About Me (Richard)

My story in a nutshell...

Greetings.

I am an Australian man in my more mature years who is a founding Principal Participant of the RiverOfLife Foundation. I am also the relationship specialist who provides the teaching, training, mentoring and coaching here.

I come to faith later in life than most, but like many, I get to the point of no return before I break enough to see through the fog and realise that God exists, that I do not have what it takes to master my own life without Him, and that it is foolishness to reject the gospel message.

I do not start out well in life.

Due to factors in my early-life environment outside my control, I develop fully blown PTSD as a five-year-old and suffer a catastrophic loss of self-esteem. 

I retreat into an imaginery persona to hide from the world and in doing so, I become totally unable to enter into authentic human relationships of any kind - and certainly not any kind of romantic, opposite-sex relationships.

I become a false person who looks OK from the outside looking in, but who lives a lie and when alone, drops into a black pit of depression, bottomless lonliness and isolation, a cluster of destructive addictions and random acts of life-threatening recklessness.

I am incapable of asking for help and so have no choice but to work on getting my right mind back, becoming a normal human being, and overcoming my deeply ingrained, pathological anxieties and dystfunctions in the relationship space, on my own.

It is a perilous and nearly fatal journey, but in the end, my demons leave me and I become able to declare from the heart that I am normal.

From that point, I pour everything into becoming confident and competent with the opposite sex to the point where I am now married and in a deeply meaningful relationship with a quality woman where all the elements of passionate sexuality, companionship and mutual support, function at a high and still developing level.

I used to be a -10 with women. 

I used to be intensely insecure, anxious, and inept with women at the extreme negative end of the scale.

Transforming all that into quiet masculine confidence and relationship know-how, has given me a highly detailed and exceedingly fine-grained appreciation of what really matters and what actually works for good men who need to do likewise.