Our Story
This platform exists because one person spent a lifetime searching for answers no one handed him — and decided no one else should have to wait as long.
Founding Context
I remember sitting in my Grade 5 classroom, completely lost. Everyone else seemed to understand what needed to be done, what the teacher was saying, that they belonged. I didn’t. That was strange, because a year earlier I’d been near the top of my class. I loved school. Now I was drowning in loneliness and fear I couldn’t explain, and nothing made sense.
I was determined to fix myself. That determination is still there, 55 years later — though I’ve come to realize that with complex trauma, fixing has no termination point. Yet, I often found myself a spectator to my own life — watching from outside it, as fate played its part. I learned to hide what I felt and get through each day. Most days it worked. It would be nearly six decades before I truly grasped what was going on and how to find healing.
I spent those decades trying everything I could find. Scanning the DSM — the thick manual clinicians use to diagnose mental illness.
New partners, new lifestyles, new therapies, spiritualities of different flavors, backpacking, mountain climbing, sailing, motorcycling, est, forum, yoga, meditation, even drugs and sex. Anything that sooth me. Each one had its moments. None of them brought the profound transformation I was actually looking for.
Some days life was fantastic and amazing. Other days I wondered what am I doing here, trying to trudge alongside people who seem to have it all together. Checking out was a question I pondered often. The theme song for my life was John Mellencamp’s “A Ride Back Home.” A desperate man asking for a ride back home from Jesus. But then will for life would flow back into me like magic and make me think what a waste to end it.
Along the way I was diagnosed with Bipolar II, ADHD, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Each diagnosis helped, some more than others. After years of trying I learned to manage my mood. But something never quite fit, and life was never easy.
I was 63 years old when I finally read the words that explained it: Complex PTSD. It was in a book called What My Bones Know, by a woman whose life had been far harder than mine. That was the moment my own research skills, sharpened over decades of trying to understand myself, met newly available AI tools — and for the first time, I could dig deep enough, fast enough, to find what I’d been missing my whole life. Everything made sense. Every diagnosis, every struggle, collapsed into five letters: CPTSD.
As I look back at my life and the people I got to know intimately, it seems like complex trauma is the rule, not the exception. And most of them are struggling silently, without even knowing what’s afflicting them.
My deepest conviction is that no one should have to go through this kind of suffering alone. We can build a collective commons, shed our fears, deep shame, and brokenness, and build thriving lives.
Founding Principle
“Lack of information is killing more people than poor or misinformation. The solution is transparency, not gating information.”
Why This Exists Now
I don’t want anyone to spend 65 years not knowing why. That’s what this platform is. FindingWellBeing.org exists so that what took me a lifetime to find — the knowledge, the tools, the language for what’s happening inside you — is available to you now, free, without gatekeepers standing between you and it.
What We’re Building
FindingWellBeing.org is a free, global commons for healing and human flourishing — five active portals covering complex trauma, ancient mind sciences, practical healing methods, anxiety and depression, and the science of flourishing.
It may look like five separate portals. It isn’t. Each one connects to a different part of the same journey toward a flourishing life.
Everything here is grounded in peer-reviewed science, clinical practice, lived experience, and documented wisdom traditions, and every claim is labeled so you always know what kind of knowledge you’re looking at. See How We Label Information for the full system.”
It is free, and it always will be. No ads. No data sales. No paywalls. You can see exactly how that’s funded and what we do and don’t do with your information on our Our Transparency page.
Where This Is Going
This is one person’s work right now, but it isn’t meant to stay that way. This is intended to be the Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube for the global community of people looking for relief from suffering.
As this platform grows, so does the need for people who believe in it — to lend their skills, their support, and eventually their own knowledge and stories. If that’s you, we’d love for you to be part of what comes next.
This platform is still early in what it could become. The next real threshold is formal nonprofit status — the step that lets it accept support sustainably and grow beyond what one person can carry alone. If you’re someone who could help this cross that threshold, I’d welcome a conversation about what that could look like. Reach out →