There was a night I was 11 years old, alone in a park after dark, waiting for my dad to pick me up from soccer practice.
He forgot.
That story, that I wasn’t quite important enough to show up for, became the operating system I ran for the next two decades without knowing it.
So I did what any good Nice Guy does. I performed. I pleased. I made myself likable to everyone around me. I became a stand-up comedian in LA, chasing validation hits from strangers in dive bars, convinced that if I got famous enough my father would finally be proud of me. I said yes when I meant no. I smiled when I was dying inside. I was everybody’s favorite guy and completely invisible to myself.
Then I got married. And my Nice Guy patterns followed me right into it.
I told myself I was being supportive of my ex-wife by never asking for more. What I was actually doing was swallowing my needs, silently resenting her for not meeting them, and slowly disappearing. When I finally asked her to meet me halfway and she said no, I did the hardest thing I’d ever done. I chose myself. I walked away from someone I was still very much in love with.
Then came the real breaking point.
I moved to Brazil thinking enough distraction would fix what was broken. Spoiler: it didn’t. Turns out when you stop running, everything you’ve been running from is right there waiting. The shame. The grief. The mind that never stopped spinning. Sexual trauma from childhood I’d buried so deep I didn’t know it was there. A body so disconnected from itself that intimacy never felt safe, something that showed up as psychological ED I spent years covering up with pills instead of asking why.
I wasn’t broken. I was completely disconnected.
The shift came in Peru, sitting with Ayahuasca in the Sacred Valley with one intention: show me the pain so I can move through it. I saw the people who hurt me most as children carrying their own unhealed wounds. And I understood that staying in victimhood wasn’t protecting me. It was keeping me powerless.
Over the next four years I threw myself into the work. Men’s circles. Retreats. Somatic work. Training under Connor Beaton and Dr. Robert Glover. I started facilitating circles and found that every time I said the thing I was most ashamed of out loud, another man in the room exhaled. Like he’d been holding his breath waiting for someone to say it First.
That became my mission.
THE MAN I WORK WITH
You’re the nice guy. The good guy. The one who keeps the peace and makes sure everyone else is taken care of. And you’re exhausted.
You say yes when you mean no. You avoid the hard conversation and call yourself the bigger man. Meanwhile the resentment builds, the connection fades, and somewhere along the way you stopped knowing what you actually want.
Your mind never shuts up. You replay conversations from three days ago. You lie
awake at 3am running scenarios while everyone else sleeps fine. You fill every silence with productivity, podcasts, work, not because you’re driven, but because sitting alone with your thoughts feels genuinely uncomfortable.
Maybe you’ve chased the validation too. The money, the status, the woman, the title.
Maybe you’ve even caught some of it. And still felt that quiet emptiness that never quite goes away.
You’re not broken. You’re running a survival program that made sense once and is now costing you everything.
The relationship you want is possible. The presence, the groundedness, the version of yourself you know is in there, all of it is possible. But no one is coming to save you. And you don’t have to figure it out alone either.
This isn’t talk therapy. It’s excavation, going back to where the patterns were installed, understanding why they made sense, and finishing the cycles that were never allowed to complete.
I work at the intersection of psychology, somatic awareness, and real world application.
We don’t just talk about your patterns, we track them in your body, trace them to their roots, and build something new from the ground up.
I’ll challenge you. I’ll hold space for you. And I’ll probably make you laugh at yourself at least once, because a man who can’t laugh at his own story is still taking it too seriously.
When you’re ready to stop carrying it alone, I’m here.
“Before working with Joey, I had things constantly ruminating in my head that were only holding me back. Through his work, I realized those patterns were self-limiting — and that I always had the power to change them. I came out feeling stronger, more connected, and with a genuine sense of pride in how far I’d grown.”
“I was struggling to express my needs to people in my life and carrying a lot of anxiety because of it. Working with Joey changed that. I feel less anxious, happier, and it’s just easier to move through the world now. I’d recommend this work to any man who identifies as a nice guy — you can’t do it alone.”
“Joey created a space where it was safe to be honest about the ways Nice Guy patterns had impacted my relationships and my life. The biggest revelation was realizing it’s okay to have boundaries, to express what you want, and to stop people-pleasing. Joey leads by example — his vulnerability and willingness to do his own work makes him a great coach and leader.”
