MY STORY
I had all this knowledge except the knowledge I actually needed most: knowledge about myself.
For a long time, I thought changing my life meant changing what was happening around me.
I tried different environments, different routines and different ways of coping. But the same patterns kept following me.
Addiction became part of my life for many years. It eventually took me through prison and into residential rehabilitation.
But somewhere along the way, I started reading.
For years, I searched for knowledge.
I read about psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, ancient civilisations, Lao Tzu, the Stoics, Carl Jung, Viktor Frankl, Jim Rohn and many different ideas about how people think, behave, suffer, adapt and change.
I became fascinated by the fact that people had been asking many of the same questions for thousands of years.
Who am I? Why do I suffer? Why do I repeat the same mistakes? What controls my reactions? Can I change the way I think? Can I become more aware of myself?
The biggest change wasn’t what happened on the outside. It was beginning to understand what was happening inside me.
Different traditions used different language, but again and again they came back to ideas like awareness, identity, attachment, fear, discipline, meaning, self-knowledge and the way our inner world shapes the life we experience.
And then I realised something. I had all this knowledge except the knowledge I actually needed most: knowledge about myself.
I could understand ideas. I could understand theories. I could understand other people. But I still did not understand why I reacted the way I did. Why I kept looking for relief. Why I pushed people away. Why I sabotaged myself when things were going well. Why I repeated behaviours I already knew were hurting me. Why certain beliefs about myself felt like facts.
That became the real turning point for me.
The most important knowledge I ever found was knowledge about myself.
The more I started looking inward, the more I began to see patterns I had never recognised before.
I started thinking about limiting beliefs. About identity and self-image. About the environments that shape us. About why familiar behaviour can feel safe even when it is destructive. About why we reach for relief. About fear, anger, shame, anxiety and avoidance. About how thoughts can become stories, stories can become beliefs, and beliefs can start directing behaviour without us even realising it.
I also started learning about awareness — the difference between reacting automatically and being able to notice what is happening while it is happening.
Recovery taught me something I had never really understood before: stopping the behaviour was only part of the work. I had to understand the person underneath it.
That did not mean excusing the choices I had made.
Explanation is not an excuse.
For me, understanding became a way of taking responsibility earlier — before the same reaction became the same consequence again.
Recovery also meant learning things I had avoided for years: asking for help, sitting with difficult feelings, setting boundaries, staying connected and doing things differently even when the new way felt uncomfortable.
Breaking The Old Self grew out of that process. It brings together what I have learned from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, ancient wisdom, recovery and my own lived experience — not as a set of theories to memorise, but as practical ways of understanding why we do what we do and how we can begin doing something different.
It is not only about addiction or recovery. It is about the patterns all of us can carry without realising it — beliefs, reactions, coping mechanisms and old versions of ourselves that may once have made sense but no longer help us move forward.
I am still learning. I am still practising this in my own life.
This site is a place to share what has helped me understand myself, and to give other people practical ways to start doing the same.
A SONG FROM MY JOURNEY
Breaking The Old Self
Listen to the song that shares its name with this journey.
This applies to anyone who wants to change any part of their life.
Especially for people in recovery — but not only for people in recovery.
My past is evidence of where I have been.
My actions today are evidence of who I am becoming.
What shaped you doesn’t have to define you.
— Jamie Devine