The Reclaimed Man · Episode 2

Why You Drink Every Night — And It’s Not About The Alcohol

Life can be hard. I get it. Work that matters. People who depend on you. A family you love. It’s a lot to carry — and most days you carry it well.

So most evenings — almost before you’ve decided to — you reach for a beer. Turn on the sport. Pick up your phone. You’ve earned it. There’s nothing wrong with switching off.

And there isn’t. That’s the thing.

But somewhere underneath that reasonable voice is something the beer is quietly taking care of. For years I called mine “decompressing.” It took the hardest inner work of my life to finally see what was actually happening in those evenings — and that I wasn’t decompressing. I was disappearing.

In this episode I’ll tell you what I couldn’t see while I was inside it: why most men live on just four feelings — happy, sad, hungry, horny — and where everything else goes. The beach ball you’ve been holding underwater. And a simple three-step practice you can try tonight, the next time you notice yourself reaching.

This isn’t about giving up the beer. It’s about knowing what it’s really for.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

# Episode 2 – Is This You

This episode is a confession, not a lecture. You are looking back at your own life and describing what you couldn’t see while you were living it. The listener is not being diagnosed — he is being accompanied.

Every section should feel like one man talking to another over a coffee. Not a coach presenting to a room.

The emotional vocabulary moment — happy, sad, hungry, horny — is the emotional centre of the first half. Deliver it with self-aware honesty, not shame. Then pause. Let it land.

The two dialogues are the emotional centre of the second half. Stay in them. Don’t rush to the insight — let him feel the layers before you name them.

The framework at the end is simple by design. Don’t over-explain it. Say it, trust it, move on.

OPEN

I want to start today with something I’ve been sitting with for the last two years.

Most of you who listened to episode one — and thank you for being here, genuinely — most of you will not have been through what I’ve been through over the last two years. The anxiety, the intrusive thoughts, the cancer diagnosis. That’s a particular kind of extreme. And I knew when I was telling that story that some of it would feel unrelatable.

But here’s what I suspect.

A lot of you will relate to what my life looked like before all of that.

Because the breakdown didn’t come from nowhere. It came from somewhere. And it took me two years of the hardest inner work of my life to start to understand what that somewhere actually was.

So today I want to do something a little different. I want to turn around and look back. I want to tell you what I couldn’t see about myself — and what I suspect you might not be able to see about yours either.

Not because I’ve got it all figured out. I don’t. But I’ve had two years of distance now. Two years of therapy, of stillness, of being forced to look at things I’d been walking past for decades. And from that distance, some things are very clear that weren’t clear at all when I was standing inside them.

Let me tell you what I found.

SECTION 1 — THE LIFE THAT LOOKED FINE

Here’s what my life looked like from the outside before any of this happened.

Successful chiropractor. Twice voted Chiropractor of the Year. Built a coaching business from scratch. A podcast with hundreds of episodes. A family I loved. A son playing lacrosse for Australia. By every measure that the world tends to use — I was doing well.

And I believed it. I genuinely did. I thought I was self-aware. I’d done personal development work. I read the books, I knew the language, I helped other people grow for a living. I wasn’t the kind of man who was sleepwalking through his life.

Except.

Except I was getting to the end of the day and I just needed to sit in front of the television for a while. Just needed to decompress. That’s what I called it — decompress. After a day of giving, I needed to receive nothing, just for a while. Just the football. Just some time that was mine.

That seemed completely reasonable. It was reasonable. A man works hard, he deserves rest.

That’s what I told myself.

It’s only now — two years later, from the other side of everything — that I can see what was actually happening in those evenings. I wasn’t decompressing. I was disappearing. I was putting distance between myself and something I didn’t know how to name.

I just didn’t have the eyes to see it yet.

SECTION 2 — THE EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY

Here’s the thing that changed everything for me. And I want to share it because I think it might be the most important thing in this episode.

About a year into everything I was going through — the anxiety, the depression, the diagnosis — I was sitting with Mark, my psychiatrist. And he said something that completely stopped me.

He said that a significant part of what I was experiencing — the anxiety, the depression — was unexpressed anger.

My immediate reaction was: that’s not right.

I’m not an angry person. I don’t have a temper. I’ve never been violent. Anger — in my mind — meant one thing, and that thing was not who I was. So I pushed back. Gently, but I pushed back.

Mark wasn’t interested in my pushback. He just asked me to sit with it.

So I did. And what I found when I actually went looking — properly looking, not just dismissing it — surprised me completely.

I started to ask myself: what is the actual range of emotions I can feel? What do I have vocabulary for? What can I name when something moves through me?

And honestly? When I sat with that question?

Happy. Sad. Hungry. Horny.

That was about it.

[pause]

I’m not joking. For a man who considered himself self-aware, who had spent years in personal development, who helped other people understand themselves for a living — that was the emotional range I was working with.

Everything else — the humiliation, the rejection, the grief, the worry, the loneliness, the shame — none of it had a name. None of it had anywhere to go. It didn’t fit inside happy, sad, hungry, or horny.

So without knowing I was doing it, without any conscious decision — I just suppressed it. Not dramatically. Not even deliberately. I just had no other tool. Something would move through me and I had nothing to do with it, so I pushed it down and got on with the day.

For decades.

And I want to be careful how I say this next part — because I’m not standing here telling you there’s something wrong with you. I’m standing here telling you there was something I couldn’t see about myself. And I suspect — if you’re anything like me — there might be something you can’t quite see about yourself either.

SECTION 3 — THE BEACH BALL

There’s an image I keep coming back to: a beach ball held underwater.

Imagine, for a moment, you can push that ball down — probably for a long time. You’re definitely strong enough. But notice that it takes constant pressure. And the deeper you push it, the harder it wants to come back up. And eventually — it doesn’t matter how strong you are — the pressure builds to the point where it’s coming up.

What I was holding underwater was everything that didn’t fit in the vocabulary I had. The unexpressed anger Mark named. The grief I’d never processed. The shame I’d never sat with. The loneliness I’d never admitted.

And what I was using to hold it down?

Work. Achievement. The television. The next project. The next goal. Staying useful. Staying busy. Staying in motion.

None of it felt like suppression. It all felt completely normal. Like just being a man who was getting on with his life.

That’s the thing about the beach ball. From the surface, everything looks calm.

And then June 2024 arrived. And that beach ball didn’t just come up — it came up and hit me smash bang right in the face. That’s what I described in episode one. But what I want you to understand is that the ball had been underwater for a long time before that. Years. Decades, probably.

I just had no idea.

SECTION 4 — THE NUMBING WE DON’T CALL NUMBING

Now — as you’re listening to this right now, there’s a chance you’re telling yourself: that’s not me. I don’t have a beach ball I’m pushing down. I just deserve a break at the end of the day. I’ve worked hard. I’ve got a good life. I’m fine.

And maybe you’re right.

But I want to walk you through something. Because that’s exactly what I would have told you too — right up until the moment I couldn’t anymore.

I’m not here to tell you to stop.

I’m not telling you not to have the beer. I’m not telling you to turn off the television or close the laptop. That’s not what this is about.

What I want to do is just slow it down. Go a few layers deeper than we usually let ourselves go. Because I think if we do — you might find something interesting.

[beat]

It’s the end of the day. You’ve had a big one. And you reach for a beer.

And the story in your head is something like: I’ve had a massive day. I’ve dealt with staff dramas, client issues, a hundred decisions. I just need to switch off. Is there anything wrong with that?

And the honest answer is — no. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But let’s go a layer deeper.

What made it a big day? The staff challenges. One of your key people — someone you’ve invested in, someone the business genuinely depends on — is looking like they might be on their way out. You can feel it. And with things the way they are right now, if they go, the revenue takes a hit. A real hit.

Go deeper still.

What does that actually mean? What’s the feeling underneath this could get difficult financially?

If you’re honest — really honest — it’s not just stress. It’s something older than stress. It’s a question that’s been running underneath the surface all day, maybe all week. Am I actually capable of holding this together? Am I good enough to lead this business through this?

And underneath that — if you’re willing to go there — is fear.

Not stress. Fear. The visceral, gut-level fear of a man who has built something real and is terrified, in the moments he won’t admit to anyone, that it might not hold. That he might not be enough to hold it.

That fear doesn’t fit inside happy, sad, hungry, or horny.

So it has nowhere to go.

And the beer — the beer isn’t switching off the day. It’s switching off that. Just for a while. Just enough to get through the evening.

[pause]

Let me give you another one.

It’s late. Your wife, your partner — she’s already in bed. You’ve barely spoken tonight. Ships passing. You’re tired, she’s tired, there’s nothing left by the time the kids are down and the dishes are done.

And you find yourself on your phone. Maybe it starts as just scrolling. Maybe it goes further than that — somewhere you wouldn’t mention to anyone. And the story is: I just need some relief. It’s not hurting anyone. I just need something that’s mine.

Go a layer deeper.

What’s underneath the need for relief?

Disconnection. A loneliness that’s hard to name because you’re not alone — you’re surrounded by people. But there’s a distance between you and your partner that’s been growing so slowly you stopped noticing it. And you miss her. Not just physically — you miss the feeling of being truly known by her. And you don’t know how to close that distance. So you don’t try.

And underneath the disconnection?

Loneliness. Not the loneliness of being alone — the loneliness of being unseen. Of lying next to someone you love and feeling like strangers. That specific ache that has no name in the vocabulary most men have been given.

And the phone, the scroll, whatever it becomes — it’s not about relief. It’s about not having to sit with that loneliness for one more hour tonight.

[pause]

Now — here’s what I want to say about both of those.

Neither of those men is weak. Neither of them is broken. Neither of them is doing something wrong.

They’re doing the only thing they know how to do with feelings they can’t name. They’re holding the beach ball down the only way they were ever taught to hold it.

The problem isn’t the beer. The problem isn’t the phone.

The problem is that happy, sad, hungry, horny gave them nowhere to put the fear. The loneliness. Whatever it actually is. So it went underground. And the numbing is what keeps it there.

Now — here’s what I want you to hear. Because when I first started doing this work, my reaction was the same one you might be having right now.

If naming the feeling is the answer — that sounds too simple. How can just putting a word on something actually change anything?

It turns out — it’s not simple at all. It’s neuroscience.

Dr Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has spent decades researching what happens in the brain when we name our emotions. What he found is this: when you label what you’re feeling — when you can actually say this is shame, this is anger, this is grief — it reduces activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is your brain’s threat centre. It’s what fires when you’re in fight or flight. It’s what keeps the beach ball underwater.

Naming the emotion literally calms the nervous system. Siegel calls it “name it to tame it.” It’s not therapy speak. It’s biology.

And then there’s Brené Brown — researcher, professor, someone who has spent twenty years studying vulnerability and shame. Her research found that people who have a larger emotional vocabulary — who can name what they’re feeling with more precision — experience less intense emotional reactions and recover faster. The more accurately you can name what’s moving through you, the less power it has over you.

Think about what that means for a man whose emotional range stops at happy, sad, hungry, horny.

Everything else — the shame, the humiliation, the grief, the loneliness — is moving through him unnamed. Unprocessed. Pushed down. And because it has no name, it has no exit. So it stays. And it builds. And it runs everything from underground.

The naming isn’t the soft option. It’s the most powerful thing a man can do with what he’s been carrying.

But here’s the question that naturally follows — and it’s the right question.

How do I find it to name it?

If I’ve spent decades not feeling this stuff, if I don’t even know it’s there — how do I actually get to it?

That’s what I want to give you now.

SECTION 5 — A SIMPLE INQUIRY

I want to give you something practical before we finish today. Not a programme. Not a twelve-step process. Just a simple thing you can try next time you notice yourself reaching.

The beer. The television. The scroll. The project you dive into at nine o’clock at night. Whatever yours is.

Three steps.

First — catch the escape.

This sounds simple. It isn’t always. Because the honest truth is that many times you’re not going to catch it until you’re already into your second beer. Or until the next morning. And that’s okay. The awareness still counts — whenever it arrives.

But here are three ways to get better at catching it.

The first is your body. Before the reach, there’s almost always a physical signal. A restlessness. A tightness in the chest or the shoulders. A low-grade agitation that you’ve learned to move through rather than toward. The body speaks before the mind does. Start paying attention to that physical sensation — it’s often the earliest warning you have that something is looking for an exit.

The second is the pattern. Most numbing is predictable. Same time of day, same trigger, same sequence. The end of the work day. After a difficult conversation. When the house goes quiet. When you’re alone with your thoughts. Start to notice — I always reach for this when… Once you can see the pattern, you can start to anticipate it rather than just react to it.

The third — and this one is for the man who didn’t catch it in the moment — is the afterwards practice. The next morning, or later that night, just ask yourself honestly: what was I feeling before the first one? Not as self-punishment. Just as curiosity. Working backwards is still working. The awareness still counts, even if it arrives late.

Second — take one breath.

Not a meditation. Not a technique. But make it a slow one — and focus on the exhale.

Here’s why. When you’re in that end-of-day agitation, that restlessness, that low-grade tension — your nervous system is in sympathetic overdrive. Fight or flight. And in that state, the part of your brain that can do honest emotional inquiry — the prefrontal cortex — is largely offline. You’re running on threat response. Which means step three is almost impossible until you do this first.

A slow exhale activates the vagus nerve. That’s the brake pedal on your nervous system. It shifts you out of fight or flight and brings the thinking, feeling part of your brain back online. One breath. Long exhale. That’s enough to create the conditions for the question to actually be askable.

Third — ask yourself two things.

What problem is this really trying to solve?

What am I feeling right now that I don’t want to feel?

Now — if you draw a blank on that second question, that’s completely normal. If your vocabulary stops at happy, sad, hungry, horny, you’re not going to find it by staring into space. So here’s what to do instead.

Try these on. One at a time. Like trying on a piece of clothing.

Shame. Anger. Loneliness. Grief. Humiliation. Rejection. Worry. Inadequacy. Disconnection. Fear.

Just say each one quietly to yourself and notice what your body does. You’re not thinking about it. You’re feeling for it. Does something shift in your chest? Does something tighten? Does one of those words land somewhere that the others don’t?

That’s the signal. That’s the one.

You don’t need to do anything with it in that moment. You don’t need to fix it or process it or understand where it came from. Just name it. Just say — okay, that’s what’s actually here.

Because here’s what Siegel and Brown both found: that single act of naming — even roughly, even imperfectly — begins to reduce its power over you. The beach ball doesn’t disappear. But it gets a little easier to hold. And over time, as you get better at finding it and naming it, it stops needing quite so much pressure to keep it down.

And then — make a conscious choice about what you do next. Have the beer if you want the beer. Watch the football. But do it as a choice, not an escape.

Because here’s the difference.

A man who has the beer knowing he’s feeling the shame of a business under pressure is in a completely different place to a man who has the beer because he couldn’t sit with what was underneath.

One is a choice. The other is an escape.

And once you can see the difference — you can’t unsee it.

SECTION 6 — WORDSWORTH AND THE PRISON-HOUSE

I want to leave you with something before the close. A bigger picture view of what we’ve been talking about today.

There’s a poet — Wordsworth — who wrote something nearly 200 years ago and there’s 2 lines in this particular piece of work that I keep returning to,

The first line is ….”Trailing clouds of glory do we come.

…and the 2^nd line is… Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.”

Trailing clouds of glory. We arrive with everything. Full. Alive. Unguarded. With a sense — even if it was never formed into words — that our life was going to mean something. That we were here for something.

And then, gradually — not dramatically, not all at once — the prison-house closes. The expectations arrive. The obligations arrive. The story of who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to want and how much we’re supposed to feel arrives.

And we learn, slowly, to manage that story rather than feel our actual lives.

And at some point, we stop noticing the walls.

That’s what I couldn’t see about myself. The prison-house had been closing for years. And I’d been calling it maturity.

The marriage that had gone quiet — I called that being realistic about long relationships.

The work I’d stopped loving — I called that growing up.

The dreams I’d let go of — I called that learning to be grateful.

Every one of those was a story. And the story felt so much like reality that I never thought to question it.

But here’s what I want you to understand.

The numbing is part of the prison-house. It’s one of the walls. Because as long as we’re numbing — as long as the beer and the scroll and the late-night project are keeping the beach ball underwater — we never have to feel how confined the space actually is. We never have to ask whether the walls are real.

The inquiry we just walked through — catching the escape, taking the breath, trying on the emotions one by one until something lands — that is not a small thing. That is the beginning of breaking free.

Not because naming a feeling fixes everything. It doesn’t. But because you cannot find your way out of a prison-house you refuse to acknowledge you’re in.

The first crack in the wall is simply this: seeing it for what it is.

That’s what The Reclaimed Man is about. Not adding something new. Removing what’s been keeping the real man buried. And it starts here — with the courage to feel what’s actually there.

Here’s what two years of this work has taught me.

The story is not the truth. It is a story. And stories — when we can finally see them for what they are — can be rewritten.

CLOSE

So let me leave you with something concrete before you close this episode.

Tonight — or whenever it happens — when you notice yourself reaching for something. The beer, the remote, the phone, the late-night project. Whatever yours is.

Try this.

Catch the escape. Just notice you’re reaching for a way out.

Take one breath.

And ask yourself two questions.

What problem is this really trying to solve?

What am I feeling right now that I don’t want to feel?

That’s it. You don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to do anything differently. Just notice what’s actually there.

Because what two years of this work has shown me is that the awareness itself is the beginning. You can’t process what you can’t name. And you can’t name what you’ve never looked for.

The man I was before all of this happened — he wasn’t broken. He just couldn’t see what was there.

If any of this feels familiar, you’re in exactly the right place.

In episode three, we’re going to get into the map. The framework that holds all of this together — the body, the soul, the mission — and why the sequence matters.

But for now — just notice.

I’ll see you in episode three.