The Early Losses
Learning what grief does to a man who doesn't have a map for it
My father died in 2005. He had battled alcoholism for years. I had watched the disease take hold of him when I was thirteen, when he was hospitalized for cirrhosis of the liver. That moment as a kid, watching my father disappear into something I couldn't name or fix, shaped me more than I knew.
By 2008, the unprocessed grief had become self-destruction. I was drinking heavily, smoking, barely present in my marriage. My wife wanted a present partner, but I was losing myself and couldn't explain why.
What finally cracked me open was EMDR therapy — one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I processed two buried traumas: my father's hospitalization when I was thirteen, and what happened at twenty-one, when my mother and stepfather were in a catastrophic motorcycle accident and I left school to care for them. Traumas I had carried as identity, not as events that happened to me.
The therapy worked. I stopped smoking. I became a better husband. I thought I had done the work.
2024 — The Framework That Named Everything
Discovering why I do what I do
In 2024, I discovered I was an Enneagram Type 9. I don't say "discovered" lightly. It genuinely felt like someone had handed me a map of my own interior for the first time in my life.
Merging with others. Losing myself in relationships. Deferring. Avoiding conflict at costs I didn't fully see. All of it was finally named. Not as flaws to be ashamed of, but as patterns with roots, with logic, with a path through.
I enrolled in the Enneagram in the Modern World Cohort with Billy and Joey Schewee. Then I enrolled again. The framework had unlocked something in me, and I wanted to go deeper because I kept finding myself in the material.
December 2025 — The Real Reckoning
When the patterns I hadn't fully faced came due
Late 2025 brought the hardest season of my adult life. I caused real emotional harm to my wife and kids. In the aftermath of that rupture, something became undeniable: the family patterns I thought I had processed were still running underneath everything. I had become, in ways that mattered, the thing I had feared most about my own upbringing.
That was the moment I found Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. Not as a program, but as a mirror. I recognized myself in every page of the literature: The approval seeking, the difficulty with intimate relationships, the loss of identity, and the numbing that had passed for peace.
I also admitted, clearly and without equivocation, that I am an alcoholic. That admission changed the shape of my life.
I now attend ACA group every week and am currently on Step 4. I am not past this work. I am in the middle of it.
Now — The Practice
Building from what's actually been lived
I spent sixteen years in corporate leadership as Director and VP-level roles in the tech sector. An MBA, the kind of career that requires you to function at a high level regardless of what's happening underneath. I know what it looks like to hold it together on the outside while the interior work is quietly, urgently needed.
That's exactly who this practice is for.
In April 2026, I'll be attending the MKP New Warrior Training Adventure which is one of the most significant initiatory experiences available to men today. I am still being formed by this work. That is not a caveat. It is the credential.
I integrate Men's inner work, ACA frameworks, Enneagram, and eighteen years of personal therapy, including EMDR and IFS, along with the relational and masculine/feminine polarity work I've done with practitioners like Ethan Hensen and Nina Cudney. Not as a curriculum I teach, but as a lived framework I coach from.
