The wounds came first.
I didn't choose this work. The work chose me โ because life gave me no other option than to either go under or go in.
I grew up carrying wounds I didn't have words for. Sexual abuse. A father wound that ran deep โ the kind that doesn't announce itself, it just shapes everything quietly from below. A mother wound that bound me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. These weren't abstractions or frameworks. They were the architecture of my life, and for a long time they ran it.
I didn't know any of this at the time. I just knew something was wrong. That the performance of being okay was exhausting. That no amount of achievement, distraction, or numbing brought me any closer to actually feeling alive.
The wounds were doing what wounds do โ driving the bus from the back seat, invisible and unquestioned.
Then came the collapse.
Addiction. Bankruptcy. The full dismantling of everything I had built my identity around.
When the outside falls apart, the inside has nowhere left to hide. That was the gift buried in the wreckage โ not that I could see it then. At the time it was just loss. Loss of money, loss of standing, loss of the story I had told myself about who I was and where I was going.
Addiction had its hands in everything. It was never really about the substance โ it was about what the substance was covering. The unprocessed grief, the shame I had never named, the pain that had no container and no language.
Eight years ago I got sober. Not as a proud achievement I wear on my sleeve, but as a turning point โ the moment I stopped running from myself and started getting curious about what was actually there. Sobriety didn't fix me. It gave me enough stillness to begin the real work.
The training was never just a credential.
I didn't go looking for certifications. I went looking for understanding โ and the certifications followed.
I trained as a life and business coach. I became a Polyvagal practitioner โ learning how the nervous system holds trauma, and how safety is the precondition for any real change. I trained in Internal Family Systems, the parts-based approach that taught me how to meet every exiled piece of a man's psyche without pathologizing any of it.
The training that shaped me most was my apprenticeship under the late Dr. Robert Augustus Masters, PhD โ a man who spent forty years doing men's work and forty years doing couples work. He was one of the most rigorous, uncompromising, and genuinely loving facilitators I have ever encountered. I completed my apprenticeship under him before his passing. That lineage lives in how I hold every container I run.
I have also been initiated through plant medicine โ not recreationally, but ceremonially, with the seriousness the work demands. The iboga root. Extended periods of isolation and descent. These experiences didn't teach me the work. They showed me what the work was pointing at.
All of it โ the wounds, the collapse, the sobriety, the training, the medicine โ brought me here. Not as someone who figured it out. As someone who went far enough into the dark to be useful to other men making the same journey.
