Women, Creativity, and Rage: Krissie McMenamin’s Mission for Change

In this episode, Amy Boyle talks with Krissie McMenamin about reclaiming creativity and embracing authenticity. Krissie discusses her Finnish roots and RAGEher, an event that helps women express anger in transformative ways. She emphasizes the importance of community, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness in empowering women to live fully. Tune in for insights on connecting with emotions and fostering creative potential.

MUSIC (used with permission)
WOMAN Performed by Tiffany Villarreal - Pod artwork by Amanda Eich

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Phenomenal You
• 2:26 The Finnish Influence on Identity
• 4:41 Reclaiming Creativity and Aliveness
• 6:35 The Birth of RageHer
• 16:25 Understanding and Expressing Anger
• 22:50 Transformative Experiences at RageHer
• 25:39 The Path Forward: Education and Community
• 29:26 Outro

Transcript

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (00:00.057)
Welcome to the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast. Krissie, I'm so glad you're here. Hello. Thanks for having me. First of all, we have to thank the fabulous Emily for connecting the two of us because there's always that one person that opens the door and then you're like, wow, we should have known each other all along and we're right where we're supposed to be. So thanks, Emily. Thanks, Emily. We love you.

I would love if you would give our audience an introduction to the Phenomenal You.

Krissie McMenamin and I'm on a journey of supporting people to live more authentic, bright, big lives. I call myself an aliveness spark. And that's a lot because of my own journey of really looking at the ways that I was living for other people for a long time and trying to fit into molds that were not me. Like I wear a lot of colors and like I have

kind of a big bright personality and I kind of felt for a long time I was doing things that put me in quite a small box. I love dancing, I love creating art out of garbage, which my husband of course does not love. He's like, why are we collecting garbage around the house? I love fashion and like bright colored clothing. I love hosting people and having people over for

dinners, experiences, and art days. I really, I love travel, right? So all of these things kind of make me who I am. And with the travel piece, you know, I grew up with a Finnish mother. And so I'm also like, part of me is like, Like I am Finnish. To the core. And that's big part. don't always.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (01:56.504)
talk about in places like this, but it's such a big part of who I am. So those are a few things I always like to say like, I might be doing a cartwheel right now. Like if I wasn't on this headphones, I might be doing a cartwheel or maybe a dance. So that's a little about me. Well, you had a few things I would like to jump into deeper on that. So what is finished to you? We have gotten the great privilege

to able to visit Finland every year since I was six months old. My mom took me by herself on an airplane, screaming little kids. At that point there were no direct flights, right? So Finland to me is home. It's second home. It's a place where

I can, there's like a part of me that can be in Finland and it's its own thing. It's like its own part of me. It's like the place you can run around naked and free. It's the place where, you know, people are so much more open about just like their bodies and everybody does the sauna together. You know, the sauna, one of the only words from the Finnish language that has made it into English. The only word.

But also Finnish people are quite stoic and a little bit reserved. So like you've got that type, that side of Finland, and then you've got this like joke of like, what's the difference between an introverted Finn and an extroverted Finn? You know, the introverted Finn looks at their own shoes, the extroverted Finn looks at yours shoes, right? it's like, it's really interesting juxtaposition in the culture. But for me, it's like,

My summer sister lives there, the woman who I spent summers with as a girl. My summer mom lives there. used to spend, my mom would be in Finland, but she would have us go to my aunt's house and she would teach me to sew and she would teach me arts and crafts stuff. I sewed my own prom dress because of my aunt Girsis teaching me how to be crafty, which like we didn't have in American schools, right?

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (04:05.974)
It's like this whole part of me that was cultivated in Finland, I feel. My sort of crafty, artsy, crossay-y side. Explain how that parlay is into who you are today, and what you're currently working on. What are those common threads, if you will? It's funny because my mom doesn't consider herself really artsy or crafty at all.

I, in my time in Finland, really cultivated that was skills, which I think is part of what I'm reclaiming for myself now. Right? So I worked in marketing. I worked in financial services, industries that are highly regulated, not a lot of creativity, even in marketing, because everything had to go through multiple layers of regulation. That's how I spent the first eight years of my working life. And I feel.

In the last five years, I have started coming back to the creativity and the creating experiences and using the arts, the crafts, all of that juicy stuff that I didn't do for a long time. And now it's being pulled in into creating immersive experiences for people that spark aliveness and send them on a journey of self discovery. You know, the fact that you're bringing in your past into your present is

I think we don't celebrate that enough. I don't realize it enough. It's like past is past and future is what we're aiming for, but now is where we're at. they, those two do merge and I don't reality of it all is it could be overwhelming. So I want to jump into just full on let's go. This experience that I got to vicariously experienced via my camera lens, your event, RageHer. Let's start from the very beginning.

with what was the spark, the impetus and it's why, and then we'll take it from there. The initial spark was actually around aliveness and what are the components of feeling alive. And so I'd created a first experience called the labyrinth where at one point my friend Chin and I who created that experience, we were in, is it Miro? Where you can create all these fun like boards and

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (06:29.986)
you know, lines to different things. And so we put aliveness in the middle and then we literally spread out spider style. What are all of the ways in which we feel alive? And one of the things was this presence and this feeling into our bodies, which is something that I've been working on for several years as someone who was very heady, very intellectual, prided myself on being good at school, knowing the right thing to say, protocol being dressed up and could chameleon myself in any situation. But,

being chameleon, right? Like it didn't feel fully authentically me necessarily. I wanted to feel more into my body and I started that journey. And part of that journey for me was getting in touch with my rage and my anger and allowing that to flow through me. So fast forward, we have this first experience. I'm chatting with another friend of mine, my friend Brenna. I'm more like, you know, we've both been on this journey with anger.

and feeling that anger in our bodies and then being able to sort of start the process of turning it into fuel. anger is so many things. It's passive aggression, it's stonewalling, it's not saying what you want, it's walking away. It's all these things that don't actually serve us. But when we can use it, feel it in our bodies and be like, that's anger, then it's boundary setting. It's saying no, it's going for what we want. It's getting satisfied.

And we'd both been on this journey and we were like, can we create something for women to feel a little bit more embodied with their anger? And that's it really started. And we created version one, which we actually did on a Zoom. It was almost like a script reading. And we got a bunch of feedback. It was pretty harsh feedback, honestly. was even some of my best friends who know me really well.

We're like, Chrissy, I didn't feel seen in that, in the way that you set that up. So we kind of went back to the drawing board and we did a version two. And that was last summer. And we ran kind of a pilot in a small retail, like vacant retail space in Chicago. It's like 17 total women, about 10 people who we didn't know super well got a ton of feedback on that experience.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (08:53.208)
and then ran a version in Chicago this summer in June. And then we had 17 or 18 people purchase tickets. That was the first time we had actually made it a paid thing. We were just getting feedback the first few times. And then I was like, there's something here. There's something here. Women are angry. We're not necessarily showing our anger. And then I started reading books. Mariah Shamali's Rage Becomes Her, The Dance with Anger by Harriet Lerner.

Jennifer Cox just came out with a new book, Women Are Angry. And there was so much data in those books, data that said, you know, women have chronic fatigue at 4x the rates of men, autoimmune disease, 3x the rates of men. Women who are more in touch with their anger have less recurrence of breast cancer. Like it is wild. So there's all this research that's coming out about how women are internalizing their anger.

instead of letting it out. And that just like put fuel on the fire. I was like, we have to get this message out. So from the June event to then the September event, you know, a few months went by and I was like, we're going to go big. We're going to try to get as many people in the space as we can. We did advertising on Instagram and Facebook, which was something I had never done before. It was super scary because I was investing time, also money, right? And just saying like, will people come? And they did.

And the right women came. had a total with the rage doulas. We had a hundred women in the space Over the four events that we hosted and the thing about rage her is it's not just a space for raids I guess I mean look women go there and they hit that and they hit pillows and they feel into their pelvic muscles and they groan and they moan and they you know release But they can also release grief and sadness and

hurt, there's a lot of tears. And then there's like this really palpable joy, after sort of the big culminating arc. And it's really cool to be witness to so many women in what they are feeling in the moment. And that's okay.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (11:09.612)
Yeah. Seeing it firsthand and how it like build and you have community and time to gather and connect and, even time to disassociate, to like get into your head space, to get ready. And then the music that you choose that helps take everyone on their journey based on the feedback that you had from your previous trials of this and how it seemed to be such a beautiful, amazing thing. Like you said, it like took people on this journey and then like, wow, like a whoosh, like.

You know, how can those who are only maybe hearing the words rage, like how can that, right? You know, I'm sure that's probably one of the biggest pushbacks. I really feel the experience of rage happens way before anybody steps into the space. It's the conversations like this on a podcast, but also when I post things on social, I almost always get responses like, I'm not angry or, I'm scared.

of my own anger. So a lot of it is in the education and the talking about it. From the research that I have done and my own experience, you know, I'm a pretty joyful person. Like if you know me, you're like, she's like, mispositive, like, she's like, you know, she's a light, you know, great energy, like those are the ways that people have described me. I was so avoidant of my anger.

that what was happening is in a lot of parts of my life, I was living in reactivity. was living in reaction to what I thought my parents wanted for me. I was living in reaction to my mother, honestly. My mother is a very strong woman, very strong woman. She was a CEO, worked with a lot of very high profile people and I was like, I don't want to be like that. And what was I doing? I was actually being like that.

in some ways because I kind of had lost, I didn't have a softness to me because I was sort of like in my masculine, like go, go, go all the time. I was reacting, reacting. was bitching at things, right? So like when something would happen in my life, I would go to my friends and talk about it incessantly for two weeks about that annoying thing that happened. Or I would have a situation where someone would say something and I wanted to say something back, but I would crumble. And the next two weeks I would replay.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (13:30.618)
All of the ways that I wish I had said something. All of the things in my head. How energy goes into bitching and then running through our minds everything we wished we would have said. Right? That's where anger comes into play. When you can feel the anger, when I felt the anger coursing through my body in that moment, I can now make a choice to be like, wait a second, this is telling me something? It's telling me a boundary has been crossed.

telling me something this person is saying isn't okay. It's telling me it's data. So how can I in that moment then say, breath, okay, I'm feeling this anger, I'm feeling this anger and not necessarily spew out at that person, which is might have happened in the past or have many of those moments. And then two days later, it all comes out as an attack on my husband, right? Because that's where the volcano that erupts. How can I in that moment use it?

Say what I need to say and that doesn't mean it has to be in an angry tone. It can be actually quite you know, Free-faced stoic whatever it can be angry Get satisfied in the moment. I don't have to be spending all of that time and energy replaying in my head So that's what I would say is like we are a you know, how do we know that we're angry? It's it's it's when we're like, I can't believe that person did that

and then we replay it over and over again. I just blew up at my kids because something's going on at work and I kind of took it out on them unintentionally. I walked away from a difficult conversation without even saying, hey, I'm walking away. I just walked away. Didn't even address it. For women, it's stuff like chronic fatigue. If you are constantly exhausted,

chances are you might actually have just a lot of unexpressed anger and you're internalizing it. You know, I'm not diagnosing anyone here, but here's what I know. Women come to rage her, they're exhausted and they leave and they're like, holy crap, I feel 10 pounds lighter. And I feel more energized than I have in weeks, months. Get curious is what I would say is just get curious. Cause there could be that there's a lot of things for us to be angry about. Stuff going on in society, the world, we're still paid less. You know, there's a lot.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (15:53.484)
And I think it's just a matter of getting conscious to it. Absolutely. And when it came to finding your own education in this space, right. When you got curious, was there classes in particular? was like the curriculum? does one take it to the next level so people understand more? how can we take something that sometimes we push aside in our brain and like, nope.

This is going to take over if I let it show up. So now it's suppressed. Now maybe it's a gut problem. Maybe it's something else. So how can we...

to get to a good place to get the proper education to micro releases or whatever it would be. This is such a good question. And I think part of my mission, which is to bring this stuff to light, because for me, you know, I did a two and a half year masters in transformational leadership and coaching program. And it was one of my instructors who was like, Chrissy, you haven't integrated your anger. So it's like, what the?

the hell does that mean? Like, I had no idea what that meant. I had no idea.

But I went on to do a training, a group dynamics training where we had to watch videos of ourselves on Zoom in a group for hours. And you could see, I could see the anger, but it was coming out as like passive aggression, eyeball rolling. It was like wild to see myself on video in a way that like I hadn't experienced before. And that's when it...

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (17:32.494)
started to click, it actually took about eight weeks. was such self beat up after that training, I couldn't even really hear the feedback for almost two months. And then when I started to finally hear it, I was like, that's what my instructor is talking about. That's the anger, it's coming out, but it's not coming out in a way that serves me. And that's when I started working on it, and the way I was able to work on it is through this master's program.

I've also done this incredible lab. It's called EQ lab program. It's a two year program where it's peer led. The closest I might compare it to is like a group therapy, but it's not, it's, it's, it's all peer run with people who have a lot of training in social and emotional intelligence. And a lot of what we did in that program is notice when we are

triggered when we are projecting parts of ourselves that we don't so much like onto other people or when we are transferring our moms, our dads, our siblings, I don't have siblings, but other people's siblings, onto people around us and how when we get really worked up with someone, it's 90 % stuff from childhood and 10 % what's going on today. And so through that program, I was able to see how in many of my interactions with people,

I was transferring my mom, I was transferring my dad, and I had a lot of anger towards my parents. This is normal. This is normal. It's like the dynamics of humans with parents. We were in a position of inferiority to our parents. Our parents literally had to take care of us for a long time. And there's ways that they didn't do it the exact ways we needed.

There's like a, like, every family is that way. There is no perfect parent. And that's not to say that there's something like terribly wrong, but that we are, it is okay for us to feel angry at our parents. It doesn't mean we have to take it all out on them, but to be able to actually release it in a safe space. When I have conversations with other people now, I'm much clearer at what's going on. I can kind of have this like,

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (19:58.446)
20,000 foot view instead of being totally in it and immediately reacting and like in the anger and the flurry of feelings, I can be like, this is, this is what's happening. I don't do that, you know, every time, like, you know, I'm still a human, but I do it a lot better than I was used to. And that was because I've done a lot of training on this and there's ways that, you know, people can do this work at home. I do think there is something about being in a

group with other humans who are sort of triggering you and poking you that is magical for healing and a lot of the healing work and the growth work these days is done solo. And I think we're actually really missing out and that's part of why Rage Her was created as a group community experience. We get so much from being in it with other women. There are women who come who would never scream their lungs off if other women weren't doing it first.

It gives permission. And there's safety in good community and you feel seen and heard literally. We've had a few of these and especially the last one being as large as it was overall for the amount of participants. What was that one woman I remember hearing who was saying she was of a certain age and this never would have been allowed. And it brought me behind my camera lens to tears because I

In her, heard things that my mother never got to say. My aunt never got to say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had a woman who said, I've never heard myself scream before. It just wasn't allowed in her family. And by the end, she had this big smile on her face and she's like, and I liked it. That is so good.

That's the thing is it's like whatever you're going to experience, you're going to experience. one woman came for a second time. She came for the first rate for and gave us this beautiful testimonial. And she gave us another one at the end and was like, is this the first time I don't hear like the self beat up critical voices?

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (22:21.772)
glowing. Like I sent my social media team the testimonial and I was on the zoom with them yesterday and they were like, holy crap, her whole body was like glowing. She looked radiant. It like, feel so energized. And that's kind of where we're at is like, what's next? Like, how do we how do we keep growing, expanding, making it accessible, available?

You know, we've got ideas of maybe even doing something online, like you said, because I do think online experiences can be quite powerful. You know, maybe it's more of like a course and, some embodiment stuff. So we're figuring out what's next early days. And as far as people getting started, what, say this sparked a curiosity, what would you recommend first steps? We're rage.her on Instagram. We're trying to provide some.

fun times, not only about the event, but also about anger. The books I mentioned, Rage Becomes Her, that's more like research on anger. So if you like that kind of stuff, but it's not so much on how do we deal with it. I would say Dance with Anger, Harry Lerner, that book was written 30 years ago, and it gives clear case studies of multiple women and how they were

angry, but not in a way that was satisfying them. So, you know, she talks about the passive aggressive, the passive aggressive one, she talks about the woman who wants to rescue everybody around her and save everybody and help everybody without kind of looking for herself and you know, what she needs. She talks about the woman who kind of defaults to her husband, which by the way, I'm a powerful, pretty, a woman who goes for satisfaction. And reading that, I started noticing how I would look to my husband

for permission on like silly things like, like, I want to take this training, like, kind of like, is it okay, instead of like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm really excited about this training I'm taking, this is how much it costs, I want to go, this is how I'm going to make it work. Right? So like, there's these, there's these ways that we kind of like, we've learned to not be direct in our communication. We talked a lot about that directness, I would say if that's the one thing that you're going to read, Dance with Anger, Harriet Learner.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (24:46.018)
Because part of it is we need to become conscious of our own pattern. Right? Like, how does anger show up for me? Am I passive aggressive? Am I, do I just like blow up once a month? We got to get conscious to be able to choose to do something differently. So kind of a course on consciousness and then also to practice doing stuff differently. If we don't practice, it's really hard to do it in our real life. And so we need spaces where we can one, express fully, but then two, practice and be messy in the practice.

We don't have spaces for that often. So I think we might create one. don't know yet. It's all like a seed of an idea. So needed. And the idea that so many things when you take a class, it's to like perfect something, to master something. But this is an awakening.

Like, and you have to be aware, like everything you just said. So I agree. Like it's definitely needed and I hope that you do it and make sure that you share so that I can share with the network as well. until we address these things and give ourselves permission to look within so that what we're projecting, that ripple effect goes further, right? We know these things, we know it in our core. And if we want, you know, change and all the things that we've talked about. So. Yeah.

And here's the thing, like, we know that there's bigger system. I also always want to say, like, acknowledge that there are bigger systems problems here, right? Like, we are part of a bigger system. And in some ways, that system victimizes us. And I was in the group dynamics training this weekend where there was a group of five people.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (26:38.143)
and they had a very clear system of what norms were okay with this group and what were not okay and they started to sort of push against those norms and push back. One person at one point set a very clear boundary and this was not typical of this person. They were trying something new and they set a very clear boundary and they did not let the other people who were, I mean, I mean these people were coming at him. They were coming at this person and like,

and they just set the boundary. The whole system changed. It was wild to see it. And granted, that's five people, right? But the way they related to each other completely shifted because of this one person being very clear with their boundary and sticking to it. Systems can change even with one person. Sometimes they get worse before they get better. But if we learn to have better boundaries, to be more direct,

there are ways that the system can change.

I'm not putting it all on us to do it by the way. And I do think that like we have a big role to play in it and that we can only play that role if we get conscious as to how we're actually supporting the system by the way we are currently behaving because we have learned to no fault of our own. Right. We have learned to support this patriarchal system, this capitalist system that we've learned and we can learn to do something differently to get more freaking satisfied.

Imagine if this planet was, like if millions and billions of women on this planet were walking around deeply satisfied with themselves, their lives, what they were going for, I guarantee this would be a different place. I love It's a great place to end and I can't wait for people to get curious, connect with you. Everything will be listed in the show notes. It was just a delight to have you on the show today. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Speaking of Phenomenal.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (28:39.231)
Be sure to subscribe, rate, review, and even share the podcast, as well as stay tuned for more inspiring conversations. Remember, each and every one of you is capable of extraordinary things. Until next time, take care and remember, you are phenomenal.