Why I do this work.

Opening

I was born with a lot of life in me. Loud, physical, all energy. Before I was four, most of it had been medicated out.

My mom was in the grip of a depression she couldn't help in the years after I was born. The attunement an infant needs, the holding, the being-met, mostly wasn't there. I don't remember any of it. I just carried the result. A feeling, set before I had words for it, that something about me was too much, & maybe something about me was wrong.

By preschool the energy had teeth. I was aggressive with the other kids. I bit. My parents didn't know what to do with me, so they had me tested. It came back two ways at once. Smart enough to make the testers sit up, & ADHD. Instead of working with the wildness, they treated it like a disease. I was on Ritalin at three.

What it cost

It worked, if the goal was quiet. I spent most of my childhood as a kind of zombie. Straight As, no trouble, & almost no memory of those years. I think they're blank because I wasn't really in them.

As I experienced it, the medication took my power, & taught me the thing underneath it - that who I was, was wrong & needed fixing. That's where the deep shame set in. Not as a thought, but as a fact about myself I never thought to question.

When it came back

At eleven, I took myself off the Ritalin. My drive came back - my agency, the part of me that wanted things & pushed for them. But it came back into a kid who was furious underneath & couldn't have told you why. Resentful about the years of not being met. Thrown by my parents' divorce. So the power came back sideways. Acting out, looking for the attention I'd never gotten.

By eighth grade I was a menace, doing things that scared the people around me. My parents sent me to a survival camp to knock some sense into me. It didn't touch the real problem though, because no one had named it.

Then my father died when I was nineteen, & I came apart more quietly. I spent years bouncing, lost, hitting rock bottom & climbing out & then hitting it again. The drinking was part of that stretch. Looking back, it was the same energy that drove the rebellion, only turned on myself. Life force with nowhere to go, leaking out as escape.

Where it turned

In 2017, I joined a men's group. It gave me the first thing that reached the old wound. Brotherhood. Men who saw the whole mess & stayed. When it dissolved a year later, I started running my own. In December 2019, I stopped drinking. After that I poured myself into personal development & fitness. First as a way to hold the sobriety. Then as the thing that led me to coaching. I stopped treating men's work as something I dropped in on. I started treating it as the work of my life.

That's the short version of how I got here. The long version is what I now do with men.

What I had to learn

In the relationships that mattered most, I ran straight into what all that quiet had cost me. I'd get overwhelmed by a partner's emotion & collapse. Shut down. Remove myself from the room without ever leaving it. I didn't have the capacity to stay present with someone else's intensity, let alone my own. I built it the same way I now ask my clients to. Slowly. Through real relationship. Through getting it wrong enough times to finally get it right.

Sexually, I learned the way most men do. Porn, & the goal of finishing as fast as possible. It wasn't until my forties that I found a different model entirely. Sexual mastery. Ejaculatory choice. The idea that sexual energy could be built & channeled instead of constantly spent. I'm still deepening that work in my own life, & I expect I always will be.

The dark masculine came later still. I had to learn that the parts of me I'd been taught to keep small, the aggression, the edge, the parts that aren't just nice, are exactly what creates safety for a partner when they're held instead of suppressed or unleashed. Learning to carry that, instead of fearing it or performing it, changed how I show up everywhere. Not just at home.

The training

Alongside the lived experience & years of personal practice, I've trained formally in this work: a year-long men's sacred sexuality coaching training with Cam Fraser, a Shadow EFT certification with Jeff Johnson, a men's sexual mastery course, plus ongoing study of polarity & the dark masculine with other teachers.

The training sharpened the tools. Needing them in my own life is what makes me trust them.

Why this matters to you

I don't ask my clients to do anything I haven't had to do myself:
Build capacity where there wasn't any.
Stay present when staying present feels impossible.
Access the parts of themselves they've learned to keep quiet.

I know what it costs to avoid that work,
& I know what's on the other side of finally doing it.