About Me
From Trauma To Acceptance,
Healing To Authenticity
My Story
A client once told me, “In Clayton, you get someone whose own story is way worse than most anything you can bring to him, so he meets your struggles with kindness and compassion.”
It’s a strange badge of honor, but it’s also the truest reflection of my life’s work.
I grew up in a small western Massachusetts town that prided itself on being perfect—politically correct, progressive, safe. On the surface, it looked like nothing bad ever happened there. But beneath the good manners and manicured lawns, there was plenty that went unspoken, especially in my home.
The easiest way to describe my childhood would be to use the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) Test, of which I score a 9 out of 10.
I have often described my childhood home as a war zone riddled with mental illness, addiction, and violence. But at the same time, inside of our little Cape-style home, the love and laughter (although sparse) were real—but it was complicated.
Love meant self-abandonment. Love meant pretending things didn’t hurt. Love meant denying our own reality to avoid someone else having to face theirs.
We were a family that adored one another but didn’t know how to process both the pain of the present and the past until it finally reached its boiling point.
And yet, even in its craziest moments, it was home.
The Split
I remember the exact moment I learned how to split in two.
I was failing first grade. My parents and I sat across from my teacher for a conference. I expected them to explain what had been happening at home—to help me make sense of why school felt impossible. Instead, they looked shocked and disappointed, as if to say, "We thought we had a deal. You’re supposed to keep those two worlds separate."
That day, I understood:
What happened in the dark was never meant to see the light of day.
There were things you could feel and things you could show, but they could never be the same.
Years later, when I realized that I was Gay, I was once again faced with the need to keep my internal and external worlds separate.
As I got older, humor became the only safe way to talk about what was happening. If I could make it funny, I could say it out loud. I became a master at using stories as camouflage—what Brene Brown calls “disclosure, not vulnerability.”
People thought they knew me because I told them everything, but I never actually let them in.
My life felt like a long game of Survivor. I hid in the shadows, used laughter as a shield, and kept everyone just far enough away to feel safe. When I finally came out as gay, I watched both of my parents cry. I interpreted their tears as pain I had caused, so I made myself a promise: never again would who I am hurt someone else.
That promise built a fortress. I learned to live two lives—the one I dreamed of, and the one I survived. But while I was desperate to protect myself from the outside world, or more honestly, the outside world from the real me, all I did was block myself from my true self. And in the process, I lost what little access I had to:
My emotions
My wants and needs
My hopes and dreams.
Grief
In my late teens, my family suffered the first of what became many losses, including a brutal stretch of six months where six members of our extended family passed away suddenly. Grief became another language of silence. I was surrounded by people who loved deeply but didn’t know how to talk about loss, so I learned to do the same.
The loss of family members became so common that I kept a suit in my closet at all times and secretly practiced eulogies to "be prepared" for when the next loss came. It was the same logic that led me to spend decades tearing myself apart with every insecurity and every piece of myself I deemed unlovable in order to protect myself from the inevitable insults that would come when the world noticed them as well.
But in each case, the result was the same. You cannot prepare yourself for the painful moments in life, and attempting to control them only furthers your inability to witness, experience, and process them.
Nothing has taught me more in my life than the complexities that accompany grief. Every loss felt different, and there was no way to predict it or prepare for it.
To date, I have lost numerous people that I love, including both of my parents, both of my grandmothers (including one whom I idolized), and dozens of family/friends.
Each time, I learned just how big a distance there was between me and my ability to feel. And in that lack of feeling was a lack of being able to give and receive love.
If my childhood had made me put walls up, the combination of heartbreak in my early twenties and the loss of family members caused me to reinforce them with as much security as possible.
The Breaking Open
By my late twenties, I had become a shell—high-functioning, loyal, guarded, exhausted.
I avoided therapy for years because I thought it meant confronting the people who’d hurt me, and I didn’t want to hurt them back. I had spent my life protecting the people I loved from their own impact.
But eventually, the anxiety caught up to me. My chest felt like it was caving in; I couldn’t breathe. It was when I started to take antidepressants that I needed help, so I found a therapist who seemed like a nice guy that I wouldn't feel the need to project versions of myself in front of.
In one of our first sessions, he casually asked, “But do you actually believe you’re worthy of love?”
The answer—no—collapsed my entire world. But it was also the moment I started to rebuild it.
When my father died not long after, I spent a year and a half sorting through his estate—paperwork, debts, and memories. I became “the man of the house” without feeling ready to be a man at all. I cried once, from exhaustion. Even in grief, I couldn’t access love.
That was my rock bottom: realizing that the armor that once protected me now kept me from everything I needed most.
I had lost my best friend and turned that pain into a never-ending checklist.
In the beginning of my "self-work journey", I didn't set myself up to arrive at a specific destination other than doing everything I could to not feel the way I did inside. I bought books, listened to podcasts, wrote down quotes, and started practices on my own to learn who I actually was.
One of the biggest pain points of trauma is not the violent acts themselves but the rift that is caused between who you are on the other side of the pain you experienced and who you were born to be.
In addition to my work in therapy, I started tracking different aspects of myself, writing my truth in the privacy of my own journal, and allowing myself, piece by piece, to discover who I am. I never expected to pass any of the things I was doing on to help other people; I was just doing them because they were what I needed. I never could have imagined years later that those practices would become the foundation of my work.
Over the years that followed, I tried almost every therapeutic modality available—talk therapy, CBT, REBT, IFS, EMDR, neurofeedback, energy work.
With each therapist and new modality, I was lucky enough to find people to work with who not only were able to offer support to my current pain points but also believed in the possibility of a healthier version of myself that I never would have believed on my own.
The turning point came when I started to do Internal Family Systems, aka Parts Work. Each time I met another inner part, I realized how much more of me there was to witness (and love). I stopped seeing myself as broken pieces and started seeing an ecosystem—some parts still scared, some still healing, all of them trying.
EMDR and neurofeedback took me deeper. They rewired not only my brain chemistry, but the way I existed in the world. I went from fighting off tremors in public spaces to being able to comfortably be in a crowd of hundreds without fear of trauma response.
I never thought I would see a day when I didn't exist in the world as a traumatized person, but a few years into my Neurofeedback journey, a brain scan came back that put me under the limits for my previous CPTSD diagnosis.
Therapy saved my life and allowed me to live in the world as a "normal" person for the first time in my life.
This required me to learn what it was to be myself, to be happy, to release the identities associated with being a traumatized person, and to build a life out of a hopeful future, not a painful past.
Finding My Voice
In 2020, I finally listened to the people who’d been telling me my whole life to try stand-up comedy. I took classes at Second City.
The first time I stepped on stage, I couldn’t believe that the same kid who once felt invisible was now holding a microphone. The stories I’d been too afraid to say suddenly had an outlet. Laughter became medicine—a way to alchemize the unbearable.
Coaching found me the same way. Friends kept telling me I should do it. I’d coached high school basketball, but being paid to help people felt uncomfortable. My dad would’ve laughed and asked why I was getting paid to be a good listener.
My first paid workshop was five dollars. Afterward, two people paid, and I cried and tried to refund them because I felt guilty taking money for something that came naturally.
I never wanted to come across as being on a soapbox or, even worse, a mountain top where I pretended to have the answers. I saw so many examples of other coaches creating "5 Step Plans For Happiness" and couldn't imagine ever being someone who marketed something of that sort.
Which, ironically, I found out I never actually would.
It took me years to understand that what I offered wasn’t advice—it was a safe space. One where someone could come as they are, be honest with themselves, be present in their journey, and start to give themselves permission for an even more beautiful future.
Now, when I coach, I live for the moments when a client gives themselves a little more grace. When they realize they’re already winning simply because they’re being honest with themselves. When they give themselves an extra day off in a month because their balance is more valuable than any amount of money that can be made.
I have worked with survivors of Cancer, grief, trauma, eating disorders, and hundreds more. Over the last few years, I have found a sweet spot in supporting entrepreneurs to not only find greater success and balance in business, but more importantly, outside of it.
Whether it has been in one-on-one sessions, small men's groups, or on stage in front of hundreds, one thing has remained the same:
I am fascinated by people and their stories.
I marvel at how people can overcome so much adversity and still tell themselves internal stories that they are not doing enough.
And I don't believe there is a moment where a person could ever give themselves too much grace for who they are, how they show up in the world, and all they have been through.
Small Miracles
Healing has made me grateful for the quiet victories.
I have spent my entire life playing through fantasies in my head of when I would win the big race or do something extraordinary to prove to people how strong and worthy I am.
But instead, some of my greatest victories weren't in the notable achievements:
Reversing my CPTSD Diagnosis
Moving cross-country on my own
Leading workshops for hundreds of people
It was in the small moments, the small shifts, where all of the work finally allowed me to be the person I was born to be.
Like the time I hugged my mother from behind during our last Thanksgiving together because I felt called to remind her that I loved her. It wasn't the act of initiating physical affection that had been so uncommon for me, but instead what happened after. After initial confusion, I felt my mother settle for the first time in my arms.
It barely lasted a minute, but in the wake of her passing, it was a moment that had been decades of work for each of us individually that allowed for it. The past no longer mattered; we just loved each other.
The Best Guess So Far
If there’s a code I live by now, it’s this:
I’m a person in progress. I’m allowed to make mistakes, to change my mind, to outgrow versions of myself that once kept me safe.
I trust myself not to abandon myself again. I know that the beauty in my life exists because of what I’ve lived through, not despite it.
Years ago, I spent so long fighting the idea that I was broken. Then one day I wrote it down—I’m broken—and everything changed. The moment I stopped denying it, I finally felt free enough to start building something new.
So if there’s one thing I hope people take from my story, it’s not inspiration. It’s honesty. A reminder that you don’t have to turn away from yourself to begin again.
Everything I’ve written here is simply my best guess so far.
And I’m sure that five years from now, I’ll look back and laugh at how naive I was.
But that’s what makes life beautiful—none of us are finished, and that’s the point.
With Love,
Clayton
