About
My life looked impeccable on the outside: athletic achievement, business success, and the lifestyle to go along with it, all in place.
All the while, I was looking away from the fact that it was all slowly burning down from the inside.
The Fall
I did not study my way into this work. I survived my way into it.
I played tennis at a high level through college and believed it would be my life and my career. When it ended, so did the only identity I had ever had. I spent the next fifteen years trying to fill the void that tennis left.
It looked like achieving at a high level in the banking world, then in commercial real estate. It also looked like a steady, then rapid, slide into heavy drinking and substance use, and all the consequences that came with that.
I held it together for the first ten years. Then, from ages thirty-three to thirty-eight, I went to rehab six times, survived oral cancer twice, and lived through a suicide attempt in 2009.
The Threshold Moment
The moment I stopped was November 21, 2012.
It was four in the morning. I was sitting alone at my kitchen table, staring at a pile of cocaine and a bottle of rum. I was shaking, and I was scared. The previous fifteen years caught up with me all at once. I had no idea what to do. All I knew was that I could not continue down that path. I knew this was the end of life as I had known it.
The complete collapse in that moment turned out to be the catalyst for changing everything and for constructing the framework for the life I live now. I have not had a drink since, and, honestly, I have never even wanted one.
The Reconstruction
In the six years that followed I did deep inner work. I asked myself a lot of questions and looked at what, about me and my life, had brought me to that moment in 2012. I turned to men’s work, expanded my emotional intelligence, and worked on how I was communicating and showing up in my relationships.
By 2019 the work had gone as far as thinking alone could take it. What had moved in my mind for years had not yet moved through my body. So I went deeper, into somatic and nervous-system work, breathwork, and other carefully guided practices, approached with the same rigor and honesty the rest of the work demands. It is where what I knew in my head finally became something I lived in my body.
As I went deeper I found the patterns, beliefs, and stories I was carrying: heavy shame, destructive shadows, chronic avoidance, a distorted relationship with myself, and little love for who I was.
The one thing that created the most drastic change was that I started looking at the parts of me I had spent the better part of thirty-eight years looking away from.
Tested
Because of the work I have done since that moment in 2012, I have been able to walk through some of the hardest moments of my life without falling back into old behaviors. In 2015 my father died suddenly of heart failure. In 2018 my older sister died of the same drinking and drug use I had escaped. In 2019 a relationship I thought would carry me into the rest of my life ended abruptly. In 2022, when I was diagnosed with oral cancer a third time, I walked through it the way the work had taught me to walk through everything: without numbing, without running, and without losing myself in the fear of it.
The work I do now was forged in what came after I stopped drinking, not just in the years before.
What I Bring to the Room
All of it is the foundation I bring to the room when high-profile and UHNW men come to me in their own collapse.
The men who come to me lead global businesses, family offices, real estate investment firms, and public lives.
I do not ask them to be unbreakable. I do not ask them to perform. I ask them to stop looking away, and I ask them to let me work with them, directly, on what is actually going on underneath.