Surviving The Storm
I was raised in the shadow of trauma and neglect. My father, a paranoid schizophrenic, drug addict, and dealer, created a home filled with hoarding and a perpetual fear of violence; not from his hands, but from the never-ending parade of unstable users he invited into his house. My mother tried to create a safe space, but even there, trauma found a way in, brought by someone who never should’ve been part of our lives.
I moved out of home at 16, surviving off government assistance, charity, and sheer will. Back then, I couldn’t imagine what thriving would even look like. I broke life into pieces I could handle; the next hour, the next day, the next month, running a marathon that never seemed to end. I was dissociated, anxious, depressed, and at times suicidal. I drank, I self-harmed, I slept around - grasping for anything that might let me feel something… or nothing at all.
‘Try everything first.’
Life-saving advice from a friend. Words that somehow pierced the chaos and gave me something to hold on to. So I did. I tried therapy. I tried meds. They helped a little, but not enough, not back then. So I turned to the only thing that made sense: writing. It started as a kind of self-therapy, just me, the page, and the mess in my head.
The page listens. It doesn’t judge. It remembers everything, but can be easily discarded. It never gets offended, it’s basically free, and is always there. No interruptions. No sideways looks. Just space to get it all out. And slowly, the chaos began to clarify.
It began with ramblings and rants. I filled drawers with scribbled notes and half formed thoughts. Me desperately trying to express what I had long kept repressed.
Can't Quite Express
There are things that I want to say,
But just can't quite express.
Ruminations and meditations
That I'm too afraid to address.
Like the veil over my eyes
That keeps me hidden from the stress.
To the dark wishes
That I'm fighting to suppress.
Like the fear and anxiety
That I will constantly transgress.
To the past expressions
That I am never going to confess.
Like how everything I do
Gives me nothing but duress.
To the unwavering ache and torment
That’s causing me to regress.
I must profess, I desire to express my stress
Confess to address this abscess, to obsess on
Happiness, to aim for excess and to stop
Living like a fucked-up mess.
Yes, I want to make progress but there are just
Some things that I can't quite express.
That was my first true poem. A raw, unfiltered attempt to name and explain the ache I’d carried for years. It didn’t fix everything, but it did give me something I hadn’t felt in a long time: direction, purpose, and expression.
My first book, Under the Influence: Reclaiming My Childhood, was written during a period of intense transition: I was changing careers, starting a business, and becoming a father. The book is a raw autobiographical retelling of my past. I didn’t write it for anyone else. I wrote it to survive. Yet when I shared it, the response was unexpected: “You’re voicing what I’ve never been able to say.” That single piece of feedback kept repeating. It taught me that honest expression heals, not just the writer, but the reader too. From that realization, everything else followed.
Writing as a Lifeline
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one struggling, and people were resonating with my ability to speak the truth of my past. So I began to wonder: if they connected with my story, maybe they’d also be open to the guidance I could offer on how to survive it too.
By that stage, I’d read countless self-help books, attended hundreds of hours of therapy, and absorbed more advice than I knew what to do with. And honestly? Most of it left a bad taste in my mouth. At worst, these were just thinly veiled attempts at self promotion, and at best, each resource focused on just one aspect of the struggle: mental health, the search for meaning, or the practical organization needed to function day to day. But I, like so many others, needed all three.
How can you chase your dreams when you’re stuck in bed with PTSD? And without a reason to get up, why bother organizing your life at all? If no one ever taught you how to function, how are you supposed to thrive?
In answer to those issues I wrote How To Get Your Sh!t Together - the last self-help book you will ever need. It begins by outlining core principles, and then breaks them down into actionable steps. The chapters are standalone, so you can read them in any order. Inside is everything I’ve learned from psychology, counseling, philosophy, spirituality, self-development, and lived experience. It’s a guide to overcoming anxiety, defeating depression, moving on from trauma, getting organized, finding meaning, and following your dreams.
I wanted this to be the single resource I needed, and I wanted to release it for free so that no one would be locked out of the information I had to fight for.
How To Get Your Shit Together is my most popular book. It’s sold tens of thousands of copies, and when paired with the appropriate combination of talk therapy, self-care, and support from mental health professionals, it’s become a cornerstone in many people’s path to recovery.
Creativity Explosion
I used to envy people who had a calling, a clear direction, a purpose that seemed to flow through them. They looked driven by something beyond themselves, like they had to create.
But trauma makes survival the goal. And neglect makes discovering who you are the first task, not some distant dream that seems impossible to begin let alone complete.
Yet, as I healed, I started to feel something stir. A compulsion. A pull. I found myself needing to express what I was uncovering inside, the truth of my inner world, my thoughts, my past, my pain, and my growth.
I quickly released three poetry collections, Words On A Page, Bound To The Wings Of A Butterfly, A Requiem For What Could Have Been, as well as started the Ask A Poet YouTube channel to further explore and express these themes.
Around this time, I also released two other cornerstone works. Mindfulness: A Guidebook to the Present Moment shares what I’ve learned through years of meditation, silence, and self-observation. It’s both a beginner’s guide and a deeper reflection on presence and acceptance. And How to Write Evocative Poetry distils my creative process into a practical, emotional, and deeply personal toolkit, for anyone looking to turn your feelings into form.
I also created a Free Shadow Work Journal PDF, offering introspective prompts and practical guidance to help people explore their hidden parts, confront suppressed emotions, and begin the journey of integration. It’s a raw, reflective tool drawn directly from my own healing work. Once again, I made it free because I know how badly I needed something like it when I was in the thick of my own shadow.
I experimented with short fiction, releasing Wage Slave: The Unpaid Overtime Edition, a satirical commentary of the flawed and depressing nature of modern work life - a commentary on the lived experience under capitalism.
In Upgrade, I wrote a collection of connected short sci-fi stories set in a dystopic future where integration with technology may cost us our humanity. A bleak prediction of a world where consumerism and technological advancement have been taken to the extreme.
The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back
Healing isn’t linear, and despite all of my internal progress, there was still much left to process and address. I was seeing therapists regularly, meditating and exercising daily, and continuing to express myself onto the page. I was fragile, but stable.
I was now a father of two and was working in what I thought to be a stable job. I was progressing in my martial arts journey, completing my lifelong goal of performing a 24-hour continuous training session in the process. My books were selling, the podcast was growing and I was becoming quite successful as a teacher on Insight Timer & Skillshare. I hadn’t ‘made it’ yet, but I was close.
Then it all happened, all at once.
The extensive covid lockdowns put pressure on my mental state as the world was thrown into years of fear and uncertainty. At the same time, funding dried up abruptly ending my five year career as a support worker. I tried to return to my old career as a school teacher but found myself crippled by panic attacks and unable to leave the house. My social anxiety was through the roof and my relationships were breaking down. To make matters worse, we got notice that our rent was being raised by 30%. We had to move. Then I had a car crash, got injured in training, family members got sick, and I lost some friends to suicide.
I felt myself falling, hard. My doctor put me onto medication but that made it so much worse. Anxiety gave way to apathy. I reached my bottom on my 36th birthday. I was drunk, stoned, and in uncontrollable tears in front of my entire family. I was broken. But then my friend’s words came back once more. Try everything first. I realized that I had tried the medication and the self care, but more was needed. I realized that for the past few years I had reverted back to survival mode and was barely holding on. I realized that I needed to really make an effort to sort my mental health out and get myself back on track.
Trying Everything
I turned to alternative treatments. TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) helped reduce my anxiety and lift the weight of depression. Beneath that, I found trauma, so I tried EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a therapy designed to reprocess painful memories. I applied for psychedelic studies, pursued a medical cannabis script, and even got genetic testing, which confirmed that I’m prone to adverse reactions with most antidepressants. I did a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat and continued writing, creating, and expressing.
This resulted in three major projects. The first was Can’t Quite Express which turned my original poem into a 6500+ word epic expression of everything I was feeling at the time. Then came Augmented Realities: Human Poetry x A.I. Art and its sister collection Poetry From A Dark Night Of The Soul:
“The poems within this collection were written over a 24-month period and are presented in chronological order. They show the inner tumult and turmoil of a man desperately trying, and failing, to hold together the crumbling status quo of his prior existence.
They show the short-lived hopes, the shattered dreams, and the impact of ill-advised interventions that made everything worse.
They also show that there is light at the end of every tunnel.
That like a caterpillar entering a cocoon, sometimes what feels like destruction is in fact a necessary part of the transformation process, and perhaps that, like a seed, the engulfing darkness may in fact be the dirt from which you can bloom.”
I was slowly healing, but wasn’t quite right. As my anxiety and depression lifted, deeper and more significant trauma was revealed. I was losing days to PTSD flashbacks and the accompanying shame and internal blame cycle that followed. I am eternally grateful to my beautiful wife Maria, who stuck with me through the worst of it. She kept me and the kids safe, fed, and with a roof over our heads. It cost her a lot, but it kept me alive.
It felt like I was constantly walking across a narrow icy mountain pathway during a blizzard. It was easy to fall, and it was a long way to the ground. The technical term for this was HPA Axis dysfunction - basically hypervigilance and anxiety caused by trauma resulted in my mind and body being extremely quick to activate, and very slow to return to normal.
Trauma Informed
This process also exposed me to a collection of alternative healers and spiritual workers. Whilst well intentioned I realized that most of them were not trauma informed, but rather relying only on intuition, pop science, and spiritual practices in their client sessions and seminars.
I learned a lot from this group of healers, but also saw the profound risk involved in working with survivors. Breath work, past life regression, hypnotherapy, energetics, shadow work, and all other forms of internal work may be therapeutic and help people to heal, but it also may cause tremendous harm, if not delivered with care.
I recognised that what I needed from them, and subsequently what I needed to bring to my own client work, was a blend of intuitive practices, lived experience, and evidence-based theory. So, I began studying a Master Of Counseling, giving me access to world class teachers, evidence based frameworks, and the opportunity to hone my practice with like minded peers.
This study is giving me the skills, experience, and awareness necessary to be able to go deep with clients. I can now safely draw from evidence based psychology theory as well as intuitive and spiritual traditions, combining them in a safe, trauma informed way, that best serves the needs and goals of my clients.
In many ways, this path felt like a continuation of what began with Under the Influence. That book helped me reclaim my childhood. Studying counseling isn’t just about understanding others, it is about deepening my understanding of myself, and learning how to hold space for others as they reclaim their own stories too.
Thriving
The final piece of my recovery puzzle came when my doctor suggested a different kind of medication: Agomelatine. It targets melatonin receptors, not serotonin, and promised fewer side effects. Combined with what I was learning in my counseling studies, particularly that medication works best when freely chosen. While I would love to live, survive, and thrive without chemical supports, the world we inhabit is far from natural. We didn’t evolve for fast-paced mega-societies, with constant access to calories, communication, and a never-ending pressure to accumulate capital. So perhaps we all need therapy and perhaps I in particular need medication.
It feels like, for the longest time, that I’ve been trying to turn a large ship around. Having successfully averted catastrophe I now need to plot a course towards paradise. I often coach people who are struggling with direction in life to find a distant mountain to climb (a values aligned goal) and then head towards it (daily actions leading to progress).
They may not know the exact mountain they want to climb, but if they have a broad idea of the kind of peak that calls to them, they can begin steering the ship of their life toward it. Then, with experience, they can refine their goals until they know exactly what they want to achieve and how they can take the next step towards achieving it.
I always knew I wanted to help and guide people - this pull caused me to work as a manager, school teacher, personal trainer, martial arts instructor, and support worker. I enjoyed aspects of each of these roles, but they never fully resonated. There were always aspects that didn’t quite fit, or that left me feeling a vague sense of emptiness that I couldn’t quite resolve.
But perhaps my ship had made some erroneous stops along the way to its true destination. Through all of these roles I learnt more about myself, what I wanted from life, who I wanted to help, and how I was best able to do so.
Now I see my role and goal far more clearly:
“I am a coach, counselor, meditation instructor, author, and poet. I help entrepreneurs, spiritualists, and survivors identify and release the limiting beliefs that no longer serve. With compassion and insight, I support them as they navigate dark nights of the soul and find peace, guiding them from surviving to passionately thriving using tips, tools, and techniques that enable them to process the past, accept the present, and embrace the future with positivity and purpose.”
Or to put it more simply, I want to help you to accept who you are and become who you’re meant to be.
My work now leaves me energized, uplifted, and desiring to expand my practice and reach so that I can do more. My clients and readers are getting the support and guidance they are after. So now I am working to maintain this balance and continue pursuing and expanding my purpose.
What I Am Working On
At the heart of everything I do is a mission to reduce suicide and promote radical self-acceptance. I know I can’t save everyone, but I want to show people that there is always a path forward through darkness, through honesty, through healing, and into a life that’s worth living.
My current focus is on living a balanced life. One in which I am able to express myself creatively, continue to pursue my hobbies of martial arts, chess, and fiction. Deepen my practice and study of meditation and counseling. Enjoy my time as a father and husband. And of course continue to expand my counseling and coaching practice.
I’m also deepening my work as a meditation instructor and course creator, continuing to produce hundreds of guided tracks and courses on Insight Timer and Skillshare.
I aim to regularly release new blogs, podcasts, and guided meditations, all with the goal of supporting you in the process of radical self-acceptance, healing, and growth, as well as offering an honest window into my own healing and dream-chasing journey. To this end, I plan on continuing to release new poetry, fiction, and books.
I have a few larger projects on the way that I hope to complete soon, so stay tuned! This includes creating and extending my Intuitive Guidance practice into a formal system of self-healing. Check out this guided individual session or this five part audio course to get started.
Thank You
If you’ve read this far, thank you.
This isn’t just a story. It’s the truth I’ve fought to live through, and now, to live by. I’m still healing. Still learning. Still creating. But I’ve come far enough to offer a hand back.
If you’re ready to do the work, face your past, feel it, move through it, and discover what’s next I encourage you to check out my counseling and coaching page, as well as the Art Of Self-Connection community.
I’m here to support you and encourage you on your journey.
