07/17/2026
As a teenager, my life spiraled fast. Drugs became the solution to discomfort, working until they didn’t. Within a few years, my future had been compressed down to two options: prison or pine. I was losing everything and staring at a sentence that would have sealed it.
Less by choice than by force, I took another path, hesitantly claiming recovery. Sobriety, however, was not the end of my story. In many ways, it was just the beginning.
With no diploma or credentials to my name, I went on to experience some unexpected successes, eventually specializing in architectural concrete – a craft known for its demand of patience and precision. Along the way, not by mission or design, I hired men in various levels of addiction. I worked beside them for long days, solving real problems with real consequences. Many of them got sober. Over time, I began to hypothesize why.
In 2018, I opened the doors to Making Whole: a structured proving ground where years of observation, pattern recognition and hard-won wisdom could be tested in real time. The premise was simple: drug and alcohol-dependent men would learn to build studio-quality furniture under the uncompromising guidance of master craftsmen. The objects built, however, would not be the objective. They would be the artifacts; evidence of men learning to take cues, accept correction without collapse and stay when every instinct yells run.
Eight years later, the experiment still stands, and men from across the country continue to find their way to the woodshop, often arriving with little more than a willingness to try something different.
What started as a hunch has shifted to proof. Quietly – without traditional accreditations or institutional backing – Making Whole is producing outcomes that challenge the entire recovery establishment and success rates that are restructuring the conversation around addiction, recovery, and what it actually means to be made whole.
Want to know more? Reach out or just come on by.
