The Root Cause Session
90 minutes, one to one, for men who've spent years and real money on personal development and are still running the same pattern. We find where it formed, and work with what's still holding it in place.
Which of these is yours
Most men who come to me have tried more than the people advising them. Therapy. Breathwork. Plant medicine. Meditation. Books, podcasts, courses, the gym, the discipline, the 5am.
Some of it helped. None of it held.
And somewhere in there you started to wonder whether the problem was you specifically.
A man in a recent workshop, before he'd worked with me.
Here's the actual reason.
Insight lives in your head. The pattern lives in your body.
You can understand it completely, explain it to a room, name the parent and the age and the mechanism, and your nervous system will keep running the identical programme. Understanding was never the thing that changes it.
There is an order to this work, and almost nobody follows it.
Even the deepest modalities tend to give you rung three without rungs one and two, so you understand everything and change nothing. Discipline culture gives you rung five without any of the rest, so you white-knuckle a life you can't feel.
This is the Ladder of Liberation. A session starts at the bottom.
Find out which rung you keep falling off.
Book a sessionNobody tells you this part
The most common question I get before a session is some version of "what am I actually walking into?" So here it is, in order.
You won't be asked to relive anything. The work is in the body, not in the retelling, and we don't go anywhere you don't want to go.
90 minutes, one to one, online. $297.
Book a session
BeforeAfter
I know because I lived it
For years, my reality looked like the textbook definition of success. I was achieving great results, climbing the corporate ladder, growing a business, winning awards, speaking on stages and building a team. From the outside, I had it all together.
But behind the accolades, I was living in a constant state of survival. My day-to-day was a masterclass in high-functioning dysregulation. I filled my calendar to the absolute brim just to avoid the deafening silence of stillness. I said yes to everyone except myself, to keep the peace and prove my worth. If I wasn't working, I felt a crushing guilt that I wasn't doing enough.
To cope with the immense, suffocating pressure I was putting on myself, I turned to avoidance. Distracting myself with substances, mindlessly scrolling for hours, and constantly chasing the next milestone to outrun the feeling that I was fundamentally never good enough.
The root of it all was unprocessed grief and trauma. Growing up and navigating a family member's attempted suicide, I had learned to suppress my emotions and rely on extreme hyper-independence to stay safe in an unpredictable environment.
I tried everything to fix the internal chaos. I spent over eight years in talk therapy. I meditated, read countless self-help books and consumed endless podcasts. I gained incredible intellectual awareness of my issues, but the biological pattern remained completely untouched. No matter how much I understood my trauma, my nervous system was still running a subconscious programme of stress, insecurity, anxiety and eventual burnout.
Everything changed when I stopped trying to out-think my patterns and finally started doing the somatic and shadow work. I confronted and integrated the parts of myself I had kept hidden: the relentless overachiever, the chronic people-pleaser and the exhausted peace-keeper. I finally cleared the trapped emotional charge from my body.
Today, I lead my business, serve my clients and live my life from a deeply composed, calm and regulated state. The meaningful success hasn't stopped, but the desperate, exhausting pressure behind it has.
I know exactly how heavy that armour is. More importantly, I know exactly how to help you take it off.
90 minutes. One to one. Online.
Book a sessionFounders, business owners and men who run something.
Biomedicine with a Graduate Diploma in Business.
Coach and partner, working with Australia's brightest minds under 30.
Recognised advocate for mental health awareness.
Thought leadership on mental health and emotional regulation.
Ready when you are.
Book a sessionMeasured, not claimed
Then again at the end. Same sheet, same questions. Gayan had spent four years and over $60,000 on his own growth before he got to me. Tony Robbins, Mindvalley, programs, courses.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Trust in himself | 1 | 7 |
| "I am enough" | 2 | 7 |
| "It's my fault" | 10 | 3 |
| Anger in the body | 9 | 2 |
| Regret | 10 | 2 |
| Relationship with his parents | 5 | 8 |
Three that barely moved in the same twelve weeks: social life 3 to 3, self-judgement 9 to 8, self-compassion 2 to 3. Those are the deepest-built things on the sheet and they move last, every time.
Nobody in his family apologised. Nobody had the conversation that fixed anything. He stopped carrying what he'd been carrying in there since he was a boy.
"I've invested in a lot of programs. Even Tony Robbins, Mindvalley. Maybe over $60,000 in the last three years. But I haven't experienced something personally like what we did together. Even though the external circumstances haven't changed yet, I trust myself again after a long, long time. Just within five weeks."
Gayan did twelve weeks of private work, not a single session. I'm not going to pretend 90 minutes does what twelve weeks does. But twelve weeks has to start somewhere, and the first piece is always the same.
Start with the first piece.
Book a sessionFrom men who've done this work
"When I'm not feeling good, my sales aren't good. When I'm feeling good, my sales are there. You've helped me pave the way through my own head. I haven't been comparing myself anymore, whereas in the past I'd get stuck in cycles of comparison."
"With counselling or therapy, you're running out of time. You feel like sometimes you're not heard to the degree that you want to be heard. This was different. I just had to show up as I am."
"Within a month, I noticed myself and even my team being happier. I put out my best revenue for the month in my 2.5 years of running the business. I'm a different boss and I'm a different mate."
And in the free workshops
Everyone gives a tension score out of ten before we start and again about twenty-five minutes later. Average drop across four workshops: 3 points. Not one score has gone up.
"After that last thirty minutes I could definitely feel the shift in my mood, and just a more relaxed state. Chest and gut mostly. At work I hold a lot of tension in my lower back, and it all just melted away."
"I find myself way more relaxed now. The bit that really settled everything was right at the start, sending a bit of relaxation to each body part. I could just feel everything sink into the floor. It took me to some interesting places tonight."
I didn't do that to them. I talked. Their bodies did it, because they were finally given somewhere to put something they'd been holding for years.
Get your own number.
Book a sessionThat's the most common thing I hear, and it's exactly why I'm not selling you certainty.
Most of what you've tried gave you a state. A state doesn't hold, because the thing producing it sits upstream and never got touched. That's where it falls over, not in your effort.
I spent eight years and a lot of money on things that helped and didn't hold. So if that's where the hesitation sits, I understand it and I'm not going to argue you out of it.
It won't undo twenty years and I won't pretend it will.
What it will do is find the root and start it moving, and you'll feel it in your body before we finish rather than taking my word for it. That's what the number at the start and the end is for.
We don't go anywhere you don't want to go, and you don't have to relive anything. The work is in the body, not in the retelling.
And I don't leave anyone open at the end of a session. We track, re-orient and land before we finish, every time.
"I have to commend you on your natural ability to use breathwork to instil peace and relaxation while simultaneously exploring deep psychic terrain of a pre-verbal nature. After our last work together, I can honestly say that I have never experienced a healing session in which I felt more safely held in such gentle, caring resonance."
If that's answered it, the next step is a calendar.
Book a sessionI'd rather run four sessions with men who need this than ten with men who found it interesting. So, plainly:
It isn't who you are. But you're not going to believe that from a webpage.
Not sure yet? Start smaller.
The Root Cause Audit is eight questions and takes about six minutes. I read every one myself and write you back a personal breakdown of the pattern I can see in your answers. You get that whether or not you ever book anything.
If you'd rather talk it through first, email me at david@dmt.care and I'll find fifteen minutes this week. No pitch.