I don't teach this from a textbook. I lived it.
I was a straight-A student who never performed at full potential. On paper I had every excuse to be winning. Underneath, I was quietly holding myself back from being seen, from being known, from taking up space.
Given a day off, I would choose eight to ten hours inside a video game over almost anything else. Not because I loved games more than life — because being anywhere else, being anyone else, felt too exposing. That was the first shape of the wall. I just didn't know it yet.
Then at seventeen — in the middle of COVID — I went through topical steroid withdrawal. My skin turned a deep, almost purple shade. My nervous system collapsed. I couldn't walk into my own garden without panic. Years, not weeks.
Through all of it, I was chasing one thing: becoming a funded day trader. Months of failing. Blown accounts. Grinding charts at hours most people wouldn't. Eventually it paid off — I passed the evaluations, got funded, and finally started winning. A couple of good months on the books, on pace to pull seventy to eighty thousand dollars a year from a bedroom.
And then I lost it. All of it. Not because I didn't know how to trade — I had just proven I did. Because the version of me allowed to hold that level of success did not exist yet. My strategy was clean. My identity wasn't. And the part of me running the show quietly took back everything I had built.
That was the moment I understood: it was never the trading. It was never the skin. It was never the anxiety or the gaming or the sugar. It was one thing, wearing different masks, and until I went after that thing directly, nothing was going to change.
So I went obsessive. Hundreds of books — hypnosis, NLP, self-hypnosis, addiction, Jung, Erickson, the whole canon. I started applying the tools on myself, and one by one, the walls came down. The gaming. The anxiety. My skin. Eventually the sugar. Not through willpower. Through going underneath it.
The framework I now use with clients is built on the work of Freddy Jacquin — one of the most respected hypnotherapists in the UK, founder of the Jacquin Hypnosis Academy, who has worked with over 30,000 clients since 1994 — and his son Anthony Jacquin, author of Reality is Plastic. In my view, their approach is the cleanest, most direct method of hypnotherapy in the world. It is what I train in, and it is what I bring to every client. But the reason I can use it on you is that I already used everything I know on myself first.
- The social anxiety that kept me indoors for two years — gone.I speak to cameras for a living now. People ask if I've always been this confident.
- The sugar addiction I carried for eight years — broken at the root.Thousands of failed attempts before. Haven't looked back since.
- The gaming escape that ate most of my teenage years — it no longer has me.I'd rather be in the world now. That took rewiring, not discipline.
- My skin — significantly changed.The deep purple is long gone. Not because I changed products. Because I changed the nervous system underneath.
- The identity I inherited — dismantled and rebuilt.What I speak like, think like, move like now — my old self would not recognise me.
I'm not a career therapist who studied this from the outside. I used this work to get myself out. I still remember the exact shape of the wall. That is why I can help you find yours — and take it down faster than someone who has forgotten what it felt like to be stuck behind it.