🌅 From Ocean Beach to Strategic Recovery™
My True Story of Addiction, Awakening, and Purpose
I grew up in Ocean Beach, San Diego—salt on the skin, board under the arm, arcade tokens in my pocket.
Childhood held sunshine and theme parks, but it also held shadows I didn’t yet have words for.
I was a highly sensitive kid without a shield—intuitive, easily hurt, and overwhelmed by the world’s volume.
That sensitivity would become my gift later.
First, it became kindling.
🚪 🌿 The First Door: Marijuana
At 15, curiosity nudged me into my first real doorway into addiction — a second smoke-session with friends that quietly tilted my entire trajectory.
This time I felt it — the buzz, the laughter, the “everything’s better now” glow that my brain instantly tagged as the new solution.
I slid into being an “enhancement smoker” — using weed to “upgrade” everything while silently dropping from straight-A’s to a 2.5 GPA.
Surfing, video games, music, food — weed made every part of life feel sparkly, amplified, and unrealistically safe.
It also stole my short-term memory, drive, and the hunger for a real future — costs I wouldn’t notice until much, much later.
💤🎮 Stalled Out, Then “Dream Job”
College starts. Stops. Drops. Classes blurred into late nights and skipped mornings — my momentum quietly leaked away.
I landed what felt like the ultimate escape hatch: a job testing video games — a lazy stoner’s dream job where I could stay high, clock in, and call it “work.” From there, I started selling weed on the side.
For a while it really was money, friends, freedom. I was surrounded, validated, and convinced I’d hacked the system.
Then the energy shifted — more entourage, pressure, and escalation than ease. The “dream job” became a conveyor belt toward risk, and I was riding it without brakes.
Stalled out — the dream job illusion
🥃😈 Enter Alcohol (and a Monster Named “Whisky Finch”)
I tried psychedelics and a sampling of pills without any immediate hooks. They were intense, but they didn’t lock in as my everyday “solution.”
Alcohol was different. A few drinks in and my brain decided: “This is it. This is how we cope.”
Alcohol made me loud, bold, and out of control. The shy, sensitive kid disappeared; a reckless, explosive version took over.
Then came the blackouts, fights, arrests — nights I couldn’t remember, consequences I definitely couldn’t forget.
My friends named my alter ego “Whisky Finch” — a nickname that felt funny at first but slowly turned into a mask for chaos.
I hated who I became when I drank… and then drank more to escape the shame of being him. That loop would follow me for years.
From psychedelics to “Whisky Finch.” The bottle promised freedom, but the shadow carried the cost.
When the party finally ends
Knock, Knock: The DEA
One morning, the door didn’t knock — it exploded. The Drug Enforcement Agency swept through my place and cataloged pounds of weed, cash stacks, and a dealer ledger — everything they needed to close the case.
I got bailed out, then did the only thing my nervous system knew: I drowned my fear in liquor.
A sleepless, hallucinatory night of withdrawal (DTs) rattled me — shaking hands, racing heart, shadows moving on the walls. For a moment, I thought this might finally be enough to scare me sober.
Instead, the courts handed me probation and community service — a second chance on paper, but no real roadmap for changing my life.
I tried AA — 90 meetings in 90 days. The fellowship helped, but the approach didn’t quite fit the way my brain and body worked, so eventually I drifted.
I respect AA deeply; it just wasn’t my path. I still didn’t have a model that explained what was happening to my brain, my emotions, and my life — not yet.
When “cutting back” isn’t really change
Switching Seats on the Titanic
I told myself I was getting healthier: less alcohol, more pills. In reality, I was just swapping one life raft for another on the same sinking ship.
Valium, Xanax, Percocet, Norco — whatever I could afford, whatever took the edge off. My nervous system didn’t care about labels; it just wanted relief.
Then life caught fire for real. Wildfires displaced me, homelessness followed, and I finally fled to upstate New York telling myself it was a fresh start.
New town, new job, a girlfriend, and a baby on the way. From the outside, the story looked hopeful: “He’s settling down. He’s turning it around.”
And for a little while, life actually worked. Bills were paid, smiles came easier, and the storm seemed far away — but the patterns underneath hadn’t changed yet.
Swapping life rafts on the same sinking ship.
Loving your child while losing yourself
Fatherhood… and the Opioid Trap
California called me back — and so did my old habits. Sunshine on the outside, fog on the inside.
Depression, drinking, pills. On paper I was functioning; inside I was sinking.
Two months before my daughter Willow was born, I made a fierce promise: I would be in her life. I moved back to New York, white-knuckled some stability, and tried to stand tall as “Dad.”
Then daily opiates crept in — slowly at first, then as the quiet center of my day.
When the pills ran dry, I met opioid withdrawal for the first time — terror, insomnia, panic. My brain and body screamed; I had no name for what was happening.
Valium dulled the storm. The relief felt like mercy — but it quietly reset the cycle instead of breaking it.
Suboxone helped, but I started toggling between subs and pills, hiding the dependency behind “Dad mode” and fake stability.
Loving your child while losing yourself
☀️ The Overdose
A doctor put me on methadone and Valium.
Within 48 hours I overdosed—blue face, not breathing.
EMTs, naloxone, a hospital, a medically induced coma.
I aspirated vomit and developed a lung infection.
When the tube came out and I could breathe on my own, I caught the look on the team’s faces: You made it back.
That was my line in the sand.
I almost left Willow fatherless before age two.
No more.
The overdose — and the line in the sand
Rewiring my nervous system from the inside out
The Hard Reset: Body, Brain, Spirit
I tapered off methadone in eight days, used a short Valium bridge — and then stopped completely.
In rapid succession I cut cigarettes, caffeine, and sugar, rebuilt my diet, and began targeted supplementation to restore dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and GABA.
This time, post-acute withdrawal didn’t break me. My nervous system finally had what it needed to stabilize.
My brain chemistry was actually healing — and I could feel it: more energy, fewer cravings, clearer thinking, and a genuine sense of “coming back online.”
Coming back online
The unexpected spark that shifted everything
The Book That Cracked Me Open
🎄
At a family Christmas, my brother unwrapped The Game by Neil Strauss. I “borrowed” it the minute he set it down.
⚡
I devoured it in two days — not for the pickup tricks, but for the transformation arc underneath the story.
📚
That book flipped a switch. I went into full-blown learning mode: NLP, Tony Robbins’ Unlimited Power, personal development, psychology, influence, mindset.
🌱
Confidence rose.
🔋
Energy surged back.
🏄♂️
I started lifting, surfing, running, studying — actually living again.
The spark that changed everything
Service, mastery, and ignition
Counselor, Then More
💼
I interned at an Opiate Treatment Program and was offered a full-time counseling position in just one month.
🧠
I immersed myself in Person-Centered Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, NLP, supplements, spirituality — a full-spectrum transformation apprenticeship.
🚀
Ten months in, I attended Tony’s Unleash the Power Within.
🔥
The firewalk, the breakthroughs, the energy — several lifelong limiting beliefs died that night.
🏆
I won Tony’s essay contest and a full scholarship to Date With Destiny.
🌊
Momentum became a lifestyle.
🕊️
Then came Qigong and food-healing training — widening my inner compass.
🌬️
During a 45-minute Breath Empowerment I accessed a natural, ecstatic bliss I had only ever chased with drugs.
💧
Tears. Gratitude. A new direction.
Service, mastery, ignition
🔥 Burning the Ships
My heart outgrew clinic work.
I wanted to help people transform without being tethered to dispensing stronger substances.
Inspired by Cortez’s story to “burn the ships”, I turned in my resignation and walked into the unknown.
Then I devoured business and marketing, helping my parents launch their herbal line (Self-Heal Balm) and learning how to build something of my own online.
Burning the ships — leaving the harbor
🌐 Opiate Addiction Support Blog
In 2014, I started blogging to help people break free from opioids .
For months, no one came.
I kept writing.
Slowly, comments trickled in: “This helped me quit.”
Traffic built.
Income followed — by helping.
I started creating free intro courses and paid in-depth courses.
I trained as a Strategic Intervention Coach and coached clients one-on-one.
Six years later: 300+ free articles and millions of visitors.
A spark in the dark — the blog begins
🎙️ Elevation Recovery & Fit Recovery
In 2019, Chris Scott and I launched the Elevation Recovery Podcast — 300+ episodes, around 500,000 downloads across 60+ countries.
In 2020, I became Head Coach for Fit Recovery: 1-1 alcohol coaching, weekly (then twice-weekly) groups, and three six-week flagship courses:
Amplifying the recovery signal worldwide
The culmination of 14+ years, thousands of clients, and a lifetime of lived transformation.
🌟 Strategic Recovery™: Everything That Works
In 2025, I founded Strategic Recovery™ — not as another “method,” but as a unified field theory of addiction recovery.
It’s the integration of everything I learned across:
- 1 My own near-death addiction journey
- 2 A decade of private coaching
- 3 Clinical work in outpatient treatment & MAT
- 4 A global platform of podcasts, courses, and thousands of client and reader stories
- 5 Neuroscience, psychology, nutrition, spirituality, archetypes, environment design, and lived human experience
Strategic Recovery™ is literally the model I wish existed when I was drowning in addiction — because it would’ve saved me years of suffering.
It distills 14+ years of breakthroughs into a single, coherent system that actually matches how humans heal: slowly, holistically, strategically, and with dignity.
This is science-based and soul-based recovery — honoring the whole person, not just the symptoms.
When fragments become a framework
Core Framework • Structural Foundation
The 5 Pillars — Your Whole-Person Foundation
(Biochemical • Psychological • Social • Environmental • Spiritual)
🔗 Read the full 5 Pillars deep diveMost recovery approaches fixate on one dimension. Strategic Recovery™ fixes the entire ecosystem that keeps addiction alive.
Because addiction isn’t one-dimensional — it is biochemical, emotional, social, environmental, and existential.
The 5 Pillars ensure you rebuild all five — so nothing is left untreated, unsupported, or unaligned.
This is why people finally feel balanced, hopeful, and stable enough to change.
Learn it once — reuse it forever.
Biochemical 🧬 → Psychological 🧠 → Social 🤝 → Environmental 🏡 → Spiritual 🕊️. Your complete model for healing.
Time-Based Strategy • From Chaos to Clarity
The 5 Phases — A True Roadmap to Freedom
(Preparation → Detox → Repair → Rewire → Transcend)
🔗 Explore the full 5 Phases guideRecovery isn’t linear. It’s staged. Every phase demands a different strategy, mindset, and biochemical support.
Most people fail not because they are weak — but because they use the wrong tools at the wrong time.
Strategic Recovery™ fixes that. You always know exactly where you are, what’s happening, and what to do next.
This is recovery without confusion.
Learn it once — use it until transcendence.
Prepare 🧭 → Detox 🔥 → Repair 🌿 → Rewire 🔄 → Transcend 🕊️. Finally, a real map you can count on.
Pattern-Level Insight • Personality-Based Strategy
The 4 Archetypes — Your Recovery Personality Map
(The Seeker • The Empath • The Achiever • The Thinker)
🔗 Meet the 4 Archetypes and find your primary typeThis is where Strategic Recovery™ becomes surgically precise. The 4 Archetypes reveal your unconscious patterns — the ones quietly driving cravings, overwhelm, overthinking, or emotional collapse.
Instead of forcing you into someone else’s template, we start with who you really are: your nervous system, your emotional style, and your deepest motivations.
Once we know your dominant archetype, we can choose the right tools, in the right order, for the right nervous system — so your plan finally feels like it was built for you.
The 4 Archetypes of Strategic Recovery™ — a personality-based map for customized healing.
Know yourself. Then build the right plan.
These 12 lenses show us how your brain, body, emotions, environment, and spirit are wired — so your recovery strategy finally fits you.
Brain Type & Focus Style
Clues about impulsivity, focus, and energy patterns — so we can match tactics to how your brain actually works.
Mood & Emotion Pattern
Are you more anxious, low, irritable, or flat? Your emotional baseline points to which tools will move the needle fastest.
Neurotransmitter Balance
Clues about dopamine, serotonin, GABA, and endorphins — and where your brain chemistry likely needs support.
Sleep & Circadian Rhythm
How you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up — one of the biggest predictors of cravings, mood, and resilience.
Stress Load & Nervous System
Life stressors, trauma residue, and sensitivity level — so we calm your system instead of just white-knuckling it.
Hormones & Energy
Patterns that hint at adrenal, thyroid, and sex hormone imbalances that quietly drive cravings and burnout.
Physical Recovery Capital
Nutrition, movement, sleep, supplements, and medical support — your body’s overall capacity to heal.
Psychological Recovery Capital
Beliefs, self-talk, coping skills, and mindset strengths we can leverage — and stories that need updating.
Social & Relationship Support
Who lifts you up, who pulls you down, and where we can build true connection instead of isolation.
Environment & Triggers
Home, work, digital and neighborhood cues — the stuff around you that either fuels or frees your habit.
Spiritual & Meaning Profile
Your connection to meaning, values, and something larger than the addiction story — however you define it.
Tendency Type & Sensitivity
Whether you’re an Obliger, Questioner, Rebel, Upholder, HSP, or Empath — and what that means for your custom game plan.
Biochemical Repair • Nervous System Calm • Faster Relief
The Detox Triad — The Fastest Way to Stabilize a Brain in Chaos
(Foundation Nutrients • Targeted Amino Acids • Key Enhancers)
🔗 Explore the Detox Triad & supplement guideWithdrawal is biochemical. PAWS is biochemical. Cravings are biochemical. Most systems treat this entire realm like an afterthought — Strategic Recovery™ brings it front and center.
The Detox Triad is my shorthand for repairing the brain’s reward system with three synergistic layers:
Under the hood, that looks like:
- 🧬 Rebalancing neurotransmitter output so the brain can actually use and convert the nutrients, cofactors, and aminos you feed it.
- 🔧 Restoring metabolic cofactors that power the enzymatic reactions behind mood, energy production, and stress resilience.
- 🛡️ Reducing neuro-inflammation so the nervous system stops operating in danger mode and symptoms can actually settle.
- ⚡ Mitochondrial supports to rebuild cellular energy and beat bone-deep exhaustion.
- 🧘♂️ Nervous system regulation to dial down alarm, anxiety, and sensory overload.
When you stabilize the brain at this level, symptoms drop, cravings quiet, and clarity, motivation, and emotional stability come online. Clients feel better — faster. And because we’re working with the body instead of against it, the relief is sustainable, not just another short-term band-aid.
The Strategic Recovery Detox Triad™ — Foundation Nutrients, Targeted Amino Acids, and Key Enhancers working together to stabilize the brain.
Recovery Capital — Your True Power Source
(The assets that determine who succeeds — and how quickly.)
🔗 Read the full Recovery Capital guideRecovery Capital is the currency of freedom. It’s everything you can draw on — the sum of your internal and external resources — that makes change possible, sustainable, and even joyful.
In Strategic Recovery™, Recovery Capital isn’t a vague concept. We map it, grow it, and treat it like your primary power source.
Your core recovery assets include:
Why Strategic Recovery™ Works When Everything Else Fails
Because it’s the only system that:
- ✔ Treats your biology and your beliefs — repairing the brain while rewiring the stories you live by.
- ✔ Rewires your nervous system, not just your habits — so you’re not white-knuckling your way through every day.
- ✔ Honors trauma and sensitivity instead of punishing it — especially if you’re an empath, HSP, or “too much/too sensitive” for traditional models.
- ✔ Gives a clear roadmap instead of vague slogans — with phases, pillars, and assessments that tell you exactly what to do next.
- ✔ Personalizes recovery to your archetype, brain, and life — no more trying to squeeze yourself into a one-size-fits-all program.
- ✔ Combines science, spirituality, psychology, nutrition, and compassion into one unified model — instead of ten separate, conflicting approaches.
- ✔ Works for modern addictions — alcohol, opioids, benzos, stimulants, porn, gaming, doom-scrolling — not just the problems people had in 1935.
Strategic Recovery™ is what happens when every scattered piece of the healing puzzle finally clicks into place.
It is the next evolution in addiction recovery.
And it was born from lived experience, from thousands of clients, and from the determination that no one should ever have to walk this journey blind again.
Where I Am Now
I live a half-block from the Pacific with my bird, Papaya.
My daughter — now a teenager — is the joy of my life.
I create podcast episodes, long-form articles, and custom Recovery Blueprints for clients.
I rebuild chemistry, calm nervous systems, reshape identity and habits, and elevate environments and spirit — just like I did for myself.
Life is simple and luminous.
Service is the path.
Timeline Highlights
The skim-friendly arc — from sensitive kid to Strategic Recovery™.
Highly sensitive, early trauma, no armor.
Grades slide, gaming, dealing — fun turns heavy.
Blackouts, arrests, fights, chaos.
Probation; AA helps, but doesn’t fully fit.
Displacement → homelessness → moved to New York.
Daily opioids → first withdrawal → trying to show up as dad.
Counseling student by day — heroin in the shadows.
Coma → naloxone → lung infection — almost didn’t make it.
Quit meds + nicotine + caffeine + sugar → rebuilt neurochemistry.
NLP, Tony Robbins, qigong — new operating system for life.
Quit the “safe” path → launched OAS → helped thousands.
Global podcast + thousands coached one-on-one and in groups.
Everything unified into one complete, holistic framework.
What I Believe Now
The five convictions that shape every Strategic Recovery™ blueprint, every session, and every decision I make as a coach.
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Addiction is not a moral issue. Your brain and nervous system adapted to survive. Shame was never the solution — understanding and redesign are.
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Biochemistry matters. When you repair the hardware — dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, GABA, stress chemistry — the “software” of thoughts, habits, and emotions finally has a fair shot.
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Strategy beats willpower. With the right sequence and plan, you experience less suffering, faster wins, and fewer “back to square one” moments. Recovery is a process, not a personality test.
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Spiritual intelligence is practical. Meaning, love, and service aren’t fluffy extras — they stabilize freedom, anchor identity, and make sobriety feel worth protecting.
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Recovery is a design problem. We can engineer a life, environment, and nervous system where relapse becomes unlikely instead of inevitable — on purpose, step by step.
If You’re Here, You’re Ready
Whether you’re at rock bottom or just tired of white-knuckling, there’s a map — and you don’t have to walk it alone.
I’ve been where you are. I know the terrain. Let’s build your freedom — step by step.
With respect for every path (AA, meds, faith, science), Strategic Recovery is simply the synthesis that worked for me and for the clients I serve. Nothing here is medical advice; it’s a blueprint you can adapt with your care team.
Start Your Strategic Recovery™ Journey Here
Whether you’re fresh off a relapse or quietly burning out on “trying everything,” you don’t have to guess anymore. There is a map. Strategic Recovery™ gives you a phase-by-phase blueprint for healing your brain, calming your nervous system, and rebuilding a life that actually feels worth staying for.
