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Kristen Naver has been married for 16 years, a pretty long time.
But in some ways, her marriage feels brand new.
Honestly, I don't know that my husband's ever actually known me, because I've never actually showed up authentically in our relationship, right.
It's always been, how can I be a good wife?
And how can I minimize conflict and make sure that he has what he needs?
And so now that I'm sort of exploring these things and bringing myself out and having conversations that I would probably wouldn't have been having before,
It's been really remarkable in terms of how much more connected we feel to each other.
It can be scary to admit that your usual way of doing things no longer works for you.
But sometimes being honest about it.
Saying the uncomfortable thing makes life better for you and your relationship.
And Krista should know she's a sex therapist, so she's an expert at talking about intimate, uncomfortable things.
It validates that idea that we can't actually connect with other people unless we are being vulnerable with other people.
In the course of doing this work professionally, in talking to people about their lives, their partnerships and the identities they hold in those partnerships, Krista discovered that her most important client it was herself.
From the Boston Globe and PRX, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Years ago, I saw Dr. Ruth arguably the world's most famous sex therapist, speak at an event.
She made a joke about what her late husband used to say about their sex life.
Apparently he would deliver that old one-liner, the cobbler's children have no shoes.
Get it?
Dr. Ruth was out in the world talking to everyone about good sex.
And her husband was like, while she's doing that, I'm at home not having it.
He was kidding, of course.
And so was Dr. Ruth. the joke got big laughs from the audience I was in.
But I figure there's always some truth in that kind of statement.
Experts tend to be experts for other people.
I know financial reporters who are terrible at managing their own money.
I've known people in construction who fix up other people's homes but ignore their own rotting porches.
As an advice columnist, I like to think that I can give pretty good advice to someone with a relationship problem, but I know I can be clueless sometimes about how to deal with a similar problem myself.
Basically, we're all cobblers who sometimes walk around barefoot.
Today's story is about a person who's been helping other people her whole life and only recently figured out how she can also use her own specialty to help herself in ways she never imagined.
My name is Dr. Krista Knobber.
I'm a psychologist and a certified sex therapist supervisor in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.
I am 43 and I have a husband and a 10-year-old son, and we have a sheepadoodle and my pronouns are she, her.
I found Krista and her practice online when I was looking for experts on sex therapy.
We wound up talking a lot about her own life.
To be clear, I don't mean her sex life.
That's not what she means when she describes showing up differently in her marriage.
For Krista, it's bigger than that.
It's about finding inspiration from her work with others to confront some things that she's never really faced.
Before Krista tells you her story, I want her to explain what she actually does as a sex therapist.
So a sex therapist very simply is a therapist who knows how to talk about sex better than other therapists.
We know more about sex.
We can guide the conversation more.
We don't touch our clients.
We maintain the same kinds of boundaries that any sort of mental health therapist might.
And most sex therapists actually started being therapists before they started being sex therapists.
And there is a specific license that says you are officially this, a sex therapist?
So you can practice sex therapy without getting certified as a sex therapist.
I'm a little biased as a certified sex therapist myself.
It's a pretty rigorous process to get certified.
Certification is done by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists.
Licensed sex therapists like Krista have to get 150 hours of education in this specialty.
They go through attitude assessments, special training to make sure they're sex positive, and they learn about the wide range of issues that people seek help with.
The things that I see in my practice tend to be related to any type of sexual dysfunction where...
My body parts aren't working the way I want them to when I'm being sexual or desire.
Discrepancy in relationships where one person has higher desire than the other person.
And that usually causes conflict in the relationship.
It could be related to sexual boundaries, such as I continually keep engaging in these sexual behaviors that don't really fit with my value system.
In addition, we also do a lot of work with clients who are working to understand and experience, explore and potentially transition their gender identities, because gender is inherently related to sex and sexuality.
As an advice columnist, I get a lot of letters from people.
And usually it's about differences in sex drives in a couple.
Like I recently had a letter from a woman going through perimenopause.
So I was like, hey, girl.
Hey, girl.
But she was like I feel we're dating during this time because my sex drive is lacking compared to what it used to be.
That seems to be a thing you could go to a sex therapist about.
Oh, absolutely.
Our bodies are always consistently changing over time.
And a lot of the work that we do is adaptation to the changes we're experiencing in our body, in addition to how our heads and how we think about those changes impact the functioning itself.
It makes a lot of sense that Krista became a sex therapist.
She is a very open person.
That started at home. when she was young.
I am from a small town in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Rapids, actually.
It's right in the center of the state.
I grew up with my two parents, a mom and a dad, and then my sister.
My mom was a social worker, and she worked for the county doing investigations for abuse and neglect, And so she was very big on making sure that we knew what our body parts were.
We were comfortable talking to her about, you know, any kind of weird sexual things.
My sister and I would get as inappropriate as we possibly could at the table in the effort to try to make my parents uncomfortable, which rarely worked.
I mean, they were super chill about everything.
From a very early age, Krista learned to be independent.
My father was he worked for the jail.
He was a corrections officer and he suffered from severe and persistent mental illness.
But You know it was sort of that dynamic of you know, my mom working full time and taking care of us two kids and my dad doing the best he can to manage working full time while also managing his mental illness, while also parenting.
It was a bit stressful at home.
And then you add in my sister to the mix, who I love dearly, but she got the short end of the stick with most things in life in terms of trauma history.
And she had some struggles that my parents had to focus on and had to deal with.
You know, she was the one who needed stuff.
I was not the one who needed stuff.
And so I, you know, grew up believing or understanding about myself that, that I was very independent.
When you were young, what did you think your relationship would be like when you were older?
Like, did you imagine getting married?
Did you think you definitely have kids?
Yes, of course, because that's what people do, right?
That's what society tells us we're supposed to do.
I think I'll bring in another piece to this.
I've become more aware of recently is sort of the ways in which growing up, being a fat person and being a fat person most of my life has impacted me throughout the course of my life.
And I think because of some of that.
Of course, I imagined growing that, like everybody, I would grow up and I would get married and have kids, but it probably wasn't going to be someone I was attracted to.
It probably wasn't going to be someone who really wanted to be with me.
The vision was more of a settling kind of scenario, which sounds awful because everybody has their own worth and value, right.
But in my mind it was always this feeling of well, that's what happens when you're fat in society, is you don't really get to choose.
Krista doesn't have romantic relationships in high school.
Then she goes to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has one romance that's complicated.
She has some not-so-great first dates.
But she meets good friends.
She majors in psychology, influenced by her mom.
Krista does okay in school.
She graduates from college in 2003.
I certainly didn't excel.
You know, I just remember procrastination was the name of the game.
You know, how long can I go before I actually have to sit down and write this paper?
And then usually that meant all-nighters did well enough to graduate, probably not well enough to get into a PhD program, which was sort of where I was headed.
And so, yeah, I ended up taking a couple of years off after that to kind of figure things out.
Krista moves to North Carolina with two friends and waits tables.
She researches graduate programs she can get into, ways to pursue the field of mental health.
It's here where she meets the man who would become her husband.
This was 2004.
I met him on Match.com.
And this was before that was a thing that people felt okay about.
I was like, yeah, I'm going to get out there.
I'm going to date.
I know I'm leaving at some point.
I don't need to meet anybody, but I'll get some dinners and have a good time.
He was the fifth person that I met and the last person that I met.
It was the most amazing first date that I've ever had.
They go to a place called the Mellow Mushroom, a chain popular in the South for its groovy pizza.
There was just great conversation.
He's He's just got this wonderful warmth to his face, this warm smile.
He's got these giant brown eyes and these cute little chubby cheeks.
Oh, he would kill me if I said that.
But we just started hanging out after that a lot, and we didn't stop hanging out.
Krista applies to the Chicago School of Professional Psychology to get a doctorate in psychology.
She and her partner stay together long distance.
In Chicago, she discovers a strong interest within psychology in multiculturalism and diversity.
Tell me more about that area of concentration and what appealed to you about it and sort of tangibly what that means.
I think I'd always been interested in social justice things, you know, recognizing the wrong in society, not really having a place to go with that or a thing to do.
I mean, I had some attempts at protesting and things like that when I was in college, but nothing really sustained.
And so grad school was actually a great time for me to just learn more.
So I was part of a multiculturalism and diversity study group and we would do some extra readings and explore some of these concepts understanding privilege and how we all fit into that and how we can bring that into our practice.
In 2007, in the middle of getting this five-year degree, Krista and her partner get married.
The wedding is in Krista's hometown in Wisconsin.
It's a lovely affair.
Krista's husband is Indian, so he has many friends and family members fly in from abroad.
About two years later, Krista gets an internship in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, her husband, who works in data security, winds up with a job in Minneapolis.
So over time, she starts to look for opportunities there.
And that's when she finds postdoctoral work that seems, well, perfect.
Back in the day, when she was a teen, Krista told her parents that she planned to be a sex therapist, to see if she could shock them.
Of course it didn't work.
They were never shocked.
But as a grown-up, she realizes, wait, I am actually interested in this.
Pleasure, self-acceptance, transparency.
That's what Krista's all about.
She winds up in the University of Minnesota's program in human sexuality, now called the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health.
She starts seeing individual clients pretty soon after she gets there.
She co-leads group therapy sessions.
She also does work in a sex offender treatment group, which is a pretty heavy experience for her.
It was so invigorating and so amazing to be able to understand that there are always factors that contribute to why people do the things that they do and make the choices that they do.
And to be able to see the complexity of these humans and understand holding that they are worthwhile and valid human beings and also that they made some choices that are pretty problematic and they hurt people.
And being able to provide a space for them to exist in all of their complexity and also help them heal was just really, really invigorating for me.
During this time, her marriage grows.
She and her husband take road trips.
They get into riding bikes because Minneapolis has very nice trails.
They buy their first house.
They have a son in 2013.
The next year, Krista's husband gets a job in North Carolina, not far from where they met, so they move.
After adjusting to the new place and a parenthood, Krista starts seeing clients again under the umbrella of various local counseling and psychology practices.
It doesn't take long before she realizes she can go out on her own.
Krista gets this idea.
What if I founded an inclusive sex-positive therapy center in this North Carolina town, in the Bible Belt, where people need to feel safe and seen?
I never wanted to be a business owner.
I never wanted to be in private practice.
I always wanted to work for someone because that's where I thought my strengths were.
Just doing the therapy, getting my notes done, going home.
And then I met a friend who ended up becoming our board president at a practice that we were working at.
And when I stopped working at that practice, I was kind of looking for something else.
And he said, you should probably start something.
And I said, you're full of shit.
I'm not doing that.
And then he convinced me to do it.
So in 2016 Krista, with the help of her business-minded friend, opens the Carolina Sexual Wellness Center in Cary, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh.
It was me in a little dark shoebox office and just starting to see my clients and trying to get everything in place.
Krista decides early on that the health care she's providing has to be accessible.
That means they'll take insurance and they'll operate as a non-profit.
She also decides to make sure all of our clinicians can get training to become certified sex therapists while they're working.
One of the things that I really wanted to do with the organization, in addition to making sex therapy services accessible, was to make sure that we were providing opportunities for clinicians who wanted to be sex therapists, who were passionate about it, to just create a more direct pathway for them.
By 2020...
The center has about 10 clinicians with roughly 150 clients among them.
At this point, Krista is helping people live their best lives using her expertise on boundaries, self-acceptance and communication.
And she is living her best life.
Well, kind of.
In truth, Krista is a bit like the cobbler I talked about at the beginning.
Like those of us who are so good at helping others that we fail to see the help we need ourselves.
Krista explains... after the break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, we're back.
So it's 2021.
Krista is thriving on the outside, but some things feel off on the inside.
She can't name it exactly, but there's an unhappiness, a feeling that she's not entirely herself.
She wonders what is wrong.
She figures it out in steps and with help.
The first step comes that year.
Krista starts seeing a new therapist.
And I originally saw her actually because I was struggling with food and my relationship with food.
And she was an eating disorder specialist, among other things.
But getting in with her, it was about way more than food.
And I think that's the thing that I've realized is just, it's my whole life.
It's not just about the food.
It's never just about the one thing.
It's never just about the sex when it comes to sex therapy.
It's never just about the food.
It's never just about the sex.
With this new therapist, Krista starts opening up in a way she hasn't done before, about the way she seems to put others first, about how she perceives herself and her body, how she's always keeping busy to avoid the uncomfortable.
The work that I've done with her has been hugely beneficial to me and eye-opening.
And I don't know that we're even on the same page all the time, my therapist and I, you know, but I think that she in a sense has set me on my own path of self-growth.
Working with this therapist helps Krista identify what she needs to change in order to be happier, to be more at peace.
A key part of that is shifting her perception of her own body.
She's heard about body positivity for years and understands from her work the importance of self-acceptance.
But when she discovers the concept of fat liberation on social media, it feels like a major breakthrough.
This becomes her next catalyst for change.
Fat liberation is a social justice issue that is connected to all other social justice issues, because there's a whole bunch of overlap between disability justice and racial justice and fat liberation and fat bodies.
Our entire society is structured through the lens of fat is a bad thing.
And what does that do to fat people?
You know, how do we, if I'm going through life realizing that my body is bad because it is fat and I don't necessarily fit into the clothes, or I don't have the choices that other people have access to, people in smaller bodies, or I don't fit into airline seats or seats at restaurants, or I have to consistently worry about?
You know, can something, is something going to accommodate my body, or isn't it?
There's a lot of stress related to that.
And so Fat liberation is really about essentially allowing fat people to exist, creating a world where fat people are normal and they're not looked down upon and they have the same opportunities as everybody else.
This understanding, by the way, is very much a work in progress, but it has been deeply meaningful for Krista.
I think that opened up the door for me to say well, if it's okay for me to be fat, How else is it okay for me to be?
That was sort of the portal to really doing more of a deeper self-exploration.
This brings us to her next step.
Krista figures out something else about herself.
And it's thanks, indirectly, to her son.
Last year, I was diagnosed with ADHD.
I have the story that a lot of middle-aged moms have where their kids get diagnosed with ADHD.
And then they, through that process of understanding more about ADHD, they start to recognize it in themselves.
This explains so much to Krista, like the difficulty she had with school, her anxiety why she was always overcommitting.
She learns that people with ADHD tend to have different relationships with food.
They can have trouble going to sleep sometimes.
They can agree to too much.
Just knowing this diagnosis is revelatory.
It starts to change how she conceptualizes every one of her struggles and how she plans her days.
During this journey of self-discovery, Krista finds the room to see a larger theme, one that's connected to childhood.
She spends her professional life guiding people as they wrestle with self-worth, establish boundaries and yeah, have a great life when it comes to sexual pleasure.
And yet, she's been confusing her own pleasure with pleasing others.
It'd been like this since she was a kid, when everyone had to focus on other people.
She fended for herself, maybe to a fault.
For a while, I was sort of marveling at the fact that I became a psychologist.
I got into a profession where my job is to hold everybody else's emotions and experiences and absolutely keep mine out of the room, because I think that's how I have lived my life really.
I think my therapist was probably the first one to sort of introduce that and to tie in my history how I grew up into how I exist right now, in in my relationships with other people.
I think she really had to beat me over the head with the fact that you showing up as yourself in your relationships is the key to you healing.
I think initially I didn't really know what that meant because of course I'm showing up as myself.
Who else would I be showing up as?
The more Krista works with her therapist, the more she realizes that even in her relationship with her husband she's a people pleaser.
It's not that her husband asks her to behave this way.
She just does this because it's always been her default.
I am much more likely to, rather than fight for something.
If I truly believe that we need to do something else, I'm much more likely to say okay, we can do that.
We can do what you want to do.
And I think that that has been detrimental to me for most of my life in that I think that builds up.
I think the Stuffing what I actually want, or what I actually need, or what I actually believe, I think has caused a lot of emotional pain over the years.
All of a sudden, because of help from a new therapist, an ADHD diagnosis and her own commitment to making things better, she's starting to do what she's been telling her patients to do for years.
Speak your needs.
Pursue happiness.
Know yourself.
I want to ask this without projecting... all over it.
But like so you know, I come from a family where my late mother took on too much and and then was like oh no, I'm overwhelmed and I can't do this.
Right.
And then my sister and I have now noticed that we will people please or and become overwhelmed and overcommit and over accommodate and then hit a wall and then be like how did this happen to me?
And, And maybe the people around us are like, well, I didn't ask for this.
I didn't mean to.
And it's really.
We are looking at each other like oh, if it isn't the consequences of our own actions.
And I bring this up to say that by realizing this, I know you don't mean to imply that your own partner was like do all these things right?
Some of this is about, right, right.
This is about just getting used to the rhythm of shelving yourself in a certain way, right?
Yeah, it's very subtle.
And if you can show that you are competent and can do all of these things, then other people aren't going to realize that you are struggling because you're doing all of these things and you're doing it fine and you're not showing that you're having strong emotional reactions to it.
And so nobody's going to know that there's anything wrong.
And I think that was probably what was going on for, you know, lots of my relationships is that people thought I was fine when I wasn't, but I was the one.
Actually, it was my responsibility to set the boundaries, and boundaries have never been easy for me to do.
And because I wasn't doing that and I was saying yes to all of these things that weren't necessarily what I wanted or what I would have preferred or that would enrich my life or bring me joy.
But they were filling up my plate so that I didn't have room for the things that I actually did really want to do or did really enjoy, or that allowed me to explore these deeper parts of myself.
One thing I wanted to know was how much Krista's clients had influenced these revelations about her own life.
I don't know that there is a therapist that can say that they are not affected and changed by their clients.
And I think especially getting my clients to be able to accept themselves sexually.
That's sort of like the advanced level.
And so being able to watch my clients do that for themselves, figure out who they are, being able to show up sexually in ways that feel authentic and feel good for themselves it's inspirational.
And I am certain that that has been part of my process and part of my Soutpha exploration as well.
It's weird because Krista was not in sex therapy, but the principles of her trade did have a lot to do with what she needed to learn.
It's really about these deeper underlying things of am I an adequate person?
Am I living my value system?
Am I expressing myself sexually as I actually am?
Or am I contorting myself to try to fit my partner's needs?
Just like as I was talking about, I have been struggling to try to make space for myself in my whole life.
But it's the same struggle, I think, just on a different scale.
I remember when...
You know, I told my therapist I didn't have anything going on on the weekend.
This was earlier, you know, a few years ago.
And she said, good, so don't plan anything.
Just sit in your house and don't do anything.
Probably one of the most uncomfortable experiences that I had had to date.
I think there were tears to say.
I think there was like anxiety.
There were a lot of things that came up just because there was space in my life that I had worked to not allow to be there for so long.
Making some space has allowed Krista to try out some new projects.
She has a book idea, a self-care guide for fat people in an anti-fat world.
She's become an active poster on social media.
That social media stuff has led to new friendships and a new podcast.
The show has an amazing name.
It's called Fat and Fucked, and it's about all of the ways that fat people are fucked good and bad.
A local artist and fat liberationist named Susie Hooker.
I knew she'd been following me for a while, but she reached out to me and she said I have this idea for a podcast.
I'm a perfect stranger, so you can block me if you want to, but I've been wanting to do this forever.
They've made episodes about buying clothes, sex toys, and the power of boudoir photography.
It's a lot of work, but it feels freeing.
Beyond these new projects.
I asked Krista how her life looks different now that she's paying more attention to what she needs and how she feels.
It shows up in terms of what I choose to wear outside of the house.
You know what I feel comfortable in, what I decide is important to me.
I think one of my favorite sayings that I hear.
That I heard recently.
I always hear different things through from my clients, but someone who was in the addiction community, like the Alcoholics Anonymous, said in session one time.
They said what other people think of me is none of my business.
And that's so resonated with me because I'm like, of course it's none of my business.
And if they make it my business, I don't necessarily have to be okay with that, right?
So it's just I think that's sort of my new motto is that what people think of me, I don't need to know about?
In her marriage.
Krista says she's bolder about establishing her wants and needs, whether that's buying something without seeking permission first or not scrambling to keep the house tidy like she used to.
I am not going to have all the time in the world to clean the house.
And that's okay.
I've decided now that I don't have to kill myself for that that if the dishes don't get done, they're not going to get done.
And...
Everybody's going to live.
Everyone's going to be okay.
Before, Krista's assumption would have been that if she was less, did less, her marriage would be less.
But by treating herself better, she's better to her husband.
They connect more.
Now they sit on the back porch, drink wine, and have deep conversations.
She's getting to know her husband better because there's time and energy to listen.
This is all pretty recent, by the way.
Within the last year, she says, the ice has started to melt.
I'm showing up more vulnerably with my husband and more authentically with my husband.
And it's just... It's really cool to see that that has not led to rejection.
It's led to the opposite.
Before we say goodbye to Krista.
I had to know what would this Krista, the experienced wise, self-actualized therapist, tell younger Krista if she were a client?
It would be to really have Krista question how she's living her life and really look at what is the impact of how you're doing this.
What is the impact of you having all of these things filling your life and not being really connected to the people around you, not being connected to yourself, not being self-aware?
How is that impacting you?
Because we can be in denial for a long time about that it's actually impacting us.
But recognizing that impact, I think, is the first step toward creating change.
Thank you, Krista.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design and mastering.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send a letter about your problem to loveletters at boston.com.
Find episode transcripts and more Love Letters content at loveletters.show.
I'm not sure the world is ready for fat liberation.
I think a certain segment of the population is ready for it.
But I am fucking ready for fat liberation.
I'm Merida Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
