Writings: Therapy, Neuroscience & Narrative

Start here Writings for the part of the story asking for attention. Explore a wound pattern Understand the weight beneath success Understand the process Move through a change Explore faith or relationship questions Read a regional perspective

Recognize the Pattern

Why do I keep reacting this way? Wound patterns, defenses, and the stories beneath them.

Recognize the Pattern August 26, 2026 3 min read

The Pattern Is Not the Whole Story

The reaction may be a problem, but it is also information. Before asking how to stop it, it can help to ask what it learned to protect.

Life Telling Processing™ August 4, 2026 3 min read Sovereign Wound

Every Man's Odyssey

Homer wrote the Odyssey approximately twenty-eight hundred years ago. It is the story of a man trying to get home. That description is accurate and almost entirely insufficient.

High Achievers August 2, 2026 3 min read Sovereign Wound

The Post-IPO Identity Wound

You built something remarkable. You achieved the exit. And now, in the silence that followed, you are not sure who you are. This is not a failure of gratitude. It is the wound finally speaking.

High Achievers August 2, 2026 3 min read Sovereign Wound

Five Questions That Reveal Your Wound Pattern

Most men who come to therapy do not know which wound is running them. These five questions are a diagnostic framework for identifying the dominant wound pattern.

High Achievers August 2, 2026 3 min read Sovereign Wound

Seven Trading-Floor Rules That Belong in the Therapy Room

What the trading floor teaches about men and emotional suppression, and why the same rules that built the career are the ones that need to be examined in the therapy room.

Neuroscience and Therapy · Life Telling Processing™ March 24, 2026 3 min read

When Anxiety Becomes Chronic: The Nervous System, Neuro-Archetypal Wounds, and the Healing Power of Narrative

Chronic high anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a story that has not yet been fully told. Explore the nervous system science of anxiety, the neuro-archetypal wounds beneath it, and how Life Telling Processing™ can help through narrative integration.

Life Telling Processing™ March 8, 2026 3 min read Men's Work Wound

The Crown That Crushes: The Sovereign Wound and the Success Trap

Your drive is not the problem. Your capacity for excellence is not the wound. What is wounded is the belief that your worth depends on it. A Life Telling Processing perspective on perfectionism, overwork, and the path to a life that is genuinely your own.

The Neuro-Archetypal Wound Series · The Sovereign February 10, 2026 3 min read Sovereign Wound

The Wound Beneath the Crown: When Achievement Becomes a Substitute for Worth

The Sovereign wound turns achievement into a substitute for worth. When the blessing was never freely given, the drive to earn it never stops. Explore the neuroscience and narrative roots of the achievement trap, and how Life Telling Processing™ can help you separate your drive from your wound.

Life Telling Processing™ January 20, 2026 3 min read Nurturer Wound

The Story That Was Never Yours to Carry: The Nurturer Wound Through the Life Telling Processing Lens

The Nurturer wound is one of the most socially rewarded wounds a person can carry. It is also one of the most isolating. A Life Telling Processing perspective on how the compulsive giver loses their own story, and what it takes to find it again.

Archetypal Healing January 13, 2026 3 min read Uninitiated One Wound

The Threshold Never Crossed: Understanding the Uninitiated One Wound

The Uninitiated One archetype is the capacity for transformation, rites of passage, and the courage to cross the threshold into a new season of life. When this archetype is wounded, we remain perpetually on the edge of becoming: capable, intelligent, and deeply stuck.

Life Telling Processing™ December 16, 2025 3 min read Men's Work Wound

When the Substance Becomes the Story: Understanding the Wound Beneath the Use

The substance is not the story. It is a chapter in a much larger one. A Life Telling Processing perspective on how three distinct archetypal wounds shape the pattern of substance use, and why the path to genuine freedom runs through the wound, not around it.

Archetypal Healing December 2, 2025 3 min read Wild One Wound

The Tamed Wild: Understanding the Wild One Wound

The Wild One archetype is the capacity for aliveness, instinct, and untamed vitality. When this archetype is wounded, the wildness does not disappear. It goes underground. And a life without wildness is a life that has lost its pulse.

Trauma & Narrative November 4, 2025 3 min read Nurturer Wound

The Weight of Everyone Else's World: Understanding the Nurturer Wound

The Nurturer archetype is the capacity for compassion, attunement, and genuine care. When this archetype is wounded, care becomes compulsion. And a person who cannot stop giving is not generous. They are afraid.

Life Telling Processing™ October 21, 2025 3 min read

When the Work No Longer Feeds You: Vocational Discontentment and the Neuro-Archetypal Wound

Vocational discontentment is rarely a problem of the wrong career. More often, it is a symptom of a neuro-archetypal wound that has been quietly shaping the relationship between a person and their work for years, sometimes decades, without ever being named.

Archetypal Healing October 7, 2025 3 min read Sage Wound

When the Knowing Goes Dark: Understanding the Sage Wound

The Sage archetype is the capacity for discernment, wisdom, and the integration of experience into meaning. When this archetype is wounded, we do not simply lose confidence in our thinking. We lose trust in our own inner knowing.

Trauma & Narrative September 2, 2025 3 min read Lover Wound

The Wound That Closed the Heart: Understanding the Lover Archetype

The Lover archetype is the capacity for connection, beauty, and embodied presence. When this archetype is wounded, the heart does not simply break. It closes. Understanding this wound is the beginning of the path back to aliveness.

Leadership and Healing August 19, 2025 3 min read

The Hidden Cost of Leading from a Wound

The most dangerous wound in leadership is not the one you are aware of. It is the one you have adapted around so thoroughly that it no longer feels like a wound. It feels like your personality. It feels like your leadership style.

Archetypal Healing August 5, 2025 3 min read Warrior Wound

The Sword That Turned Inward: Understanding the Warrior Wound

High achievers are often exhausted not by weakness but by the relentless demands of their own strength. The Warrior wound, whether over-activated or suppressed, is one of the most common and least recognized injuries in the lives of those who have built everything by fighting for it.

Archetypal Healing July 15, 2025 3 min read Sovereign Wound

The Wound Beneath the Crown: How the Sovereign Injury Drives the Success Trap

The restlessness that high achievers carry is not a character flaw. It is the Sovereign wound: the wound to the capacity for self-blessing that drives the success trap from beneath. Understanding it is the first step toward the deeper story.

Life Telling Processing™ April 11, 2025 3 min read Men's Work Wound

The Wound That Misdirects: Substance Use Through the Life Telling Processing Lens

The reach is not the truest thing about you. A Life Telling Processing perspective on why substance use is a misdirected Warrior energy, not a moral failure, and how the wound beneath the behavior holds the path to genuine integration.

Work, Pressure, and Identity

Why does success still feel like it is not enough?

Work, Pressure, and Identity August 26, 2026 3 min read

When Success Stops Answering

Success can remain visible long after it stops being nourishing. The resulting emptiness is not necessarily failure. It may be an invitation to ask a better question.

Life Telling Processing™ April 18, 2026 3 min read

The End of the Success Journey

There is a moment when the success journey runs its course and something deeper begins to call. This is a reflection on what that moment means, why it arrives, and what it is asking of you.

Contemplative Practice · Place & Formation April 22, 2025 3 min read

The Ground Beneath the Work: Place, Contemplation, and the Rhythm of Life Telling Processing™

There is a particular quality of light in Fair Oaks in the early morning, the way it filters through the valley oaks before the heat of the day arrives, diffuse and unhurried, touching everything without insisting on anything. The land has become a teacher.

Neuroscience & Healing January 14, 2025 3 min read

The Neuroscience of the Success Trap: Why High Achievers Feel Empty

You have built the career, the reputation, and the life that everyone around you admires. So why does it feel so hollow? The answer lies not in your character, but in your neurology.

Understand the Process

What does Life Telling Processing actually involve?

Latest

Understand the Process August 26, 2026 3 min read

How Life Telling Processing Begins

The first task is not to tell every chapter at once. It is to begin with what is pressing on you now and make enough room for the story beneath it to emerge.

Life Telling Processing™ August 1, 2026 3 min read

Reading the Map

A man cannot integrate what he cannot locate. The five phases of Life Telling Processing as a map of the journey through a man's interior life.

Life Telling Processing™ July 25, 2026 3 min read

The Album That Sat With Me

Songs From The Big Chair arrived in the middle of a difficult season and sat with a teenager in his inner-wilderness. What that album has to do with what Life Telling Processing is trying to be.

Life Telling Processing™ May 20, 2026 3 min read

The Man Who Chose His Story

Epictetus, Stoicism, and the arc of masculine courage. On what it looks like when a man refuses to allow his wound to write his final chapter.

Life Telling Processing™ April 21, 2026 3 min read

The In-Motion Mystic

A long run, especially alone, especially where nature is near, is not primarily about fitness. A reflection on pace, change, and the wilderness within.

Life Telling Processing™ April 15, 2026 3 min read

What AI Cannot Do

AI tools can help you feel temporarily less anxious. They cannot gather the shattered fragments of your story and arrange them into a mosaic. Here is an honest account of the territory that requires a human witness.

Life Telling Processing™ June 3, 2025 3 min read

The Mosaic I Had to Build First: The Origin Story of Life Telling Processing™

Life Telling Processing™ did not emerge from academic theorizing. It emerged from a season of profound personal fragmentation following a rotational brain injury in 2013. This is the origin story of the modality, told from the inside.

Life Telling Processing™ April 1, 2025 3 min read

From Survivor to Thriver: The Arc of Narrative Integration

Survival programs kept you alive. But they were never meant to be permanent. Life Telling Processing™ describes the arc from surviving to thriving, from fragmented story to integrated life.

Life Telling Processing™ March 25, 2025 3 min read

When Weekly Sessions Are Not Enough: Vocational Discontentment and the Case for an Intensive

For some people, the wound beneath vocational discontentment is too layered for weekly sessions to reach on their own. A reflection on why the intensive format exists and what it makes possible for those in a season of profound professional disorientation.

Life Telling Processing™ March 11, 2025 3 min read

The Five Phases of Life Telling Processing™: What the Journey Actually Looks Like

One of the most common questions I hear from people considering therapy is a simple one: what will we actually do? Here is a plain-language guide to the arc of the work, from building safety to carrying the story forward.

Life Telling Processing™ February 25, 2025 3 min read

The Mosaic Metaphor: Why We Don't Throw Away the Broken Pieces

Walk into any ancient basilica and you will find them: mosaics that have survived fifteen centuries of war and neglect. They are not smooth. They are not seamless. And yet, from a distance, they are breathtaking. The mosaic is the central metaphor of Life Telling Processing™.

Life Telling Processing™ February 11, 2025 3 min read

What Is Life Telling Processing™? The Story Behind the Method

Life Telling Processing™ is not a technique borrowed from a textbook. It is a framework built on the conviction that every person carries a story worth telling, and that telling it fully, honestly, and in the presence of a skilled witness is itself the healing.

Navigate a Threshold

How do I move through a change that has unsettled me?

Life Telling Processing™ November 18, 2025 3 min read

The Necessary Winter: Seasonal Cycles and the Making of a Whole Life

Spring does not arrive in spite of winter. It arrives because of it. A contemplative reflection on the seasonal rhythms that shape the Life Telling journey toward integration, wholeness, and the breath-taking emergence that only a necessary winter can prepare.

Trauma & Narrative May 13, 2025 3 min read

When the Story Shatters: What Trauma Actually Does to the Narrative

Trauma does not just wound the body or the emotions. It shatters the narrative. Understanding what trauma actually does to the story, and how the fragments can be gathered into something whole, is the beginning of the path toward integration.

Relationship, Family, and Faith

What is happening in my faith, family, or closest relationships?

Faith & Integration June 24, 2025 3 min read

When the Map No Longer Fits the Territory

Faith deconstruction is not the end of the journey. Through Life Telling Processing™, the fragments of a broken spiritual story can be gathered into a wholeness that is larger and more honest than what came before.

Faith and Integration March 14, 2025 3 min read Men's Work Wound

Pornography and the Fragmented Story: A Life Telling Processing Perspective

Your struggle is not the truest thing about you. It is a fragment of a larger story. A Life Telling Processing perspective on why the behavior is a communication, not a moral failure, and how the mosaic of the full story holds the path to genuine freedom.

Faith & Integration February 4, 2025 3 min read

Spiritual Shadowlands: When Faith Fragments and Wholeness Becomes Possible

The dark night is not the end of faith. It is the passage to a faith that is larger than the one that broke. A Life Telling Processing™ guide to the path from fragmentation to wholeness.

Regional Perspectives

What does this work look like where I live?

Regional Perspectives August 27, 2026 3 min read

When the Pace Becomes the Problem

A Sacramento reflection on achievement, pressure, and noticing when the pace no longer leaves room to arrive in your own life.

Regional Perspectives August 26, 2026 3 min read

When the Role Follows You Home

A Sacramento reflection on the private cost of staying capable everywhere, and making room for the story beneath the role.

Regional Perspectives August 26, 2026 3 min read

When Success Needs a Quiet Room

A Folsom reflection for a man whose life is full, yet needs a quieter place to understand the pressure beneath it.