it is, and so let's get married. And they did. And they had my sister and myself. I don't know how accurate this is, but I think the fact that they both were struggling with those feelings almost drew them together in some way. But they really did have a very deep friendship and love for each other, but after a few years of being married they, I think it was really my Mom first who said, I think I could be happier. I'm not sure this is really what I want. She started meeting women that she was having feelings for and wanted to live happy.

Looking back, what a huge leap she took to say, you know, I think maybe I want to be more happy and I'm not living my authentic self. So she went to my Dad and said, I think I may be gay. He said, oh, well, I think I might be too.

Courtney: Never, I'm sure. In your mother's imagination, would she have thought that that was the response?

Krista: Yeah, I don't think she did. I don't think she did. And I think that they thought for a while that they might be able to somehow manage that still as a family, but ultimately decided to get divorced.

And so when I was growing up at a time when still this wasn't an acceptable thing and certainly raising children as gay people was definitely not acceptable.

So when I was pretty young, I wound up telling somebody on the playground that I have two moms, and from that moment on, we got harassed and bullied and ridiculed and teased, and it was horrible. They probably culminated in my Mom's car being keyed and when we started having damage to property, we basically decided to move.

My Mom and her partner made the decision. When we moved, we really just kind of made this family pact that we were going to keep this a secret. That it wasn't acceptable to share that we were risking safety, a hard life, and ridicule.

Courtney: How old were you?

Krista: Um, I was, this was probably, I was probably around seven. Okay. Seven or eight when we moved. 

Courtney: And how did you, do you, you recall the feelings like being that young and having to move? Because you know you have your two moms essentially. Yeah. Like loving each other, but now you have to move. Yeah. 'cause there's this hatred.

Courtney: Did you understand that? 

Krista: No, I don't think I understood the hatred as well at that time. It's more, what I remember is an extension of what I felt all during my upbringing, which was that our family unit's amazing. You know, my Mom and her partner Linda, they're still together after 40 years. And my Dad and his partner Reese and my sister and I, like, there was just so much love in our family.

My parents stayed really good co-parents. We would spend holidays together and birthdays together. You know, my Dad, we were about an hour apart, so my Dad would drive down for concerts and events. My Mom and Linda were both social workers. My Dad was a psychologist, so we, we were communicating, we were processing, we were doing all the things, but it was like that was what was happening on, in, in the family. But to the world, we were not okay, and to the world, we couldn't share what was happening. 

So we learned to keep the secret. We didn't talk about it with friends. We didn't tell boyfriends. We would invite a friend over to the house, and there was always this anxiety.

Back in the day, it was like, come over to your house, let me show you around, you know? And it was really fearful to do that because what if they found out? What if they knew and I grew up just knowing I couldn't talk about these things?

Feeling like I couldn't talk about these things. We made a decision not to talk about these things for fear of what it meant for all of us.

And so Linda was just a friend of the family who helped out and needed a place to stay. And poor Linda, she was devalued in the family to everyone else. She was just this family friend. Sometimes she was an aunt, whatever the cover story was. But we really got good at having a cover story. Got really good at getting to know people and trying to be yourself. And at the same time, knowing you had this whole big secret that you wouldn't share with people.

And it was hard. It was, it sounds really hard. Hard. 

Courtney: And Linda did not have children, correct? 

Krista: Correct. And really, in some ways, the harder part in our family unit was more typical step-parenting stuff. Because Linda was a stepparent and, I'd say that was more of the challenge than the fact that it were two women or two moms. My parents were amazing. It was like this weird thing to try to wrap my head around. , My parents are loving, they're kind, they're, you know, supportive.

They're doing everything, quote unquote - right. You know, without the manual and yet everything in society is telling us that you can't be a good parent. That this isn't acceptable, that this isn't okay. Mm-hmm. And it really culminated. When my Dad, actually Reese first was diagnosed HIV positive. And it was heartbreaking, devastating because we also knew that meant likely that my Dad was gonna be positive too.

They did both wind up passing of AIDS and that was even worse because at this time AIDS was still not understood.People were scared about how AIDS was transmitted, how you could get it, the stigma of having AIDS and just the amount of people at that time, the amount of men that were just dying.

It was so, so heartbreaking, and we were afraid to talk about it. 

Courtney: So how old were you at this time?

Krista: I was in college and this was in the eighties? Yeah. 88 is when I graduated high school, so from 80, Reese died in 89, and then my Dad died in 92 and I was in college during that whole time. 

And when Reese died, I didn't tell anybody. I was away from my family. This was before cell phones, before FaceTime, before all that kind of stuff. And I couldn't talk about it. So it was like this grief that I couldn't explain to my friends. And actually, I was talking to one of my college friends the other day, and she recalls, she said, you know, I remember when Reese died. You said like he was a family friend, and he, you know, died of diabetes, and I remember feeling like it didn't add all up. Like, I didn't really understand what was going on with you. And that was just a year or two she shared that with me. And that there, that was it. There was this disconnect 'cause not only was I grieving the loss of Reese, but I was grieving, pregrieving the potential loss of my father not knowing what was gonna happen there.

So I got really, really good at just keeping the secret and feeling shameful for something that didn't make sense. 

Courtney: Did you ever wonder if other people had secrets that they were hiding? Did you ever think about that? If you met someone, did you have that feeling, you know, like, do other people live like I do? Shoving stuff down and, and pretending?

Krista: I think during that time, I really believed I was the only one. 

I felt that feeling that nobody else could possibly be going through what I'm going through.

That this secret felt so big, and even now, looking back, it's so strange to talk about it 'cause I do have such a different perspective on it. But when I put myself back there in that moment as that. You know, 10-year-old, 15-year-old, 20-year-old. It was such a big secret and I held onto it with everything I had, right?

This was the secret that nobody could find out, and it felt so big that I was sure nobody else felt the same way. Nobody else was hiding secrets. Certainly not as big as mine. Right? 

Courtney: Right,right. And that's a big secret. 

Krista: And I think that's the challenge: shame makes us feel alone and that we're the only one. And certainly at that time, to be very honest, at this point in my life, I have only met one other person. Who had two biological gay parents. That part's pretty unusual. 

Courtney: That is very unusual. You're the only one that I've met. That has that. But then again, I don't know who else may still be hiding that secret.

Krista: That's right, that's right. That's really true. You know that's really true. I mean, I met other women, couples, and male couples that my parents were friends with and things like that, and some of them had children, usually from a straight marriage. They had children and got divorced, but usually, one of them was gay, and the other one was straight.

So I really, honestly, I think it wasn't until I had that perspective and started talking about it that I realized, oh wait, other people have things that they hide too. When I was in it. I don't think I had that perspective. 

Courtney: I'm wondering if you dealt with it on a spiritual level because your Dad was very spiritual, correct? Your mother as well, or not quite to the extent that your father,

Krista: It was just different. My Mom actually had a strong religious background that then she tried to unravel, but they had a strong spiritual connection because they were both interested in spirituality and theology. Their backgrounds were just a little different. But certainly today my Mom is extremely spiritual as we use that term.

Courtney: Did that help get you through some of this and lead you into yoga and things like that? Like what role did that play and when did that start becoming a part of your life? 

Krista: What helped most during that time when I was holding the secret

was the love and the compassion and the understanding for my parents, which in my mind is spirituality. Mm-hmm. Right. They had enough self-awareness and ability to be there as a support, even as we were holding The Secret 'cause they were holding the secret too. I mean, they weren't talking about it. I remember them trying to find people that were also gay. 

So, growing up, my Dad would listen to meditation tapes. He always said he could channel and he would sit and, you know, channel, self-proclaimed channel, or he would do yoga. I'd see him doing yoga.

But when I was a kid, I thought most of that stuff was kind of pokey, you know? You know, you're always embarrassed of your parents and what they do, and like, okay, I don't know what all that's about. So it was interesting when I found yoga. It was like a light bulb went off. Wow, this is pretty full circle.

This is what my Dad was doing all that time. This is what helped him manage a family, being divorced, being gay, being diagnosed, all of those things. I think that yoga and, spirituality and some sort of faith is a foundation for how to manage all these different things that come up in life. And so I don't know if I understood it from exactly that language until I was older and I started discovering yoga and I really fell on yoga.

I became a fitness instructor after I had my own children and took a weekend yoga class, thought this might be fun. I needed CEUs. And it was there that I realized, oh, this is something more. This is something special. And I actually believe I was intuitively teaching yoga, but I didn't understand it in that language at that time. And so once I had that, I started incorporating it more and more into my classes and seeing the eyes open and the"aha"s that would come from mindfulness and self-awareness.

So, I went and got my official certification and decided to teach yoga exclusively. Then, I discovered that yoga as a physical practice is just one aspect. And discovering that from the philosophies, from the teachings, from living that really the goal is to live mindfully, and yoga on the mat is one tool to help us do that. Because it's great to be able to do that stuff on the mat, but you don't wanna leave your mat, go out the front door and be a jerk, or forget everything that you just paid attention never take a deep breath, right? 

It's a practice that we do on the mat so that we are better when we're off the mat, so that we can have more self-awareness when we're off of the mat.

Courtney: Wow! What a powerful conversation so far, and Krista and I are just getting started. This story deserves time, and we've got so much more to share.

So we are going to hit pause here and pick up next week for part two. You do not want to miss that episode. 

Thank you, friends, for joining us today on Life After Fear.

If you found value in today's podcast, subscribe and share it with someone who could benefit. Until next time, keep reaching for the sky and never settle for less than what you can be. Take care, everyone, and I'll see you soon.