About Me

My mom died as I was turning 22. I had just graduated college and landed my first internship. I was standing at the very beginning of adult life, and suddenly there was a giant gaping wound in my heart. I was shaken and unmoored, and the prospect of navigating life in that state was daunting.

So I did what made sense: I tried to figure out how to feel better. I started by going to grief counseling and then workshops, where I learned about metacognition, integrity, leadership, goal setting. It gave me something to hold onto, and I grew in many ways. But what I was really searching for was something harder to name — a sense of safety, maybe. Inner strength. The feeling that I could stand on solid ground even without her. Instead, even with all the new friends I made, I felt strangely alone, in a way that my family and friends, despite their love, couldn't quite reach.

What followed was thirteen years of searching: therapy, EMDR, plant medicine, coaching programs, ceremonies. All of it helped, truly. I developed enormously as a person. But what I hadn't yet understood was how much trauma I was actually carrying. Not because I'm a special case, but because trauma's manifestations in our society are so common that they've become invisible, normalized. Most people are carrying far more than they realize. And no matter how much good work I did, I wasn't getting to the core of it. The scope of what I needed was simply larger than what was available to me.

As my journey progressed, I started chafing against conventional wisdom. There is a belief that's upsettingly common in healing and psychology, that deep wounds never truly resolve, that you just learn to accept them, carry them more gracefully, slowly, over years of dedicated effort. Honestly? Fuck that. I know it’s offered with compassion. It's meant to give hope. But it struck me as not so different from a doctor telling a patient with a broken leg that oh, the pain will always be there, you'll never fully walk right, but with time and effort you'll learn to accept it. The reality is that broken bones can heal so completely that you forget they were ever broken. Why are emotional and psychological wounds different? The human capacity to heal had to be bigger than managing symptoms with grace.

It was. It is.

When I found Peak States Therapy, something clicked into place. The approach is built on an unconventional understanding of how consciousness actually works, and when I encountered it, something in me recognized it immediately. This was the missing piece. Not just another tool to add to the collection, but a fundamentally different way of working with the roots of emotional pain.

I trained in it. I began working with clients. And I watched people do in a handful of sessions what they hadn't been able to do in years of other work. Not manage their wounds, not reframe them, but actually resolve them permanently. People who had carried specific fears and patterns for decades were suddenly free of them, not because they'd finally accepted their limitations, but because those limitations had genuinely dissolved.

The clients who find me are usually people who have already done significant work on themselves. They know themselves well. They've grown through therapy, plant medicine, workshops, practices. And they've arrived at a threshold: a moment where they sense that what has brought them this far can't take them through what's next. There are still specific fears and wounds quietly making decisions for them, and they're finally ready to resolve them.

If that's where you are, I'd love to talk.

—Owen Smithyman