This is part of a series of reflections by Paul Sinclair, one of the managing directors of Mind Matters. Drawing on his experience in high-pressure environments and his training with Dr Gabor Maté, Paul writes with unflinching honesty about the patterns he sees in his work with clients and in his own life. In this piece, he explores how trauma quietly steers a lifetime of choices, and what it costs to choose differently.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are seeking medical guidance, please consult a licensed healthcare professional. Never change or stop prescribed medication without consulting your prescribing clinician.
Table Of Contents:
- Your life is a labyrinth of almosts
- Every decision echoes for eternity
- Be back by the time the streetlights come on
- The world stands in front of you holding a clipboard
- High voltage cables by day. Heroin by night.
- If my father had not died, I would not have gone
- Psychedelics are not customer service
- A trembling decision made in faith
- You are still here. The universe is not finished.
- FAQ
Stop.
Not politely. Not spiritually. Not in that smug little way people post on LinkedIn with a sunrise photo and a quote stolen from someone who has never actually had to survive anything. I mean, stop properly. Freeze. Feel your body where it is. The weight of you. The breath dragging itself in and out like an old dog that refuses to lie down. The pulse in your throat, stubborn as a bastard, still keeping time with a universe that is not sentimental and does not give a toss whether you make it to lunch.
Now ask the only question worth asking.
How the fuck did I get here?
Not the postcode. Not the job title. Not the carefully curated identity you hand out to strangers so they do not ask awkward questions at dinner parties. I mean this exact moment. This exact version of you. The one sitting here, with all your memories stacked behind your eyes like a library you never asked for.
Your life is a labyrinth of almosts
If you sit still long enough, you start to see it. Your life is not one story. It is a labyrinth of almosts. Almost died. Almost stayed. Almost left. Almost said yes. Almost said no. Almost took that job. Almost never met that person. Almost never survived that night. A million different routes, a million different versions of you, and yet somehow, through the ridiculous choreography of decisions and consequences, you have arrived right here. Right now. Reading this. Breathing. Swearing under your breath, probably.
That is either pure chance.
Or it is something else entirely.
I don’t believe in coincidence or chance. Instead, I believe in destiny, not the gentle, romantic type with angel numbers and pastel skies, but the harsh kind. The kind where the universe delivers a kick in the ribs and then acts like it didn’t happen, watching as you pick yourself up. Only years later do you see that the darkest moment of your life was actually the turning point that opened the next door.
Everything you are right now is the sum of choices. Yours. Other people’s. Choices forced on you. Choices you made half-asleep. Choices you made to survive. Choices you made when pissed off. Choices you made because you did not know what else to do. Choices you made because pain has a way of making options out of things that were never options.
Every decision echoes for eternity
Every decision we make has the chance to echo for eternity.
Even the stupid ones. Especially the stupid ones. The ones that start with, ah fuck it, why not. The ones that feel irrelevant at the time, like choosing a street to walk down, answering a phone call, going to that party, not going to that party, saying yes to a drink, saying no, leaving early, staying late, or picking up the first cigarette, the first line, the first needle, the first kiss, the first lie you tell yourself that becomes a lifestyle.
Imagine this: a single decision is like throwing a stone into a pond. The water seems still for a brief moment, then ripples expand outward, reaching distant shores you can’t see. Years down the line, you realize you’re living within those ripples and can’t recall the exact moment you tossed the stone. That’s the punchline, the cosmic joke. You believe you’re making a small choice, but the universe subtly rearranges your entire destiny around it.
Be back by the time the streetlights come on
Start at childhood.
When we are kids, most choices are made for us. What we eat. Where we live. When we sleep. Who we are told to respect. What we are told to want. But I grew up in an era that now sounds like folklore to anyone under forty.
Six weeks of summer holidays. Both parents working. Mum makes breakfast for me and my sister. Then the rule, carved into the air like scripture.
Be back by the time the streetlights come on.
That was it. No phone. No tracking. No constant adult surveillance. No screen addiction masquerading as parenting. No weekday television. Saturday morning cartoons, then the world. The rest of the week, you were on your own. Nine o’clock in summer. Five in winter. That time in between was ours.
We had sports clubs. Football. Tennis. Athletics. Or we had fields, alleyways, rivers, abandoned places, and boredom, which is where children become either artists or criminals, or both. We did stupid, dangerous, and brilliant things. We got hurt. We laughed. We lied about where the blood came from. We learned early what freedom feels like when no one is watching. We also learned what loneliness feels like when no one is watching.
That childhood, not all bad, had happy moments, but it was threaded through with melancholy. A kind of emotional unsupervised living. The feeling that you have to figure it out alone. That you have to become your own parent before you even understand what parenting is. It makes you resourceful. It also makes you hungry. It makes you susceptible to anything that promises relief.
The world stands in front of you holding a clipboard
Then comes the age where life gets serious.
Sixteen. Eighteen. The moment when the world stands in front of you holding a clipboard.
So what are you going to be then?
Some people do not have that choice. Their parents are lawyers, so they become lawyers. Doctors produce doctors. Engineers produce engineers. Families hand down careers the way they hand down cheekbones. A generational conveyor belt of unexamined lives. Polished shoes, dead eyes.
I said no.
Not because I was brave. Because I was lonely. Because I was melancholic. Because I was seeking structure, belonging, and a place where the rules were simple enough for my nervous system to stop vibrating like a broken speaker.
So I joined the Navy.
I was a nuclear engineer on a submarine. That sentence sounds confident. It sounds competent. It sounds like a lad who has his life sorted.
It was supposed to be training.
Procedure. Discipline. Checklists. Learning to keep impossible machines alive under impossible conditions. You do your job, keep the reactor safe, follow the book, and trust the system. A neat little world of steel corridors and ritual. And then history does what history does. The Falklands were invaded, and training stopped being theoretical.
One minute you are on a training mission. The next, you are pointed towards war.
I turned eighteen on board HMS Conqueror, en route to the South Atlantic. The chef made me a cake in the middle of the ocean while the world outside prepared to kill and be killed. That is one of those moments that makes no sense until decades later. Childhood to adulthood, with a slice of sponge and icing, then straight into the underworld of geopolitics.
Then the torpedoes hit.
The whole submarine shook. Not metaphorically. Physically. Steel flexing. The sound travelling through the hull, through your feet, into your bones. Sailors cheered. I did not. I was stunned. I could feel the dead. I knew men were dying. Conscripts. Young men who did not get a heroic narrative. Young men who were in the wrong place because governments move human beings around like pieces on a chessboard.
People later ask how you can be traumatised when you did not shoot anyone, did not stab anyone, did not do hand-to-hand violence.
Trauma is not a competition. Trauma is not awarded for bravery. Trauma is what happens when something overwhelms your system, and there is nowhere for it to go.
PTSD affects the sensitive, those who deeply feel others’ joys and cannot turn off their awareness of suffering. I carried that moment within me, which influenced my worldview, my decisions, and the ones I felt compelled to keep making.
High voltage cables by day. Heroin by night.
From there, life became a chain reaction.
You do not always notice it at the time. You think you are making isolated decisions. You think you are choosing job A or job B, partner A or partner B, sober or not, stay or go. Years later, you realise you were following a trail of breadcrumbs laid by your own nervous system. Pain pointing you. Longing pulling you. Fear driving you. Shame whispering in your ear like a parasite.
I left the Navy, carrying something I did not yet have language for. A nervous system tuned to loss. A sensitivity that felt like a flaw. A brain that had learned the smell of death without ever seeing a battlefield.
Then came rock and roll.
Twenty years in lighting. Massive stages. Big bands. Noise, glamour, travel, nights that blur into mornings, adrenaline and exhaustion, a life built around spectacle while inside you a different kind of darkness grows.
High voltage cables by day.
Heroin by night.
That is not a poetic line. That was my life.
Addiction is not about drugs. It is about unfinished pain seeking an anaesthetic. Drugs are merely the delivery system. Addiction is a relationship. It is the most loyal relationship you will ever have, because it never asks you to be better. It never asks you to feel. It only asks you to keep feeding it.
I overdosed nine times. Nine. Cats have nine lives, apparently. I do not know what that makes me. Some kind of cosmic administrative error. A man who should not be here but keeps waking up anyway. A body that refuses to die because the universe has not finished with it, or because it is laughing, or because it does not care and this is just random chemistry. Choose your favourite explanation. I have tried them all.
I have woken to dead girlfriends. Women who overdosed in their sleep. You carry that. You do not get to wash it off. It sits in you. It visits you at three in the morning. It climbs into your chest and tightens its grip around your lungs. It asks you questions you cannot answer.
What choices did I make that led to that?
What choices did they make?
What choices did we make together?
What choices did the universe make for us when it handed us the bodies and the childhoods and the pain we were carrying?
This is where the irony becomes savage.
People like neat endings. They like redemption arcs. They like a hero. They like to believe that if you suffer enough, you earn a reward.
Life does not work like that.
Sometimes you suffer and the only reward is that you are still alive to feel more suffering.
Sometimes you survive, and the punishment is remembering.
Sometimes the choices you made hurt people, and you cannot undo them. You can regret them. You can own them. You can carry them. But you cannot unfire the torpedo. You cannot unstick the needle. You cannot unbreak the heart. You cannot unmake the moment.
And still, here you are.
If my father had not died, I would not have gone
Then my father died.
He left me a small amount of money. Not a fortune. Just enough to make a decision possible. And I was still actively addicted to heroin. That is important. Not a cleaned-up version. Not a sober memoir. Active addiction. The kind of addiction where money is petrol on a fire.
I had a choice. Stay in the UK and go completely insane with that money. Disappear. Or do something else. Something that made no sense. Something that looked like running away.
So I chose Bali.
If my father had not died, I would not have gone.
If I had not gone, I would not have worked at a diving school.
If I had not worked there, I would not have met the people I met.
If I had not met them, I would not have met my wife.
If I had not met her, I would not have ended up living in Munich.
If I had not lived there, I would not have started a business and sold it.
If I had not done that, I would not have followed my actual passion, which is working with people.
If I had not done that, I might never have found psychedelics in the way I did.
And none of this would have happened from that single choice.
This is how predictable and unpredictable life is. It is chaos with a blueprint. It is a roulette wheel that somehow keeps landing on the exact number needed to build the life you are living, even if you hate it.
And that brings me to the part people avoid because it feels like an insult.
If you keep doing the same thing day after day, expecting different results, you are insane.
That is not judgment. That is physics. That is cause and effect. That is the universe’s quiet laugh.
Nothing changes unless you make a choice.
Choices come with consequences.
Consequences come with pain.
Pain is not optional. Pain is the tuition fee for being alive.
And in my view, a personal opinion not carved on tablets, the universe has a function. It becomes more complex, more conscious, more aware of itself. We are not separate from it. We are the universe experiencing itself through nervous systems, stories, and fucked-up coping strategies. Every time you make a choice, you add information to the system. Every time you survive something, you add information. Every time you hurt someone and live with the consequence, you add information. Every time you make a different choice, you add information. The universe learns through us. The universe expands through us. Bollocks to anyone who thinks their life is insignificant.
Psychedelics are not customer service
Now, I work with psychedelics. Not as a trend. Not as a badge. Not as a spiritual fashion accessory. As a tool. As a mirror. As a means of forcing people to look inward rather than outward.
And I see it constantly.
Academics. Lawyers. Doctors. Engineers. People with beautiful CVs and dead eyes. People who have done everything right and feel nothing. People who followed the inherited plan and arrived at success only to discover they do not live inside it. They perform it.
Recently, two lawyers came to work with me. Their parents were lawyers. The profession was not chosen. It was assigned. They were not broken. They were not collapsing. They wanted clarity. And here is the joke. Psychedelics do not care what you want. Psychedelics are not customer service. They never give you what you want. They give you what you need. Sometimes gently. Often brutally. Always honestly. One of those lawyers has now said, fuck this. She wants to be mentored by me in this field. She is walking away from the law. She is on a dieta deep in the Amazon as we speak. That is what one choice can do. One decision to look inward, to stop outsourcing your identity, to stop living in other people’s expectations. Not because you are mentally fucked up. Because you want to see clearly.
And clarity is expensive.
A trembling decision made in faith
Now I am at another threshold.
I have done ayahuasca before. I know it is not a toy. I know it is not a nice night of visions and a journal entry. I know it can dismantle you. What I am choosing now is a deeper, therapeutic depth. Soul retrieval. Going into the underworld to retrieve a part of myself that went missing because it was too dangerous to stay inside me. To retrieve a soul, you have to go deeper. Deeper than comfort. Deeper than insight. Deeper than the places people usually come back from. This means a full therapeutic dose, taken with proper support, not a dabble. Go in unprepared or unheld, and people can come back fragmented. I have seen it. That is not mythology. That is reality. That is the risk, and it is exactly why the container matters. And I am not heroic about it. I am terrified. Terrified in the way you should be when you are about to walk into something that can rearrange you permanently. I am going anyway.
Not because I am fearless. Because pretending absence is manageable is no longer an option. Because something is missing. Because too much has happened in my life for me to dismiss that feeling as mere imagination. Believe it or not. I know it is true.
Alongside that, I am preparing to spend a year in a Taoist monastery on a sacred mountain in China. Do you know what that means? It means I have to learn Mandarin. It means I have to work in a garden because they grow their own food. It means daily life stripped down to basics. No performing. No hiding behind cleverness. No distractions. And four hours a day of training. Two hours of Tai Chi, not the park version, but the violent martial kind. Two hours of Qigong, also weaponised. A sixty-one-year-old man putting himself into a structure that will expose every weakness.
That is not bravery. That is a trembling decision made in faith. Faith that the universe has a plan for me. Faith that the universe has a plan for everyone. The only question is whether you surrender to the process or fight it until it drags you by the ankles.
You are still here. The universe is not finished.
And it is not just me.
This is all of us.
We are all in the same boat. Every person you meet is navigating the same river of cause and effect. Some are awake to it. Most are not. We make choices from the moment we wake until we surrender to sleep, passing unconsciously into the dream world, never fully knowing whether we will wake again. We do it anyway. We book meetings. We pay bills. We argue. We apologise. We scroll. We pretend. We love. We sabotage. We survive.
So if you are miserable as fuck right now, if your life feels like absolute shit, if you are trapped in a loop, if you are doing the same thing day after day, hoping the universe will magically change the outcome, then take a moment to be honest.
It won’t.
Nothing changes unless you choose.
And yes, choice is terrifying. It might cost you your job, your identity, your relationship, your home, your reputation. It might cost you everything you thought you were. It will probably cost you the comfort of staying numb.
But you are allowed to choose anyway.
Sit quietly for a few minutes and trace your life back. Every wrong turn. Every left when you should have gone right. Every right when you should have gone left. Every person you met by chance. Every person you lost. Every moment that forced a decision on you. Every moment you refused to decide and called it fate. Look at it properly. See the absurd precision required for you to be here.
And then notice this.
You are still here.
Which means the universe is not finished.
Which means you have another choice.
Right now.
FAQ
Can trauma from decades ago still be running your life?
Yes, and usually without announcing itself. A nervous system tuned to loss early keeps making decisions on old information: you think you are choosing freely, job A or job B, stay or go, when you are often following a trail laid down years before by pain, longing, fear and shame. Seeing that is not defeatism. It is the first real choice, because you cannot change a pattern you cannot see.
Why do successful people arrive at success and feel nothing?
Because they followed a plan they inherited rather than one they chose. Careers get handed down like cheekbones: lawyers produce lawyers, doctors produce doctors, and the profession is assigned, not selected. You can do everything right by someone else’s blueprint and end up performing a life rather than living in it. The emptiness is not failure. It is the gap between the inherited plan and the actual person.
Is it too late to make a different choice?
No, and the belief that it is tends to be the pattern talking. Nothing changes unless you choose, and choice is genuinely frightening: it can cost you the job, the identity, the relationship, the comfort of staying numb. But the alternative is repeating the same move and calling the result fate. If you are still here, the story is not finished, which means another choice is available now.
What role do psychedelics play in this kind of work?
Used seriously, and only where legal, they are a mirror rather than an escape: a way of forcing attention inward instead of outward. They do not give you what you want; they tend to give you what you need, sometimes gently and often bluntly. They are not a trend, a badge, or a shortcut, and they belong inside proper preparation and integration. The insight is the easy part. What you do with it afterwards is the work.
Paul Sinclair
Paul Sinclair is Managing Director of Mind Matters and co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator. He is a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, one of a small group personally trained and certified by Dr Gabor Maté over two and a half years. He holds a 12-month psychedelic-assisted therapy certification through Vital and is a certified breathwork practitioner. His path to this work ran through Chelsea Academy as a footballer, a career-ending knee injury, service as a Royal Navy nuclear propulsion engineer on submarines during the Falklands War, Cold War reconnaissance work, international football for the Navy, a career as a lighting director (Glastonbury, UB40, Suzanne Vega), and several businesses of his own, underneath which ran thirty years of addiction, and the PTSD that is the lived ground of his work today.