The work isn't easy to describe from the outside...

What was actually going on for you when you first reached out?

When I first reached out to Sam, I thought I understood the problem — I drank too much, I chased dopamine. I knew the behaviours.

The trigger was a breakup — an intense, short relationship with someone who mirrored things back to me that were true, painful and clarifying all at once. She cracked me open enough to realise I needed to go much deeper than I'd ever gone. So I did.

What I found, through working with Sam, was that I was carrying things I didn't know I was carrying. Childhood feelings of scarcity — of joy being rationed, of love being conditional on performance. A protective shadow had emerged early to manage it. An ADHD mind that, once let off the leash as an adult, was expecting the fun to be stopped. And beneath all of it, things encoded in my body that I'd never thought to consider.

The most striking example: through somatic work, I found a soreness in my liver, followed it, and was taken back to being eight years old with hepatitis — genuinely frightened I might die. I'd completely forgotten it had happened. It had never occurred to me that an experience like that, at that age, might leave a psychological mark that was still there decades later. But it had. And once I felt that, I understood that I was carrying many things. That the behaviours weren't the problem — they were the response.

I went in thinking I needed to drink less. I came out understanding that I'm on a journey, that the journey will probably never end, and that I'm okay with that in a way I couldn't have understood or previously accepted.

You'd done other work before — therapy, coaching, books. What was different about this?

I'd done a lot of work before Sam — talking therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, coaching, and I'd read extensively, from the depths of psychoanalysis to modern interpretations of mental health. But I'd never done somatic work. I'd barely encountered it, and the little I knew didn't strike me as particularly scientific, so I'd instinctively steered away.

What's different about somatic work is that it's in the body. It's not about logic or intellectualising — it's about feeling. And for someone like me, who is sensitive but simultaneously thinks deeply, it is uniquely powerful. I had spun a formidable web of defences to protect myself from my own sensitivity. Somatic work slipped effortlessly through.

In retrospect, throughout my life I've felt things far more acutely than I perhaps realised. That sensitivity is real, and I've spent a lot of energy trying to box it away. But what I've come to understand through this work is that being a sensitive person is a privilege. Once I stopped defaulting to self-preservation, I realised I can experience profound things — what Maslow would call peak experiences — from the simplest moments. Lying on the living room floor, touching a plant, walking in the woods, gardening. Things a sensitive person can access deeply without needing to chase much else. Realising this has changed how I view work, achievement, and what I'm actually seeking from life. I can now embrace that sensitivity rather than lock it away.

This work requires you to stop intellectualising — which can be both safe harbour and prison — and encourages you to feel and release. Sometimes there are tears, sometimes a gentle shift of emotion, sometimes profound relief. Nothing theatrical or clichéd. Just moving.

And the intensity of what can happen in a single session rivals anything I've experienced, even psychedelic therapy.

What's different in your life now that you didn't expect to be different?

I have begun to allow myself to return to being a sensitive person — the sensitive little boy I always was, but felt I had to shed to become a man.

Through this work, I've reconnected with that earlier version of myself. Somewhere along the way, I absorbed a sense that becoming a man meant shedding that sensitivity. Whether that came from society, family, or my own interpretation of what was expected, I'm not entirely sure, and it doesn't really matter. But I internalised it. I threw up the shutters. What I've come to understand is that integrating that sensitivity back into who I am now is how I become aligned.

It's given me a much clearer sense of who I really am. I've come to understand myself as thinly sliced layers existing across time — the seven-year-old who was frightened and needed soothing, the young man who was lost and yearning, the adult I am today. These versions of me are simultaneously the same person and different people, shaped by differing and shared fears and experiences. What used to feel fragmenting — the way certain moments could pull me back into those earlier selves without warning — now feels like something I can move through consciously. I can visit those younger versions of myself, understand what they needed, comfort them, and return to the present feeling more whole rather than more lost. That's the paradox I've made peace with: I am one continuous person and many people at once.

— Jake, Entrepreneur