The Reclaimed Man

For most of my career, neediness was quietly running my life. It took me a long time to see it.

From the outside it looked like success. A busy practice. Twice voted Chiropractor of the Year. But underneath, I needed my patients to like me. I could take a stand for my whole profession, and still step back the moment I had to back myself.

This is Part 2 of the Reclamation Triangle: Lost → Worthy. Not the how, the map.

I talk about the masks a man wears for every room, the two words I said to a patient when the truth was sitting in my mouth, and what a man is really looking for when he can’t find himself.

Some of the neediest men I’ve known were the most confident blokes in the room. The opposite of needy isn’t confidence. It’s worthy. Not because you earned it. Because it was always yours.

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When I say every man should be dangerous, I don’t mean violent — I mean capable: force in you, and the control to choose what you do with it.

The opposite of dangerous isn’t safe. It’s harmless.

This is Part 1 of the Reclamation Triangle: Broken → Dangerous. Not the how — the map. Where you are, and where you’d like to be.

I talk about what broken actually sounds like, and why it’s a place, not a life sentence. Then a fire, a vote of no confidence and a roundabout, and what each one taught me about force and the control to use it well.

When something goes wrong, a man can go three ways. Cower. Explode. Or handle it.

The force never left you. It’s been turned down, not taken out.

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For thirty-five years, I was proud of being the bloke who never got angry. Then it started showing up in traffic, on the golf course, and while walking the dog.

In this episode of The Reclaimed Man, I share how a childhood moment in my dad's shed shaped what I believed about anger—and what it cost me to keep burying it.

Through the end of my first marriage, conversations in therapy, and the everyday pressures of fatherhood, I explore three things I wish I'd understood sooner:

• Why anger doesn't always look like anger—and why other emotions sometimes hide behind it.
• Why feeling angry doesn't make you a bad man, and how feeling it differs from acting on it.
• How anger can point towards a boundary you haven't set or a feeling you haven't acknowledged.

If you've ever called yourself easy-going while quietly carrying resentment, or snapped over something small and wondered where it came from, this episode is for you.

When the size of your reaction doesn't match the size of the thing, there may be something else asking for your attention.

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I've realised I don't need to hit those numbers."

There's nothing wrong with that sentence. That's the problem.

A mate told me he'd learnt to be happy with where his business was. And he meant it. But he wasn't telling me his numbers — he was explaining them. He'd got so good at the explanation that he'd stopped hearing it as one.

So this one isn't about the dream you lost. It's about the story you told yourself about why you never needed it.

It happens in two stages. First you build a reason. Then the reason gets promoted — it stops being an explanation and becomes wisdom. And you can't argue with wisdom.

Inside: the two questions that sort a man choosing from a man justifying. My own ceiling, the one I called specialism for twenty years. What I'd say to the man who went for it and missed.

What have you been calling wisdom — that's actually just a ceiling?

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When I was seven or eight, I talked to God every night. Lying in bed in our house in Colac, with the dog asleep down the end of it. I'd tell him about my day — what went wrong at school, what I was worried about. Nobody taught me to do it. We weren't a religious family: no church, no Bible in the house.

Then somewhere in my late teens, I stopped.

Here's the part it's taken me nearly forty years to notice. I don't remember why. I don't remember deciding. There was no crisis of faith and no argument I lost. It just went quiet.

I wonder if that's what happened to you too. You didn't reject God — you'd have had to think about it to reject it. You got on with it instead: the career, the mortgage, the kids, the business. And one day you're fifty-two and there's something missing you can't put a name to, and you'd never in a million years connect it to a boy talking out loud in a dark bedroom.

 

For the thirty years after that I'd have told you I was spiritual but not religious. I thought that was open-mindedness. It was a fence, and I was sitting on it — the same way I've sat on every other fence in my life, running the whole thing at about eight out of ten so that if it ever didn't work, I'd have somewhere to put that.

Then two things turned up at once. I'd spent a year saying this is not happening to me, it's happening for me — and one day I actually listened to what I was saying. Because if it's happening for me, then who's arranging it? Who's the architect? That's the noble version. The other one is that I was at rock bottom and had run out of things to try.

I know exactly how this looks from outside. A bloke gets debilitating anxiety, twelve months later he's diagnosed with stage four cancer, and then he finds God. If I were an academic looking at my own case I'd have me down as a prime candidate, and I'd probably write me off. I'm not going to argue with that.

So I'm not here to prove anything, or to debate what's right and wrong, or to convince you of a thing — because the moment I start trying to convince you, I've already lost.

In this one: why I went to church three different ways and still haven't landed. Why trust is a better word than faith, and the page in a book that had me pick up a pencil and write five words in the margin. What I don't ask for when I pray, and why. The 11:11 thing, and the reason I think my own brain is probably doing it. And the one I didn't see coming — twelve months ago I was terrified of death, and I'm not now. That isn't me giving up: I'd like to be here a very long time and I'm doing everything I can to make that happen. The fear has just gone out of it.

I also read you the prayer I say every morning. The whole thing. I have never once heard what another bloke actually says to God on a Tuesday morning in his own house, and I don't think you have either.

One question at the end, and it's the only thing I ask of you: how's what you're doing right now actually working for you?

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For about three months of my life I woke at two fifty-eight in the morning. Not roughly. Two fifty-eight, two fifty-nine, three-oh-one — every single night, inside a three minute window, like something had set an alarm I didn't know about.

That was the stretch after my marriage ended. My back had gone as well — two disc bulges, proper pain. And I was short with everybody.

I'm a chiropractor. Twenty years of it, thousands of people through my hands. And I could not fix my own back.

I treated all of it as separate problems. The marriage was a life problem. The money was a money problem. The back was a back problem. And the 3am was a sleep problem — so I did the sleep things. Darker room, cooler room, off the screens earlier. Some of it helped a bit. None of it touched it.

It took me months to see what was in front of me. They weren't four problems. They were one problem, and it had found four different ways to get my attention.

You don't have a sleep problem. You've got a nervous system problem, and 3am is just where you're noticing it.

Here's how I explained it to patients for twenty years. A light comes up on your dashboard. You can pull over and find out what it's pointing at — or you can get a black texta, colour the light in, and drive on telling yourself it isn't there. Nobody does that with a car. We do it with our bodies every single day. That's what a sleeping tablet is. That's what melatonin is.

You are not waking at 3am because you have a melatonin deficiency.

Also in here: why three in the morning, specifically, and why it's the same time night after night — it's cortisol, it's a rhythm, and rhythms are punctual. Why it doesn't take a lion to hold that switch down. Why you can run the entire stress response lying completely still in a dark room with nothing happening to you, just by thinking. And why the wake-up isn't a fault at all — it's a readout of how you've been living.

Then the four things holding your baseline up. Not one of them is sleep.

How you eat — the chemical load your body deals with every day.

How you move — too little, or too much and never recovering from it.

How you think — the worry your body runs as though it were actually happening.

How you rest — which is not sleeping. Rest is something you do awake, on purpose. Most men haven't got any. They've got work and they've got unconsciousness, and they assume the second one covers it.

They're not a menu. Think of a plant — soil, water, light, air. Take one away and it dies, and no amount of extra water makes up for no light.

Also: the list I made when I was a bloke in a rented house with a bad back who wasn't sleeping, and where I started on it. Not the marriage, not the grief. The tax, the bank accounts, buying a table. Ninety days before anything held. And the thing I finally heard when I got quiet enough to ask — which I'd known for a long time and had no interest in hearing.

There's no protocol in this episode, and that's deliberate.

If you sleep perfectly well, don't sit this one out. Swap in the temper you can't explain, or the back that won't come right no matter who you see about it. Same switch, different light on the dash.

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Last September I was told I had cancer. Within about a week I'd changed how I ate, completely — straight to ketogenic, sugar out, no wavering. Give me a hard thing to do and a reason that big, and I'll do it.

A few months ago some of my bloodwork moved, and it was put to me that it might be worth trying ninety days eating entirely plant-based. I'm in the middle of it as I record this, and I don't know yet how it ends.

And it has been so much harder than going keto ever was.

Nothing about the mechanics is hard. I know what to buy. I know how to cook. I spent twenty years as a chiropractor teaching people how to eat. But something in me has been dragging its heels the whole way, and it took me weeks to work out what.

It isn't the food. It's the stories.

Here's why I'm telling you. I had the strongest reason a human being can be handed. In writing. With a stage number on it. If motivation was the answer to this, I should be the easiest case in medical history.

And I still sat there arguing with a plate of food.

So can we please put down the idea that the thing standing between you and the body you want is that you don't want it enough.

You already know most of it. More protein, fewer things out of a packet, something heavy a couple of times a week, more walking, better sleep. If information was the missing piece, you'd have finished this years ago. The weight isn't sitting there because you don't know what to do — it's sitting there because something is getting in the way of you doing what you already know.

Three things, in fact, and not one of them is your diet.

One — you're arguing with yourself and you don't know it. You're not at the start line neutral. You're carrying a verdict, and it was passed on you, not on the plan.

Two — you're waiting until you're sure. Confusion isn't a shortage of information. It's the most comfortable room in the house, because from the inside and the outside it looks exactly like diligence.

Three — you're doing it in secret. Nobody knows, so nobody notices on day four. And day four is the day somebody needed to.

They're not three separate problems. They're one loop — and it's how a man arrives in his fifties with a thick folder of proof against himself, not one page of which was ever about food.

Also in here: the eighteen months of training I wrote off because of one knee, the eighty metres of road that's all anyone ever gets, and the rule a professional netballer gave me that I've never forgotten.

And the question at the end, which stopped me: what have you stopped doing completely — because you couldn't do it properly?

If your body's fine, don't sit this one out. Swap in the thing that isn't. It's the same three reasons the business never starts and the conversation with your father is still sitting there fifteen years later.

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A mate texted me last week. Three words: how are you? And I sat there with my thumb over the screen for longer than I want to admit — because I'm good ends the conversation, and there was a part of me that wanted the follow-up.

Nothing dramatic happened. I typed I'm good, he sent back something about the footy, life went on. But I caught it — and what I caught myself doing has a name. It's one of three.

Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor. The Karpman Drama Triangle. Three roles that need each other to exist, that nobody ever agreed to play, and that spin so fast you can get through all three inside a single conversation. Between them they run most of the conflict in a man's life, and they cost more than you'd think.

Mine that morning was the Victim, and the deal is a good one: be sick, and people will come. You don't have that particular deal — good, I wouldn't wish it on you. But you get offered the same role every single day. In the car. Across the table at the pub. At the kitchen bench at ten o'clock at night when you're tired and someone asks how it's going.

Yours might be the economy — and it is hard out there right now, that's not me being dismissive. It might be the business. The interest rates. The clients who don't value what you do. It might be your wife, and what she doesn't understand about the pressure you're carrying. Your kids, and what they've cost you. Your father, thirty years ago.

And here's what makes the offer so good: every one of those might be completely true. Nobody's asking you to lie. You're just being handed a place to stand where none of it is yours to do anything about. Most men take it without ever noticing there was a choice on the table at all.

The way out isn't three roles to avoid. It's three to grow into: Creator, Coach, Challenger. Same instinct. Matured.

Including the part I got wrong, and the question that stops me in my tracks: who have you already decided isn't strong enough?

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Should a man still open the door for a woman? Should he still pay the bill? Thirty years ago most men answered without thinking. Now most men freeze — caught between two cartoons: the testosterone-fuelled hard man, and the softened, apologetic one. Nobody told them there was a third option.

Ten months ago I had to find that third man for real. My cancer feeds on testosterone, and the treatment — the oncologists called it chemical castration — took away the thing I'd quietly built my whole identity on. Marriage, fatherhood, business: I believed all three were about to be taken from me, because I believed testosterone wasn't just fuel. I believed it was who I was.

This episode is what I found underneath. The crossing every man makes eventually — from warrior to king — and the seven checkpoints I now hold myself to daily: emotional capacity, accountability, courage, physical presence, leadership, humility, presence. Not commandments. Not add-ons. Seven things I believe are already in you, waiting to be uncovered.

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For forty years I ran on a sentence a ten-year-old boy heard from his mother. It became an operating system. Prove yourself. Prove it again. Earn the right to be loved. It produced a lot. It nearly destroyed me too.

In this episode I want to make a claim: you are unconditionally worthy, and nothing you achieve or fail at changes that. Then I want to go deeper — because that claim on its own is incomplete, and I think that incompleteness is quietly wrecking a generation of men. I'll show you the difference between soul worth (given, unconditional, yours before you built anything) and lived worth (earned, required, what your community actually needs from you) — and why confusing the two is what keeps a man either grinding himself into the ground or coasting on entitlement.

This isn't about becoming worthy. It's about knowing you already are — and what that frees you up to build.

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