Who I am
MATT THORPE
Growing up, conflict meant violence. My father always told me, “You’re a failure - you’ll never amount to anything”. He was a maniac and drank himself to death twenty years ago, but that’s what I grew up with. That was my world. My nervous system was so traumatized by my environment that I stuttered for almost half of my life.
Over thirty years ago I was a bad guy. I was a convict, a drug addict, and an alcoholic. I hustled everyone and everything. When I was twenty-eight years old, I overdosed on cocaine. I’ll never forget the day I woke up from the overdose. There was nothing in my life that gave me any juice at all. When I looked down the end of my nose at everything that was in front of me, I realized that my relationships and environments were exactly a reflection of what I'd grown up with and who I was being in my own world up until then. My past had become my present reality, and soon to also become my future.
I believe that every human being has their day... THE day when something inside of you wakes up. My day was August 18, 1988.
I’m sixty years old now and I’ve been on a healing journey for the last thirty years of my life. This is the longest commitment I’ve ever made. I've been fully recovered from alcoholism and drug addiction for over thirty years, and I've healed my nervous system from trauma. I paid the price to be here today, and I’m here because I was ready and willing to do whatever it took to go from life, just surviving, to living full out.
My life started to shift when I accepted the fact that the situation I was in was not my abusive alcoholic father’s fault; it wasn’t my mother who left me at thirteen with my five younger brothers’ fault; I couldn’t even blame the people who abused me anymore. All that stuff happened to me and I’m still here, living the dream. I could have easily continued to stay stuck in my victim story. I could have made that choice. I could have continued to suffer, but I decided to create a new story. When I gave up being a victim and started living in the moment, I started living in a powerful way. I went from empty and meaningless to meaning and purpose, and I was like a house on fire. I’ve been living at the top of my game for over twenty years. I haven’t had a bad day in fifteen years. Don’t get me wrong, I have challenging moments but I’ve been living the good life for a long time now.
The other place you'll find me is with people... coaching them through the internal and external conflicts that are keeping them stuck in their story. I’ll always remember something an elder once told me. He said, “When you’re in the job of service, you need to make sure you’re doing your own work because people will chip away at your soul all day long. You’ve got to have what it takes to keep yourself well throughout it all or else this stuff will take you out.”
When you have the courage to look within and take the opportunity to shift your liabilities into assets, you can then use those assets to create a new world within yourself as well as shift the world around you. This is an amazing place to be!
These days you'll likely find me on a motorcycle or near water. I've always connected with nature and the open road. It's where I do my best thinking and BEING!
