To answer the question “who am I?” requires that I tell you about myself, or what I’m about. We do this mostly through story. Below, you will find a few brief stories describing in a general way what I was like, what happened, and what I’m like now in various areas of my life. For now, allow me to provide some of the broader strokes.
I am an author, psychotherapist, educator, and researcher. I am a storylistener and a storyteller. I’m not so much a “people person” as I am a ‘person…person,’ preferring time spent with individuals or small groups, rather than large crowds. To say that I’m a “dog lover” would be a tragic understatement. Few things excite me more than time spent outdoors. As a southern transplant residing in New England, I often feel like a stranger living in a strange land. I am a lover of wisdom. I strive to be a worker among workers, a friend among friends, a member of my family, and a useful member of society. In most things, I’m not yet what I ought to be, but I’m better than I used to be.
Perhaps the greatest asset I bring to my work with clients is my extensive personal experience with hardships and failure. Every story must start with a really bad first draft. It’s not the content that makes a story good or bad, but how it’s told. In the beginning, I struggled because I couldn’t piece together my life in a way that made sense.
Disordered feelings and behaviors were the byproducts of a disjointed story. In my life, I have faced severe illnesses of mind, body, and soul, including depression, multiple addictions, and autoimmune diseases. I’ve dealt with sleep disorders and other mysterious conditions, for which I was prescribed many medications that only worsened my health. I have endured numerous relationship woes, as well as legal and financial hardships.
It wasn’t until I learned to coherently piece together my story within a larger narrative that wasn’t solely about me that I began to straighten out spiritually, mentally, and bodily. Today, I am exceedingly grateful for all my setbacks and failures, as they are precisely what make me useful to those with whom I work, which affords meaning in my suffering. Through this work, I am permitted to share my experience and continually refine the drafts of my story.
My academic pursuits have been driven by a deep desire to make sense of my own experiences, understand myself, and find recovery. So, it’s impossible to separate my academic work from the rest of my story.
Psychology and philosophy. In 2003, I started seeking treatment for my addictions and began exploring the core concepts of recovery. I learned about how addiction changes the brain and about the spiritual solutions offered by approaches like the 12-steps. I switched my major from philosophy to psychology, figuring it would be cheaper than therapy in the long run. In my classes, I studied the relationship between consciousness, the mind, and the brain, and how these relate to psychiatric disorders like addiction. This made me obsessed with a big question: What exactly is the “self”? Is it the same as the brain or mind? If not, where does it come from, and how does it affect the material world, especially in terms of recovery? The idea that the self can make a difference is central to our concepts of self-help. I also started wondering how all of this fits with the idea that God or a Higher Power is the real solution. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these questions were eating away at whatever faith I had left. To make sense of these conflicts, I took these questions with me into my graduate training in theology.
Theology. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend bringing your doubts and skepticism into divinity school like I did. Most students in these programs approach the subject through the lens of faith. My motivation was to find a rational explanation for how God could actually help save an addict like me. During this time, I started believing more and more that self-help, rather than God-help, was the only real solution for what I was dealing with. I dug into these questions in my master’s thesis, called “From Ontology to Recovery: Rethinking Human Nature, Addiction, and the Prospect of Self-help.” In that project, I argued that selfhood emerges from all biological systems and that the defining feature of selfhood is purpose. For humans, our purposes are unique because we can think in terms of symbols. On this view, the self is a symbol that stands for something, represents something, and therefore means something. In other words, the nature of the self is inherently relational, and its meaning can only be understood through those relationships. Like all symbols, the self needs to be interpreted for us to understand ourselves. The irony is that even as I was reaching these conclusions, my own behaviors, emotions, and self-interpretations became more chaotic than ever. I also started to see that what we call spiritual transformations in recovery are actually dynamic re-interpretations of the self through changes in personal meaning systems.
Science and Religion. Realizing how important spiritual transformations were to both clinical science and religion, I decided to dive deeper into this field. I observed that these transformations were crucial for recovery and wanted to understand how they actually worked. At this point in my life, around 2009-2010, I was probably the most spiritually sick I’d ever been. As providence would have it, I ended up doing research among Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups because of their emphasis on the significance of spiritual transformations to their recovery. Meanwhile, my drinking and mental health had gotten so bad that I had to take a year off. For two years, I attended these meetings regularly before I truly began to understand how they worked. Listening to people’s stories about what they’d been through and how they’d changed, I started to rethink my own experiences. I realized my addictions were really about disordered behaviors and emotions that came from disordered self-interpretations. Recovery was about bringing order to those behaviors, emotions, and self-interpretations. In other words, my drug use wasn’t the problem; it was a symptom. Then, I heard someone say something that changed everything: “We have to identify, not compare.” Suddenly, I saw my primary problem. I was focused on how I was different from everyone else, looking at the differences in our experiences rather than the similarities. I realized this was one of the most cunning strategies of my soul-sickness, which seemed to want my isolation, meaninglessness, and destruction. That was on December 28th, 2010. I haven’t had a drink since then. Through these experiences, I began to see the importance of the group and the community in gaining leverage on systems of meaning. More importantly, I understood the role of storytelling within these communities as essential to accessing those meaning systems. I completed a second master’s thesis titled “Identification as a Mechanism of Change in Alcoholics Anonymous.” I argued that at least part of how spiritual transformations come about in recovery is through the process of storytelling, enabling both the audience and the narrator to effectively make sense of their experiences through their relation to each other.
Neuroscience. Driven by my desire to understand how this identification process works in the brain, I went back to school to pursue a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. I also wanted to understand how the brain changes during recovery, especially through a concept called “emotional sobriety.” In my dissertation research, I looked into the neural and behavioral aspects of the emotional improvements that often happen during recovery from AUD, known as “emotional sobriety.” This is basically a dynamic state of emotional balance, which is a major goal in recovery. Our findings showed that emotional and behavioral changes in recovery happen together, in tandem with specific changes in the brain. After finishing my doctoral research, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale School of Medicine, where I received advanced training in neuroimaging for addictive disorders.
Recovery science. In 2023, I accepted an appointment at Harvard Medical School, where I currently research the changes in the narrative self during recovery. This work continues to bridge the gap between personal experience and scientific exploration, driving my commitment to understanding and improving recovery.
There was a time in my life when I rejected anything resembling spirituality. I simply could not accept the notion that change could come about in the material world through unseen, immaterial causes. This was especially true when it came to handling my own problems. I was all about self-help and self-improvement. In other words, I was all about SELF. Looking back, I can see that this philosophy really came from a deep-rooted belief that the world is unsafe and other people are not to be trusted. And so, I leaned more and more on my own intellect and understanding. What’s the use in believing in things unseen, or expecting them to somehow work out in your favor? What evidence is there for a purpose outside of my own? Isn’t this just setting myself up to be let down in the long run? Yet, the more I tried to rely on my own ability to reason my way through life’s problems, the worse they seemed to get. Maybe this strategy of abject self-reliance works for some people, but I am not one of them. I have come to learn that when I believe and act as if my life is all about me, I get very sick, emotionally and physically. When there is nothing outside of myself to live for, no purpose outside of myself towards which to grow, my soul grows back on itself – it becomes ingrown. This type of soul-sickness has been referred to as the “bondage of self” within an “existential vacuum.” I craved relief from this bondage, which I got temporarily through drugs and alcohol. But, I found that the more these substances do for you, the more they’ll do to you…
It’s ironic. I used to reject the notion of spirituality because I couldn’t understand how something without physical substance could change something in the material world. Yet, I seemed to have no problem accepting this possibility in the opposite direction. One of the best definitions for addiction I’ve heard is “the attempt to solve a spiritual problem with a material solution.” Ultimately, my problem was a spiritual one, because it resided deep within my innermost self, unseen and unseeable. Regardless of what I gave lip-service to, this was the only reality I really cared about – my own suffering. And though it was invisible, I came to learn that my suffering had everything to do with how I saw myself in the world. I used to believe that more knowledge meant more power and perhaps more ability to save myself from the experience of myself. Yet, considering how abysmally I had been managing my own life, it began to seem like a stretch for me to think that I was (or ever would be) all-knowing or all-powerful. Simply put, I realized that I was not God. And it was through the realization and acceptance of my own finitude and the limitations of my knowledge that I acquired enough humility to concede the possibility of a Reality beyond what I could perceive or comprehend. As I let go of the belief that I had to have all the answers, or that I had to somehow be a finished product, I felt free for the first time. As I continue to let go of what I think I know and relax my focus on what I think I see, I occasionally catch a glimpse of the spiritual dimension of existence that I used to scoff at. And it’s within that dimension that my life’s purpose reveals itself, as though it has finally come out of hiding. That purpose is to live out this spirituality of falling and getting up again, no longer trying to become more than human, but rather, more human…
As a clinician, I’ve treated individuals struggling with all types of addiction and other common co-occurring disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and insomnia. My experience ranges from directing addiction treatment programs in men’s correctional facilities to providing individual therapy. As the Clinical Director of treatment programs in correctional facilities, I drew from the insights from my research and personal experiences to develop and implement a novel therapeutic curriculum that would help clients learn to make sense of their own experiences through storytelling and storylistening. This approach fostered profound shifts in self-understanding and enabled lasting remission for many clients. In my ongoing clinical work, I consistently observe the relationship between addictive symptoms and low personal meaning in life and sense of self-identity. In my private practice, I focus primarily on men’s issues in recovery, particularly those related to finding meaning, purpose, and identity.
