The slightly longer and more interesting version of my story:

My story has changed as I’ve learned new ways to think about it. When I was 17 years old, the story of the world gave me was that I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. The story my religion gave me was that my best effort would never be enough to be able to be worthy to be with my family that I loved forever. When this was my story, this was my reality and you can imagine how I might have felt.

After failing my first year of college due to severe mental illness, I found myself becoming a dad at age 19 after an unplanned pregnancy with my ex-wife. Talk about needing to grow up quickly. Looking back, I had no idea how to navigate my inner world at that point, but responsibility wasn’t going to wait for me to catch up. Two years later we found out our oldest daughter had cancer.

I found a way to get better at school and finished up my bachelor’s in human development and family studies. After three more years of taking more prerequisite classes, I was accepted into a master’s degree program to become a physician assistant. I started to learn more about psychology in college and more about psychiatric diagnoses as other stories to try on. Along the way, I learned that I had experienced clinical depression and anxiety and tried different antidepressants and different therapy options. I learned I had adhd and that it is real and significant. I learned I was a highly sensitive person and that that was a real thing too.

Around 6 years ago, I had the opportunity to experience a psychedelic assisted therapy journey far from home. My intention going to that session was to explore why I was always anxious. Up to that point in my life, I experienced an almost constant state of unease and anxiety, always feeling like everything was one step away from falling apart unless I was doing something intense like backcountry skiing or trail running or turning the volume down with substances. As I started to develop chronic pain in several areas of my body, those exercise prescriptions weren’t going to work anymore, and the ones society gave me hadn’t worked in the past so I naturally looked for alternatives.

During this experience, I was able to meet my soul or my higher self. My day to day self was pure fear and worry. This aspect of me I found myself experiencing was endless no worries, love, and peace. I connected to an energy or presence I had found years before through intense fasting and prayer when I was 18. Only this time, I knew that this presence or feeling was “me.” I learned more about myself that weekend than I had my entire life to that point.

I still had room for new stories. The next morning in the group integration circle I was taught a lesson I’ll never forget. I was sharing about some of the experiences I had and some of the things I learned about my anxiety. During the story, I referenced a younger version of myself as being an idiot. That is exactly how I thought of myself based on how I was taught to think about myself while engaging in “dumb” behavior. From age 18.5-29, the story I told myself was that I used to be a screw up and I had finally found a way to fight through my defectiveness and become who everyone else already expected me to be. I believed that I had engaged in the substance use behaviors that I had when I was younger because I was a screw up, because I was defective or broken. Because I just needed to try harder…

The facilitator stopped me and asked what was going on in younger Thomas’s life during this time? He wondered what I was feeling and experiencing in my inner world that led to behaving the way I had described in the memory I shared. In that moment, all of my self-judgments shattered. I realized that all my behaviors made sense when seen in the context of the inner hell that I was experiencing with no other ways out of the pain.

At the end of PA school, I became obsessed with Audible and my entire relationship with learning changed overnight. Once learning was allowed to to be guided by my passion instead of by the structure or rules of formal schooling, I found learning about subjects that I found interesting was purely effortless and enjoyable. I learned more on my own that I ever did from any formal schooling or education. I realized there was so much value to what I was learning and also that most people were never going to read or listen to all of these books.

Over the coming years I listened to hundreds of books about psychology, neuroscience, different forms of therapy, consciousness and psychedelic assisted therapy research, near death experience research, quantum physics, and more. I started to learn what all these different fields had in common when you get to the message underneath the symbols.

I found a job when I got out of school where I’d spend the next five years doing guided ketamine assisted therapy sessions for patients who experienced treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I learned how to guide others into their subconscious and how to navigate the depth of their inner worlds. I experienced countless miracles with my patients over those years. Where traditional meds and therapy came up short, ketamine assisted therapy and the tools and principles I was teaching were leading to relief, understanding, and lasting change where the usual right answers fell short.

I developed the underlying framework of the coaching programs that are still at the heart of Synergy today. As I started to practice the tools and principles for myself that you’ll find in my programs, everything started to shift for me. I started to get more and more connected with my higher self or soul that I had met in that journey years ago. I started to see layer after layer of the onion of every other layer within myself, all the clouds between me and that never ending central sun of my higher self.

I wasn’t done having a hard time and decided it would be fun to go through a major faith transition and leave my childhood religion. I started to learn through the books I was reading and the experiences I was having personally and with my patients and coaching clients that there seemed to be a universal spirituality beneath the symbols that all traditions and science were pointing to. What if we use words as symbols so much that we forget that a sign post only points the way to the experience? What if sign posts are not destinations but something to guide us back into the inner world of our own experience?

A couple years ago, I closed my first coaching business at a time of great marital difficulty. About a year ago, within a week of coming home from a family trip in Kauai, my ex-wife told me she wanted to separate and ultimately get divorced. We never had a normal conversation again. Overnight, my entire world broke. It got messy.

I was instantly thrown back into the emotional and psychological world of my upbringing without realizing how much I had still had to process. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, whether from deep meditation or from ketamine or psychedelics, the barriers that normally guard our wounds and vulnerabilities fall down. All the stories of a lifetime are suspended and we’re able to see ourselves from a different vantage point. In medicine assisted sessions, the medicine wears off and some of those guards go back up. During this time it was as if I was in a permanent psychedelic journey where all of my childhood and adolescent emotional wounds from all the times life was “too much, too fast, too soon” combined with all the wounds of getting unintentionally pregnant and married at 19. Naturally, all of that combined with the wounds of finding out my partner of 14 years no longer loved me and was ready to leave me behind.

It was a lot like in a psychedelic journey where the only real way out is through. There are many other paths I could have taken to escape my pain and avoid facing the stories and oceans of emotion within myself but that would have led to more looping. Fortunately, I understood enough about what I teach others to take myself through that process, with the support from key friends and family in my life along the way.

I was already really burnt out and struggling with my own mental health leading up to our separation. After separation I was drowning. There were plenty of moments in those early days when I felt the lowest I’ve ever felt, and I felt like the only thing that could help was being able to hug her again. What used to be my safest place in this world.

I clung to my job as a physician assistant. It felt like the only shred of my old identity I had left, the only thing left to hold onto. Three months after separation during an extended panic attack I freaked out and quit my job, with zero days notice… I felt completely trapped in the dynamic I was experiencing with my ex-wife while still fighting with everything left in me to continue to be a functional member of society as well as a dad. That same week, a cop called me and told me I was being issued a restraining order (apparently a go to strategy for divorce attorneys these days…) that took my kids even further away from me without justifiable cause. Now I didn’t even have my job that had become such a part of me and all I could do was draft counter arguments with my lawyer and pay more money to get my kids back. Layer after layer the trauma and pain intensified.

The day after I quit my job, I tried to get it back, but they wouldn’t give it back, which is quite understandable given my sudden exit. I found myself sitting there in my apartment asking myself, “What now?”

Immediately the answer came, well, why not do what you’ve always wanted to do? When I had my old coaching business as a side business, I loved the freedom that I had to teach people what I wanted to teach them. Back then, I wished that I could grow that business to the point where it could replace the income that I felt was necessary to sustain my family. I am passionate about ketamine assisted therapy and psychedelic assisted therapy, but I also already knew the truth that although psychedelics can open the windows of heaven, they can’t keep you there. I knew that these principles and tools that I had learned and taught my coaching clients were the way to find your way back to that state from our day-to-day realities. The tools and principles that help people reconnect with that same inner ocean of peace and love, without the medicine. I believed that if I applied these tools and principles in my own life, I could heal, I could start over, I could rise from the ashes.

I started Synergy Peak Performance Training. Even though I had closed my last coaching business the year before, somehow, miraculously I happened to have a referral from a past client that same week I quit my job. As I set sail down my new path, the same pattern continued, and more people who resonated with what I had to teach began to find me or be referred by other past or current clients. Before long I was living the reality that my old character version of me didn’t believe was possible. Through death came new life, through the darkest night, the brightest day and a better understanding of our collective misunderstanding of black.

I am an advocate for all forms of therapy and medicine on our planet. I seek to be a bridge between eastern and western wisdom. I seek to be a bridge between people and their families and their communities. I seek to be a bridge between people and their parts and layers within themselves. What if we could utilize all available wisdom to heal? What if we weren’t threatened by new ideas that didn’t fit into the boxes of what we think we know? What if we were allowed to explore our own minds?

I’ve personally experienced the truth that Gabor Mate points to when talking about addiction. He says to look for the pain underneath the addiction rather than focusing on the behavior that stems from that inner pain. I have found that underneath all these labels whether it’s addiction, or depression, or anxiety, or any other label our Western illness culture provides, there are always very real and very valid feelings underneath that label. There is always more to the story when we are willing to expand to the whole story. I believe we live in a reality where more than one thing is true at once, even though we’re taught most of what we’re taught in black-and-white thinking. In my experience, the world is full of nuance and everything exists along spectrums of interconnected relationships. In the world of rainbows and spectrums, ideas are not threatening. In fact, they are expansive. Something to try on and see how it fits or how it doesn’t.

I no longer define myself by the labels that were given to me by society. I now define myself based on the infinite love and possibility I have found and feel within myself. I have found this state in medicine assisted therapy states, and I have also found it in countless other ways using the tools and principles I teach and practice.

I believe we’re all taught what I would call the myth of arrival. We are all taught to look to some future condition to be better than our present condition. I don’t believe myself or anyone I work with will get across some finish line by using my programs and find themselves in the land of unicorns and rainbows. I also believe that life can be way easier and way more fun. I believe most people on our planet have no idea there is an infinite energy source of limitless love at their core. I believe that hardly any of us are taught how to actually understand and process our emotions.

We all share the same original wound. We are taught by our families and communities that some aspects of us are welcome, and others are not. We all learn to hide aspects of ourselves that are not seen as socially acceptable. We all hide things from ourselves in our subconscious until we are taught how to turn the lens around and look within. We all need spaces where ALL of us is welcome. I believe unconditional love is just that, without condition. What if all of you is welcome, even the parts of yourself you’ve been taught to exile?

Even though I had been teaching others about their own parts and layers and discovering my own for years, I kept discovering more and more layers of myself through the pain. I realized I still thought of my confident self in a flow state as the real me and all the less polished versions of me seemed like a “bad day” and something to get through or hide. This time, I learned to share those vulnerabilities with clients rather than hide them which led to deeper and deeper transformation for all of us. The more I listened and felt, the more I learned and understood.

I found the deepest fear and the self-sabotage avoidant loop within me. My fear of sharing my story and what I’ve learned, along with the stories of everyone I’ve worked with. This fear was so deep that I’ve avoided sharing publicly until now which naturally leads to no improvement of skills with no practice. I wasn’t hearing my fear’s true message (which would have led to the actions I’m taking writing this now). As I finally start to share publicly, I find myself released from fear as I used to know it. All I had to do was learn how to listen and how to adjust course. Our emotions are messengers and when we can’t understand them, they do what any good messenger would do, they get louder.

My path is to show other people that there’s a third door. My path is to share my story and the stories of others that flow through me. My path is teaching others how to find what unites us rather than divides us. My path is teaching others how to find wholeness, how to find a state where everything you’ve ever experienced makes sense. My path is to help whoever is ready discover the power we all have inside ourselves. My path is to connect people back to their most authentic dreams and desires in a world where we all win together and everyone’s story matters equally.

If you’re ready to explore the world within, you’re most likely going to like what I have to offer. If you don’t like what I have to offer, I think that’s a win-win and it’s helpful to know what you don’t like. I would encourage you to keep looking until you find what speaks to you.

To all who resonate

May peace prevail on Earth

This is me

Take it or leave it

-Thomas