Our Story
About Us
Two women. Four decades of combined experience. One question that never stopped pulling at both of them:
Why do so many of us spend our whole lives searching for the love we were born for, and feel so separate from it?
Who We Are
Shift with Love™ exists because love is more than a feeling we carry. It is a truth we return to, a practice we choose, a way of living that can be given and received in every ordinary moment.
We built this work because we watched thousands of parents who love their children deeply still struggle to make that love felt. Because somewhere along the way, love became a sentiment instead of a way of being. Families are not meant to be preached at. They are meant to grow together, teach each other, and find their way back to connection, again and again. This is the space where that happens.
What We Do
The work that changes everything,
starting with you.
Shift with Love™ is a conscious parenting and relational healing approach built around one core truth: the patterns playing out in your home today began long before you became a parent. They began in you, as a child, when your nervous system was learning how to protect love and keep it close.
Most parenting programs teach you what to do. We work on something deeper. We help you understand why you keep doing what you swore you would never do, and we give you the tools, the language, and the compassion to begin shifting it. The shift happens in you first. And when it does, everything around you begins to move.
The foundation of our work, the L.O.V.E. Framework™, is a practice built around four core emotional and relational needs every human carries from birth:
to be Listened to, Observed, Validated, and Empathized with.
When these needs are met, the nervous system settles. When they go unmet, it protects. Our work is learning to meet those needs, in yourself and in your child, one small moment at a time.
Who This Is For
Does any of this sound familiar?
- The parent who loves fiercely and still loses it. The one who goes to bed reviewing the day, replaying the tone they used, the moment they wish they could take back.
- The parent who is doing everything right on paper and still feels like something essential is missing at home.
- The one who promised themselves they would parent differently, and then heard their own parents' words come out of their mouth.
- The parent who is not looking for a script or a set of rules. They are looking for something that actually changes how parenting feels, from the inside.
If any of that sounds familiar,
you are exactly where you are meant to be.
Who We Are Together
We are Kris and Kim, and between us, we have spent forty years helping people find their way back to something they never actually lost.
Most of us were never taught how to live from love. We were taught to reach for it, perform for it, and hope it would show up if we tried hard enough. But love is not something to be earned or chased. It is already inside you. It is the most natural thing you carry, and it has a language, one that your nervous system already knows, one that your children are already asking for, one that your heart has been reaching toward your entire life.
That truth is what sits at the center of everything we do. Through years of walking adults through deep and painful places, the thing that brought people home to themselves every single time was love, not as a feeling to wait for, but as a living practice. L.O.V.E. became our formula, not because we invented it, but because we recognized it.
When love becomes something you live from instead of something you live for, everything shifts. And it is so much simpler than anyone told you it would be. That is what Shift with Love™ is here to show you.
Co-Founder
Kristine Lackey, M.A.
Co-Founder, Clinical Director
M.A. Clinical Psychology, Attachment Theory, Somatic Awareness, Developmental Neuroscience
Kristine has spent four decades studying one question: what does it actually take for a human being to truly feel loved?
That search led her through a Master's in Clinical Psychology and deeper still, into attachment theory, somatic awareness, developmental neuroscience, and over eleven years pioneering The Journey Method across North America, walking thousands of people through deep trauma and into healing. What she found was not in any single theory or technique. It was something simpler and more radical: the power of presence, of curiosity, of meeting someone exactly as they are without an agenda or a need to fix. Every healing she witnessed came down to the same thing. True presence and unconditional love.
And then, as it so often does, motherhood brought the moment that changed everything.
Her pregnancy had been magic. Her husband promised the room would fill with light the moment their daughter arrived. It did not. What arrived instead was exhaustion, disconnection, and a quiet shame that the love she had been promised had somehow passed her by. Everyone around her kept pressing her to do things differently. The noise built until something in her rose up and said: enough. She looked around the room and said, "Get out."
In the quiet that followed, alone with Riley for the first time, she stopped reaching for the feeling she had been promised and got honest about the one she had. She looked at her daughter and apologized. She told her she did not yet know how to be the mother she needed. And then she made a promise from the truest place she had.
I will follow your lead. And I will figure this out."
Riley opened her eyes and latched on for the first time.
That moment became the foundation of everything Kristine has built since. Not the years of study, though those matter. But the choice, made in a quiet room with a newborn she was just meeting, to stop performing love and simply practice it. That commitment is what grew into the L.O.V.E. Framework™. It is what she brings to every parent who finds their way here.
Kristine is still learning. She is still practicing. And she is so glad you are here.
Co-Founder
Kimberly Cotton
Co-Founder, Integration and Community Director
Life Coach, Accredited Journey Practitioner, Bodyworker
Kimberly grew up in a home where love was present, but emotional safety was unpredictable and volatile. As a child, she often felt invisible, and when she was truly seen, the rawness of it made her want to hide. Those early experiences made her deeply curious about people and their behaviors. From a young age, she knew she wanted to help people feel loved.
At nineteen, she became a massage therapist and discovered her intuition, a capacity to feel what people were carrying and help them release it. At twenty-one, she became an accredited Journey practitioner. She traveled the world solo for five years, learning and absorbing as much as she could from the people she met and the work she did. She trained in permaculture in Costa Rica and absorbed its central philosophy: you do not force transformation. You create the conditions that allow it to happen naturally.
She believed she had done her own work. She was the grounded one. The healer. The one who held space for others.
And then she became a mother of Irish twins, and everything changed.
Slowly, without realizing it, Kim entered survival mode. More often than she cared to admit, she would burst out in anger at the two humans she loved the most. The gap between who she knew herself to be and how she was showing up grew wider and harder to ignore. And then one day, a moment erupted so explosively that it stopped her completely. She pinned her seven-year-old son to the ground. Her husband stepped in. Her daughter stood watching with tears of fear and confusion in her eyes.
That moment did not defeat her. It became the beginning of her return. Not to the person she thought she was before motherhood, but to someone truer. She reached back to Kristine. She did the work. She rebuilt, slowly, from the inside out.
Kim's story is the one most parents are carrying silently. The moment they became who they swore they would never be, and the long, quiet, courageous journey back.
What We Believe
The convictions at the center of everything we do.
- The wounds are real. And they are not the whole story of who you are and who you are meant to be.
- Repair is always possible. It is not just a recovery from a hard moment. It is the doorway into deeper connection.
- Perfection was never the standard. Return is.
- The parent you want to be is already inside you. This work is the practice of coming home to that person, one moment at a time.
- Love is not a feeling you wait for. It is a truth you choose to live every single day.
- Two things can be true at once: love is the simplest thing in the world, and one of the hardest to live — because most of us were never shown how. That is why we are here.
If something on this page has moved you,
the next step is simple.
Take the free quiz and discover the pattern you are carrying. It takes three minutes, and it is the beginning of understanding everything.