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A Day That Changed Everything
January 20, 1977, a knock at the door shattered the innocence of my childhood and marked the beginning of an unimaginable journey. At just five years old, I answered the door to find the police, bringing the devastating news that my dad had been killed in a tragic accident. What followed was chaos — my mother’s cries echoing through the house, the incomprehensible weight of loss, and a young boy sent to the neighbour’s house with no real grasp of the scale of what had just happened.
This was the moment everything changed. Grief hit our family hard, and I didn’t know how to make sense of it. At five years old, I didn’t have the words or understanding of what was happening, so I turned to the only comfort I could find: food. It became my escape, my safe place, the one thing that made me feel okay in a world that suddenly felt scary and unpredictable.
The Hidden Struggle
While my family was consumed by their grief, my internal world spiralled into chaos. Food served as a temporary balm for the deep wounds of loss, but it wasn’t enough. By the age of ten, my struggles had manifested in ways that could no longer be ignored – I was withdrawn, lonely, overweight, and struggling to connect with others. My family, desperate to find a solution, turned to the psychiatric system, where I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants. At just ten years old, I became part of a system that labelled me as broken but offered little understanding of the root causes of my suffering.
The diagnosis and medication didn’t provide relief, instead, they deepened my sense of isolation and confusion. By my early teens, my life had become a chaotic mix of crime, escapism, and rebellion. From stealing money to buying motorbikes in secret, my actions were desperate attempts to regain control of a life that felt anything but stable. These behaviours were not just acts of wrongdoing but cries for help — signals of a young boy lost in a world that didn’t see or understand him.
The Escape into Addiction
By the time I was 13, I had discovered drugs, and with them came a profound sense of relief. For the first time, the constant turmoil of my mind quieted, and my body felt at ease. Addiction wasn’t a choice, it was a response to the overwhelming discomfort of being me. Drugs provided an escape, a temporary respite from the pain that had defined my existence for so long.
But the relief was fleeting, and the cost was immense. My life, if you could call it that, descended into a cycle of crime, homelessness, and despair. I found myself in and out of jail, psychiatric wards sectioned, and rehabilitation centres, clinging to the hope that something – anything – could save me from myself.
The Turning Point
November 17, 1994, marked the beginning of a new chapter. I entered a rehabilitation centre desperate for change, but I had no real understanding of what recovery would entail. The 12-step programme became my lifeline, offering structure and community in a life defined by chaos. For over two decades, I followed the programme faithfully, attending meetings and building a life that, on the surface, seemed successful.
Beneath the surface, the same struggles persisted. My addiction had shifted from drugs to food, to relationships, to overworking — a relentless cycle of seeking peace in all the wrong places. Despite the external success, I was still haunted by the same internal turmoil that had driven me to addiction in the first place. This makes perfect sense as the 12 steps do not address trauma or our spiritual disconnection adequately.
The Relentless Search for Answers
As the years passed, I became consumed by a relentless search for the answers I believed would finally bring me peace and happiness. Recovery meetings provided a sense of structure, but they didn’t touch the deep unease I felt within myself. I turned to psychotherapy, believing that if I could understand my mind, I could heal it. My search became a full-time endeavour, leading me to train in multiple therapeutic modalities: psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), transactional analysis, person-centred counselling, NLP, and even body and energy techniques. If a training, workshop, or method promised transformation, I signed up, hoping to find the missing piece of the puzzle.
But despite the extensive list of credentials I accumulated, I remained depressed. Therapy sessions, both as a client and as a practitioner, became just another form of seeking – a way to intellectually dissect my problems without ever addressing the root cause. Even as I helped others navigate their struggles, I felt like a fraud, disconnected from the very peace I was trying to guide them toward.
Many of my friends and colleagues in the therapeutic world shared the same secret struggles. These people had spent their lives helping others yet battling their own demons behind closed doors. They confided in me about their hidden addictions – food, porn, shopping, gambling, workaholism – all carefully concealed behind a professional façade. Their stories mirrored my own: outwardly, as we had periods of abstinence and qualifications, we were seen as successful, accomplished, and even healed. But inwardly, we were still running, still seeking, still caught in the same cycles of pain and avoidance.
This phase of my life taught me an important lesson: intellectual understanding, no matter how vast, cannot touch the deep discomfort in the body. No amount of therapy, training, or external achievement could fill the void I felt inside. The more I sought answers outside of myself, the further I seemed to drift from the peace I longed for. I was spinning my wheels, rearranging the furniture in my mind, but the core issue – the unresolved pain and trauma and my spiritual disconnection – remained unresolved.
And so the cycle continued: periods of temporary relief followed by the inevitable return of dissatisfaction. No matter how much I achieved or how many techniques I mastered, I couldn’t escape the troubling sense that something was missing. It wasn’t until years later that I would come to understand the truth: the very act of seeking was keeping me trapped. What I was looking for wasn’t out there. It was, and had always been, within me.
This realisation, however, was still a long way off. For the time being, I remained caught in the endless pursuit of external solutions, blind to the truth that the answers I sought couldn’t be found in the next training, meeting, or modality. I was looking everywhere except where it mattered most: within.
Awakening to a
Deeper Truth
The turning point didn’t come from another programme or therapy, though I’d been through countless ones. It went from a simple yet profound invitation to presence during an intensive workshop I attended. For the first time, I wasn’t told what to do, how to fix myself, or why I was broken. Instead, I was invited to stop and look – to be here now.
At first, it made no sense to me, as I was frustrated and restless, questioning whether I was wasting my time. Over the course of a couple of days, something shifted. It wasn’t an intellectual realisation or a step-by-step process. It was more like a quiet recognition, a moment of deep clarity. All the years I had spent trying to fix myself were built on the false belief that I was broken in the first place.
In that space of stillness, I started to realise that my addiction, my pain, and even my endless coping strategies weren’t evidence of failure or inadequacy. They were my bodymind’s way of keeping me safe – a survival mechanism responding to trauma and adversity. I wasn’t broken; I had been brilliantly adaptive in ways I hadn’t understood. This insight wasn’t just a thought – it was something I felt deeply in my body, something that began to unravel the years of struggle I had carried with me.
I started to reflect more that true recovery wasn’t about fixing myself or reaching a destination of perfection. It was about reconnecting with the truth of who I am – a wholeness that had been there all along, hidden beneath layers of conditioning and coping mechanisms. This realisation marked the beginning of the Infinite Recovery Project, a movement born from my journey to freedom.
A New Beginning
Today, my life is unrecognisable from the chaos of my past. The Infinite Recovery Project is not just a framework for healing addiction; it’s an invitation to awaken to a deeper truth about who we are. It combines somatic healing, spiritual awakening, and psychological understanding to guide individuals toward a life of true peace and freedom.
My journey proves that no matter how lost or deep the pain is, there is a path to healing. That path doesn’t lie in fixing yourself or following someone else’s formula for recovery. It lies in rediscovering the wholeness and wisdom that have always been within you.