My Story
I grew up without a father. He left before I was born and started a new family in Sydney. No one in my life ever named what that absence cost me. I carried it alone.
What the wound built was specific. A pattern of starting and abandoning things — businesses, trades, relationships — going hard for two weeks and then finding a reason to quit just when it got difficult. An inability to trust even the people who had given me every reason to. A distrust of authority so deep I couldn't follow another man's lead even when I wanted to. A constant sense that success, when it came, still left me empty.
At thirty I had a business that was working, a wife who was completely dedicated to me, and I still could not access the life those things should have made possible. I felt empty, lost, and broken — and I had no idea why.
The turning point came through a podcast. Someone describing the patterns of men from fatherless homes. I sat completely still. That was me. That had been me my entire life. And I had never known it had a name.
The shadow work revealed that I had been making decisions from the rulebook of a wounded boy — not as a grown man. The breathwork reached things that years of self-help and therapy had not touched. The grief work was the hardest part. Finally grieving a father I had never met, accepting what I could never change, and discovering that on the other side of that grief was not emptiness but ground.
In 2024 I reached out to find him. The lead went cold. He probably did not want to disrupt the family he had built in Sydney. What I discovered was that I did not collapse when that door closed. For the first time in my life, I did not need his acknowledgment to know who I was.
Today I have a stable marriage of ten years. A steady business. The ability to be fully present with my son — not just providing for him but actively shaping him, doing life with him, being the father I never had. I am less impulsive. Less angry at myself. Capable of trust in a way I could not access before the work.
I built Orbus Rising because the program I needed at my lowest point did not exist. Now it does.