If you’ve ever felt like your life looked fine on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside, this story is for you.
The Rise
Before I turned 30, I had earned a PhD from a top-tier program in marriage and family therapy. Within a few years, I had climbed quickly in my field—recognized across Texas as a gifted clinician and emerging industry leader. I led initiatives at both the state and national levels that shaped how therapists did their work.
Before I could help others rebuild, I had to face what I’d destroyed in my own life.
The Cracks Beneath the Surface
I was building two businesses and fine tuning a quickly developing expertise helping couples save their marriages.
But behind the scenes, I was quietly unraveling.
Many of my clients have told me that it wasn’t failure, but success, that brought their inner demons to the surface. That was my experience, too.
While I was helping others build stronger marriages and more meaningful lives, I was making private choices that violated my own principles. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself no one would find out. I told myself I could fix it on my own.
When it All Fell Apart
Over the next five years, the very businesses I built collapsed under the weight of my distracted mismanagement.
My personal life followed. I gave up the professional license I had spent years earning.
I lost the respect of my peers. My marriage teetered on the brink. My addictions and unresolved trauma didn’t just catch up with me—they handcuffed me -
literally and figuratively.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
People expect the healer to have it all together. We’re supposed to be the calm in the storm.
And in many ways, I was.
But I was also the healer sitting on a concrete curb outside of a closed office in the wreckage of a failed dream, wondering how the hell I’d gotten there.
Starting over wasn’t part of the plan.
But I was finally willing to admit to myself that the control I thought was just arrogance disguised as competence.
The Truth About Redemption
What I’ve learned is this: none of us outrun our pain. If we try, we just end up becoming someone else’s.
I don’t have a clean record. I’ve made mistakes—some of them public, all of them painful. I’ve hurt people I loved and cared for. I will never be the guy who lives without regret. I have already accumulated too many.
But I haven’t quit.
If You’re in it Now..
If your life, your marriage, or your world has been brought to its knees—whether by your own doing or someone else’s—I want to say this:
Welcome.
Welcome to the long road back. Welcome to the work of rebuilding. Welcome to real, earned nonjudgment—not the kind taught in graduate school, but the kind that comes from wrestling with your shadow and making peace with it.
You’re not too far gone. You’re not beyond redemption. Maybe things aren’t going your way right now. Maybe you’ve lost something, or someone. Maybe you don’t even know where to begin.
Start here.
I don’t have all the answers. But I know the road. And I’m still walking it.