When I first began this website/blog in late 2017, it was at the behest of the publisher of my soon-to-be-released first book. After three solid years of pornography addiction recovery, I was ready to tell my story and potentially launch a career as a keynote speaker, lecturing/entertaining the world to the dangers of pornography addiction through my story and the extensive amount of research I unearthed to that point.
There were some very active early years on this site as it became a marketing tool for an ever-increasing cadre of books I’d write, hundreds of podcast interviews and whatever else was going to make me Mr. Pornography Addiction Savior.
Then, the pandemic hit and almost everything I was trying to achieve ground to a halt. While I continued writing and giving interviews, even that got tedious pretty fast. Thankfully, I found the world of coaching.
Remember Instagram during the pandemic? Everybody was suddenly a coach. You just needed a friend who told you that you were a great listener and you were advertising your new career. For most, it was clearly something to do while housebound. For many, it seemed like an excuse to pay for a pretty website and have an excuse to engage in photo sessions. I can’t count the number of “Here’s My Family in White Shirts and Jeans on the Beach” photos scrolled through during 2020 and 2021. I’m curious how many of those people ever had a single client.
Pornography addiction coaching and betrayal trauma coaching clicked for me. While those coach-till-something-else-came-along folks fell by the wayside, I found something I never knew I had: a natural calling for helping people. Taking my experience as a journalist and interviewer of 20+ years, adding months of training and certifications, my own story of recovery and a style that is apparently unlike most people have dealt with… it just worked.
Instead of wanting to return to the world where I’d stand in front of 100+ people and tell my story or appearing every other day on a podcast, I wanted to build a clientele that I could help overcome their demons and challenges before they grew to the decades-long extent of mine. During the pornography addiction recovery process, a handful of people guided me to getting a life I didn’t think was possible. I wanted to be one of those people for others.
Honestly, it came as a surprise when I recognized that the guy who craved attention from strangers prior to recovery – and was still there in the first five or six years of recovery – would rather sit with a man, woman or couple and talk about their individual issues than have as many eyes on him as possible. It proves recovery is an ongoing process. My need for public adoration dissolved over time as I became more comfortable with myself.
So, here I am today, writing this in June 2024 as part of freshening up a website I have largely ignored the last few years. I think there’s been less than 10 new entries into the blog section of the website in the last three years. At some point last year, I stopped keeping track of the podcasts and interviews as they slowed.
I was far less interested in telling my story than helping others with theirs and that led to less bookings, but it genuinely didn’t matter to me. Podcasts didn’t drive many clients to me and that has been the main thrust of my marketing. I’ve been working on a fifth book for months, but it’s been challenging having the same passion for it that I once did. I’d rather be helping a couple with trust issues based on betrayal trauma or working with a pornography addict who thinks they’ll never be able to stop.
A couple of years ago, I wrote on here about how I’d got lucky on TikTok and that was steering clients toward me. Today, it still is vastly my most reliable way to find new clients, but the hits and likes don’t really mean anything unless a potential new client is attached. I hold “live broadcasts” a few times every week, and while they are tedious at times, I also know they help people.
As I’ve been freshening up this website and clearing the cobwebs away from who I was trying to be five or six years ago, I’ve decided to get back to basics. I’m going to be writing here much more in the future. I’m willing to do more interviews, as long as they aren’t exclusively about me. Maybe I’ll write the fifth book, and for the first time, I won’t be the focus. There was a lot of value in this website/blog once, and I think there can be again.
So welcome, or welcome back.