My story, and why I work with women.
My parents split when I was two. I don't remember it. What I remember is what came after. Bit by bit, my father faded out of my life. The visits got rarer, then they mostly stopped. And somewhere in there, before I had words for any of it, my mother said something about his cats, and my asthma, about why I couldn't go there anymore. And what I took from it was this. He chose not to want me. He doesn't want me. I'm not enough.
That became the sentence. I carried it for over twenty years.
Because that is what we do with a pain too big to feel. We make it mean something. We climb up out of the body and into a story, because a story you can survive, and the feeling you are not sure you can. The meaning I made hurt. But it was a thought. Something I could carry, and think about, and try to fix. Anything but feel it. That was the real job of that sentence. It kept me one safe step above the thing underneath it.
You made a sentence like that too. Probably before you had the words for it. And you have been living one step above it ever since.
And that is where I stayed for the next twenty years. In my head. The meaning did its job, so I never had to go back down there and feel it. I just kept climbing. New countries, new businesses, always the next thing that might finally prove the sentence wrong. It looked like drive. It was also distance. Staying busy enough, and impressive enough, that I never had to stop and feel what a five-year-old couldn't.
But a sentence like that does not just sit quietly in the past. It runs underneath everything, and it spends your whole life looking to be proven right. It reads his silence as rejection. It turns his distance into confirmation. He doesn't want me, see. I'm not enough, see. Without you ever knowing it, it arranges your whole life around the one thing it is most afraid of.
Then I was twenty-nine, in San Diego. In one morning, a business I had built got shut down. Thirty thousand dollars, gone. And my body barely flinched. That same day I called my girlfriend, and I could feel something was off. So I asked her. And she said five words that felt like a knife twisting into my heart.
I don't love you anymore.
I lost thirty grand that morning and I stayed standing. Five words from the woman I loved, and I ended up on the floor. Back against the bed, crying, for hours. That tells you everything about which wounds actually run your life. It is never the money. It is never the career. It is always the love.
It shook me to my core. And whenever something like that happens, we step into a bubble. A bubble that puts distance between us and the outside world. Where everything slows down. Where all there is, is the pain, and how to get out of it. It is a crossroads, really. One of the biggest chances you ever get to wake up. Or, if you keep blaming the circumstances, to sink even deeper into the mess.
Luckily, I took the first path. Or so I thought. Because what I actually did was step right back into the same trap.
I tried to think my way out. I read everything I could find. Every book, every teacher, every framework. Years of it. And I got very good at understanding myself. I could explain my pattern better than most people could explain theirs.
And none of it changed a thing at the core.
Because understanding my pattern was the exact same move I made at five. Going up into my head, away from the feeling. Every book gave me the sense I was finally getting somewhere. And all it did was take me one more step from the pain I still would not feel.
It took me years to understand that you can't think your way out of what your body is still holding on to. Because thinking is how you left your body in the first place.
If you have read everything, and done the therapy, and you can name your pattern in perfect detail, and it still runs you, it is not because you have not figured it out yet. It is because figuring it out was never going to reach it.
What finally moved it was the one thing I had spent twenty years running from. Not another idea. The feeling itself. I went back to that boy, and instead of explaining him, I let myself feel what he never could. The grief. The sadness. The anger underneath the grief and the sadness. And under the anger and the pain, all the love for my father that I had cut myself off from. Buried so deep I had convinced myself it was gone.
I stopped climbing. I went back down into my body, and I let it move through me until there was nothing left to hold. And the sentence that had quietly run parts of my life for over twenty years finally finished.
And after fifteen years of barely speaking, I reached out to my father, and stood in front of him without that sentence between us for the first time in my life. I could see him in a way I had never seen him before. I could meet him in a way I had never been able to before. And because of that, I could meet myself in a way I had never been able to before.
That is the work. It's not more insight. It's completion.
I have since done this process myself, and sat with countless women around the world. I have seen and heard it all. I have held space for their shame, their guilt, their anger, their sadness, their grief, their pain, and helped them let it go, so it does not run their lives anymore. Because make no mistake, these stories, and the feelings we suppressed underneath them, are at the root of almost all of your behavior. In every area of your life.
I helped a woman resolve her daily panic attacks, in the middle of a divorce after twenty years of marriage, and reconcile with her husband, and soften.
I helped a woman who had not been able to hug her own mother in years finally hold her, and feel safe doing it.
I helped a woman with walls around her heart, in a relationship that was actually safe, finally trust that her future would not be a repeat of her past.
I helped a single mother, blindsided by a breakup and sure something was deeply wrong with her, see that there never was.
Different women. Different stories. A different meaning made underneath, every single time.
The problem with that meaning is that it gets recycled through your whole life. Different man, same relationship. Different relationships, same struggle.
Now let me also address the elephant in the room. But you are a man, working with women?!
Exactly. Because how are you going to heal your relationship with the masculine otherwise? How are you ever gonna be in the healthy, steady relationship you so desire, while also keeping all the stories you have about men alive?
The honest truth is that me doing this work as a man is another layer of the healing. Because it restores a safety that has sadly been absent for most women, most of their lives. No father. Or a father who left. Or men who manipulated, and disappeared.
It's about safety, with the masculine. Safety in the body. Because a lot of this started, or was recycled, with a man. It gets to heal with one too.
I have sat with women through some of the worst moments of their lives. And I have been on that floor myself. So there is nothing you could show me that would make me look away. However ugly it feels. However ashamed you are of it. What's on the other side of the shame, the guilt, and the pain, is the prize you have been looking for.
And you will realize, like I did, that little boy was never unwanted. He just decided he was, and believed it for decades. Proving himself right, every chance he got. Meaning built upon meaning.
You made a decision like that too, a long time ago. And it's still running your love life today.