Kristine Ouwenga

Kristine's Story

Kristine learned very young that home is not always the safest place in the world.

When she was 5, a 19-year-old family member moved in, and while he lived there, he sexually abused her. She became angry. Not the kind of anger that passes after a slammed door or a difficult afternoon. It was the anger of a child whose boundaries had been taken from her before she fully understood that she was allowed to have them.

The house was already difficult. Violence was familiar. Fear had become part of the furniture.

Then, when Kristine was seventeen, her oldest brother burned her with an iron because she refused to do what he wanted.

Something inside her became very clear. No one else was going to touch her.

She ran out of the house and chose the streets of Albuquerque over the place she was supposed to call home. She lived there for almost a year.

There is nothing romantic about survival. It is not cinematic when you are the one who is hungry. It is lonely, cold, and humiliating. It teaches you how invisible a person can become while standing directly in front of everyone.

Kristine hated the streets from the beginning. Her only goal was to get off them.

She took a job washing dishes in a restaurant because it guaranteed her one meal a day. That was enough. On weekends, she found parties, walked inside as though she belonged there, and hoped nobody would ask questions. She found food. She found something to drink. She found another way to make it through the night.

That was how she survived. Not through one miraculous rescue. Not because someone suddenly arrived and fixed everything. She climbed out slowly, decision by decision.

For years, anger had been the thing protecting her. She rode motorcycles. She became part of a gang. She fought people because fighting was easier than being afraid. When the world teaches you that softness is dangerous, anger can begin to feel like armor.

But armor gets heavy.

Eventually, Kristine began building a different life. She found her identity. She found her self-respect. And because she had grown up without someone to protect her, she decided she would become that person for others.

For more than thirty years, she has helped victims of domestic violence escape abusive situations. She understood the fear. She understood the confusion. She knew how difficult it was to leave when your sense of value had been dismantled by someone who claimed to love you.

What she did not immediately recognize was that she was living inside another version of it herself.

After thirty years of marriage, Kristine realized that her husband was another extremely unhealthy relationship that was holding her back.

There is something painfully human about seeing danger clearly in someone else's life while struggling to name it in your own. We can often recognize the fire in our neighbor's yard before we admit that our own house is filling with smoke.

The divorce could have become another ending forced upon her. Instead, it became freedom.

Kristine moved to Nashville with her children and began again. She started two businesses. One of them, Ride SHIELD, was born while she was driving for rideshare on weekends and learning the city. The idea grew from the same instinct that had shaped so much of her life: people deserve to feel safe.

The name is not accidental. She became the shield.

Today, Kristine says the end of her marriage is what set her free. Not because thirty years can be erased, or because pain becomes acceptable once we survive it. But because, for the first time, she is free to be entirely herself.

She is living her best life now. Not the polished version of a best life people post online. The real one. The kind built after finally understanding that freedom is not simply leaving a person or a place. It is no longer allowing anyone else to define your value.

When Kristine was asked what makes her feel most alive, she did not talk about success, motorcycles, business, or even survival. She said it is seeing someone get free. Seeing someone discover the path they have been searching for their entire life. Seeing someone finally succeed after years of trying.

Perhaps that is because Kristine knows what freedom actually costs. She knows what it feels like to be the child nobody protected, the teenager nobody came looking for, the woman helping others escape while still finding her own way out.

And she knows what can happen when one person finally realizes:

I am not what was done to me. I am not who they said I was. I belong to Jesus and He has shown me who I was always meant to be.