I used to fly for a living.

I'd dreamed of it since I was a boy. Part of that was the adventure, and part of it was wanting out. Home wasn't an easy place to be, and getting into the air felt like the closest thing to freedom I knew.

It took years to get there. I mowed lawns and pulled weeds and, with some help from my parents, got my private license while I was still in high school. Through my twenties I instructed, flew scenic tours over the Canyonlands in Utah, and hauled mail through the dark in small planes over Wyoming and Colorado, slowly building the hours until I finally landed a job at a regional airline. By my thirties I was a captain. I had everything I'd spent all those years reaching for.

And underneath it, I felt like an imposter. Like something was wrong with me. Like I wasn't quite deserving of any of it, and it was only a matter of time before someone found out. I didn't have language for that then, so I tried to outrun it instead, and mostly got in my own way. Close relationships were hard to find, and harder to hold onto..

At thirty-nine, it caught up with me.

I went looking for help. Conventional therapy hadn't done much for me before, so this time I went looking for something else, without knowing yet what that would be. Around the same stretch of time, the airline I flew for went bankrupt. I took a year off. I went to massage school, delivered pizzas, ran a paper route, worked as a hotel bellman. Life got very ordinary for a while, and I started paying attention to it.

When I went back to flying, I did it differently, on contracts that sent me around the world and left long stretches of time in between. For about ten years I lived and worked in places like Nigeria, Norway, India, and Turkey, and on nearly every break between contracts I was somewhere else entirely, in a meditation retreat or a healing group, in India again, the Netherlands, Greece, Bali, still looking for the thing I couldn't yet name.

For a long time I assumed I was the problem. I didn't know anything about developmental trauma, or how the things that happen early in life keep shaping you long after. Then I read Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger, and something fell into place. What I'd been carrying wasn't a defect. It was trauma. And trauma can heal.

That gave me the map. But the moment that changed everything happened in the middle of those years, at a retreat.

We were working in pairs, and one day the count was uneven. I had no partner, so the facilitator set a full-length mirror in front of me instead.

The man looking back looked tired. Broken. Older than his years. I didn't look away. I sat with him. I let myself see him.

And then something happened that I still don't have words for.

For one moment I saw the truth of myself, and it was whole.

Not broken.

Never had been.

What came with it was a kind of aliveness, a vitality, the feeling of meeting my real self for the first time. There was nothing in me that needed fixing. It was already there. It always had been.

It still brings tears to my eyes. That moment is the reason I do this work, because what I saw in that mirror wasn't only true about me. It's true about everyone.

I haven't been able to see people as broken since. Sitting with people in treatment centers on their worst days, what I saw was never someone defective. It was someone who'd lost contact with who they really were, and that contact can always be found again.

That's the longing underneath everything I do—helping people find their way back to a wholeness that was theirs all along.

Which is why I focus on trauma. It's what gets in the way of that contact, what stands between a person and their own aliveness. Healing it was never the destination. It's the doorway back.

The contracts eventually ran out, and by then the pull toward this work had grown stronger than the pull to fly. I wasn't ready to leave it behind completely, so I took one more chapter in aviation, five years flying medical transports across the western states and Hawaii. But I already knew where I was headed. I began my training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner during those years, three years of it, while I was still in the air. By the time I finally landed for good, I'd already started becoming who I am now.

Eventually I let the old life go. I was living in Hawaii, still flying medevac, when I made the decision. I moved to Arizona and started over at the bottom, working as a behavioral health tech at a trauma-informed treatment center while going back to school full time for a master's in counseling. I've worked in addiction treatment and at a methadone clinic, and I still work in a community mental health crisis center. I'm currently training in NARM, the NeuroAffective Relational Model.

Across every one of those settings, the same thing kept showing up. The problems people brought in looked different from each other on the surface, but underneath them was almost always the same root— trauma, and the quiet conviction it leaves behind that something is wrong with you.

That's why I work the roots instead of the symptoms. Trauma healing is the doorway, and on the other side of it is the aliveness that was yours all along.

If any of this resonates with you, I'd be glad to talk.