The only way out is through.

The Patterns That Were Pulling Me

How I built a life I don't Want to escape.

By the time I was in my late 20's I had a life that looked, from the outside, like I had it all figured out. A stable career with social benefits. A low interest rate mortgage. Money to spend. At work I was the man – a special teams operator, an instructor, and a mentor. I was the guy people called on their worst day.

Inside, I was being run by patterns I had never chosen and could not see.

These unconscious patterns were a manifestation of the conditioning, trauma responses, inherited beliefs, and survival strategies that once served me early on in life, but were now preventing me from connecting to a deeper sense of purpose.

These are the patterns that quietly run a lot of high-performers. Often, the same ones who look most in control.

Mine patterns took me thirty years to find. Here are three.

Pattern 1

I grew up in a house I wasn't safe in. My stepfather was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive from the time I was 2 until I was 10. My mother had her own undiagnosed mental illness which made the environment more chaotic, not less.

I survived by becoming useful.

As a kid, that meant managing the room. As an adult, it meant a career built entirely around being the person who shows up when things fall apart.

I loved the work and I was good at it. I also used it. 48-hour shifts, side jobs, adrenaline – all excellent ways to never sit still long enough to notice what you're avoiding.

Depression can’t hit a moving target, or so I thought.

Utility = Safety

Pattern 2

If I was always producing, always achieving, always earning, always adding another certification, I never had to find out who I was without the uniform.

The vices were the other half of the same equation.

Workaholic. Alcoholic. Sexually compulsive. Hyper-independent in a way I called strong and now recognize as guarded. All of it served the same function: stay sufficiently numb so that I never had to actually be present in life.

A failed engagement at 28, was the first major crack. The first thing I couldn't out-work.

Achievement as armor.

When I left the fire service in 2023, I went looking for answers in all of the usual places — meditation, breathwork, plant medicine, long stretches of solitude on the road. Eighteen months of it.

A lot of it was useful. Some of it was profound. But I watched myself, and I watched a lot of other seekers, fall into the same trap: pursuing wisdom as just another way to avoid being present in life.

For some, real change is always just one more ayahuasca download, meditation retreat breakthrough, or trip to Bali away.

I personally had all of these stacked up like trophies, but none of it actually changed the way I showed up when I got home.

Spirituality became a treadmill with a carrot of wisdom dangled just out of reach.

Pattern 3

Spiritual Treadmill

What changed

Intuition guides - Agency Moves

I realized that all the answers I was seeking externally, could be found by just pausing long enough for my intuition to speak. I've watched a lot of people have profound insights and change nothing. I didn’t want to be one of them.

I stopped chasing insight for insight sake, and started practicing integration. Self-inquiry — without judgment, without urgency, without a goal — became a daily practice instead of a retreat experience. The boring, unsexy process of actually applying what I noticed became the real work.