I lived every word of it first.

The bottom

Addiction took everything before it was finished with me. The drugs I was on are some of the hardest there are, and they took me all the way down — to the streets, with nothing left that looked like a life.

I don't tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because I need you to know I've stood where you might be standing right now — and I know the way out, because I had to find it myself.

Serving — and what came back with me

Before addiction had its grip, I served.

I came home carrying things that don't show up on any scan — combat-related PTSD that the standard help was never built to reach. The appointments, the waiting lists, the medication: none of it touched what was actually wrong. So, like a lot of veterans, I tried to handle it on my own. That road rarely ends well, and for me it led straight into addiction.

Getting clean — and why the soft approach never worked

Every soft, comfortable approach I tried let me off the hook — and being let off the hook kept me sick. What finally turned it around was the opposite: honesty I couldn't dodge, structure I couldn't wriggle out of, and accountability that treated me like a man capable of change rather than a patient to be managed.

Alongside that, I went to the frontier — the plant medicines our ancestors understood and modern science is only now catching up to. That combination, real discipline and the right medicine used properly, is what got me free. Not overnight, and not by luck. By doing the work.

Five years building the curriculum

Getting clean was the start, not the finish. I spent the next five years obsessed with one question: why does recovery fail so many people, and what would it take to make it hold? I researched, I experimented with frontier treatments, and I built a curriculum that doesn't just remove the substance but rebuilds the whole person around its absence. That curriculum became the Rules of Engagement programme. It was tested on the hardest case I know — me — and refined on everyone I've helped since.

It started with me — and it's a team now

It started with me, and at its heart it's still me: my story, my method, my standards. But the work has grown bigger than one person. Today I work alongside a small, hand-picked team — trained facilitators, a shaman, medical screening and support staff I trust completely. So when you reach out, you're held by people who run things the way I would, whether you're speaking to me or to someone on my team.