Finding True North
From Warrior to Wounded to Whole. How I Found My Way Back to Myself.
There are two kinds of successful people.
Those who are at peace with what they've built.
And those who are haunted by something they can't quite name. Driving harder, flying higher, achieving more. As if speed itself could outrun whatever is following them.
For most of my adult life, I was the second kind.
From the outside, the picture looked perfect. Airline pilot. Combat veteran. A career built on discipline, precision, and the kind of competence that earns the trust of hundreds of people every single day.
What I didn't know, couldn't know, was that beneath all of it, something was buried. Something that had been waiting decades for the right moment to surface.
It surfaced in a combat zone.
The Thing About Trauma
Trauma doesn't follow a schedule.
It doesn't care that you have a career to protect, a reputation to maintain, or a cockpit full of passengers counting on you to be completely present. It waits. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades. And then something, another stress, another loss, another moment of being pushed to the absolute edge, cracks the container open.
For me, that crack happened while deployed. Military service has a way of stripping away everything non-essential. And what emerged from beneath the surface of a very successful, very disciplined, very controlled life was something I had no framework for.
Repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest.
I want to be careful how I say what comes next, because this is the part people get wrong.
What happened to me as a child was not the defining moment of my life.
What I did about it was.
The Fight
I could have kept it buried. Many do.
Instead, I made a decision that would change everything. I retained legal counsel. I documented everything. I went through the discovery process, the depositions, the reliving of things no one should have to relive in a conference room under fluorescent lights.
And then I went to trial against one of the most powerful institutions in human history.
And I won.
It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. The courage it required. The reliving. The exposure. The fight itself mattered to me and to others who came forward because of it.
Winning was meaningful.
It just didn't heal the underlying wounds.
I went back to flying. I was good at it. I stayed good at it. But I was living in two worlds simultaneously. The crisp, competent, professional world of the flight deck. And a private interior world that was increasingly difficult to navigate.
The Pandemic as Portal
When Covid grounded the aviation industry in 2020, something unexpected happened.
The noise stopped.
And in the quiet, for the first time in years, I could hear myself clearly enough to realize I hadn't actually healed. I had performed healing. I had checked the boxes therapy, legal resolution, time without ever going to the place where the wound actually lived.
I made a decision that felt both terrifying and completely obvious.
I was going to go all the way in.
The Work
What followed was a year of the most rigorous, intentional, and transformative work of my life. And I say that as someone who survived military deployment, flight training, and a jury trial.
I entered a carefully structured, clinician-guided healing protocol. Each modality is deliberately sequenced. Each session is held within a skilled therapeutic container. Each experience was carefully integrated before the next began.
I worked with trained professionals at every step. This was not recreational exploration. It was the most serious and disciplined undertaking of my healing journey.
And it worked.
Not in a vague, felt-good way.
In a measurable, permanent, life-reorganizing way.
The haunting stopped.
The quality of my ambition, driven by something I couldn't name, dissolved. Replaced by something I can only describe as a chosen direction. I started moving toward things instead of away from them.
For a man who had spent decades being excellent at everything while secretly running from something, that distinction changed everything.
The Research
I needed to understand why. Mechanistically. Rigorously. Academically.
So I did what any former military officer and airline pilot would do.
I studied it.
I enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and used my own healing journey as the foundation for original research, applying heuristic-hermeneutic methodology to propose a staged clinical framework for treating complex trauma through a sequenced, multi-medicine healing protocol.
Heuristic research places the researcher's lived experience at the center of inquiry. My dissertation sits at the intersection of intimate personal experience and rigorous academic inquiry, which is exactly where I believe the most honest research lives.
I earned my doctorate. I published my dissertation: The Journey Back to Self: Healing Childhood Trauma Through Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
Who I Work With
I work with high achievers who are excellent at their lives and haunted by something beneath them.
People who have won the external fight for career, status, family, and income, and still can't shake the feeling that something essential is missing or unresolved.
People standing at a threshold. Between the life they built and the life they actually want. Ready for a guide who has walked that exact terrain.
I know exactly who you are.
I was you.
Where The Work Happens
Two locations. One direction.
Marin County, California. For clients navigating high-stakes transitions in one of the most dynamic communities in the country.
Nosara, Costa Rica. On the Pacific coast, where the jungle meets the ocean, and something about the place invites the kind of honesty that is harder to access at home. Intensive retreats. Deep immersion work. The kind of reset a weekend workshop cannot provide.
True North
In aviation, True North is fixed. Absolute. It doesn't shift due to magnetic variation or interference from nearby metals.
It simply is.
Most high-achieving people spend their careers navigating brilliantly, but by magnetic north. Influenced by external pressure, other people's expectations, and the relentless pull of achievement and validation. Getting where they are going. Just not always where they actually wanted to be.
The work I do helps people find their fixed point.
Not the version of themselves built for survival. Not the version optimized for performance.
The actual one. Underneath all of it.
It's there. I promise you.
I found mine. In a courtroom, in a combat zone, in a clinical office in the middle of a pandemic, and eventually on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where I now spend half my life doing the most meaningful work I've ever done.
It was worth every mile of the journey.
If any part of this landed, I'd like to talk.