The Afters didn’t come from a business plan. It came from years of trying to understand myself and realizing that the support I needed never really existed in one place.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to understand the psychology of humans, myself included. I became deeply obsessed with astrology when I was younger because it gave me language for parts of myself I didn’t understand yet. I grew up feeling incredibly disconnected from my own identity. There wasn’t a clear emotional roadmap, and a lot of my early experiences shaped a nervous system that felt unsafe more often than not. Religious trauma, inconsistent experiences of love, and later the loss of my father and other significant grief events left me feeling like I was alone and navigating life without a map. There was trauma that shaped how safe it felt to be myself, and I was constantly trying to stabilize rather than explore.
So I started searching.
At first, that search looked like curiosity, then it turned into devotion, and it took many forms. I worked with therapists. I saw energy healers and Reiki practitioners. I tried various life coaches, indulged in every wellness podcast, hypnosis, EFT, somatic work. I subscribed to memberships, took courses, followed different frameworks, and genuinely gave myself to the process. I wasn’t dabbling. I was committed. I followed every thread that felt like it might lead me closer to myself.
And a lot of that work profoundly helped me. It gave me insight, awareness, and language. It helped me understand why I was the way I was, why other people were the way they were, what motivates us, and what we fear.
What it didn’t always give me was more emotional and relational capacity.
For a long time, I didn’t realize how dysregulated my nervous system actually was. I could talk about my emotions, but my body didn’t feel safe enough to fully feel them, especially in the moment. I could understand my patterns, but I still reacted from them. There was so much stored inside me that had never had the space to move through. I would try to explain this as, “my body feels so small, and my emotions feel so big… I don’t have anywhere for them to go.”
It sounds simple now, but newly understanding this felt revolutionary. I realized that nothing else could fully integrate if my nervous system didn’t have the capacity to hold it. I couldn’t explore my internal world deeply for long because part of me was still operating from survival. Healing wasn’t just about awareness or insight. It was about internal safety. It was about learning how to be truly present, how to recognize triggers without becoming consumed by them, and how to allow emotions to move through me instead of getting stuck in my body, creating constant internal tension.
Discovering nervous system regulation changed how I understood healing entirely. My emotional world expanded. Practices like hypnosis and neural rewiring became more effective because my body could actually receive them. Somatic and energy work helped me release what had been stored for years. It was about working across multiple layers of myself. It became obvious that nothing else could truly integrate without it. If my body didn’t feel safe, no amount of insight or spiritual work was going to land the way it was meant to. I started understanding my patterns not as unchangeable flaws, but as adaptive responses.
That’s when the bigger picture started to come into focus.
Over time, I noticed that every meaningful shift in my life touched four different areas: my body, my emotions, my mind, and my energetic or spiritual world. When one of those was ignored, something always felt off. Most healing spaces focused deeply on one or two of these, but rarely all of them together.
I also became very aware that people need different things at different times, and I did NOT want to create another space that asked people to fit into a rigid structure or move through healing in a linear way. Sometimes you need grounding and safety. Sometimes you need emotional depth. Sometimes you need perspective, identity reflection, or energetic clearing.
Because healing isn’t linear. People move in seasons.
That understanding is what became THE AFTERS.
The Afters is built around what I call the Energetic Architecture. It’s a way of recognizing where you are and giving you tools that actually support that phase. Inside the membership, those phases are Restore, Unlock, Cosmic Mirror, and LightSource. Some people stay in one phase for months. Some move between them. Some revisit earlier phases when life shifts again. That flexibility is intentional.
Because what I needed most during my own healing journey wasn’t pressure to become someone new. I needed space to integrate. I needed tools that honored individuality. I needed something that recognized that healing is both deeply personal and deeply human. I wanted to create something that doesn’t rush people or force transformation before their system is ready for it.
When I look back, every version of me led here. Working in the salon for over a decade taught me how to read between the lines, how to sit with people in intimate moments, how to read energy and understand deeper motivations without needing to name it. My own healing journey taught me what it feels like to live without internal safety and what it takes to rebuild it. Moving through different seasons of identity showed me how easy it is to lose yourself when you don’t have the tools to stay grounded.
The Afters is the space I wish I had earlier in my life. I didn’t build it because I had all the answers. I built it because I finally understood the right questions — and because I know how transformative it can be when someone feels supported enough to ask them.
Explore The Afters membership here: https://thekriscollective.com/membership/
