We will begin our story with Naomi as a child, in a social environment that was really hurting — physically, emotionally, relationally.

And as Naomi looked for the reason behind her suffering, and the suffering of the people she loved, she came into awareness of the converging series of catastrophic risks to the current world order, known as the Polycrisis.

Now being that she was seven, she didn’t have a name for what was happening, she just developed a felt sense of it. It was palpable everywhere she went, and without any peers to talk to about it, she found herself spiraling into a crisis of meaning.

It was terrifying. And, it transformed her. When she was 9, she dedicated her life to figuring out how to address what was happening.

As the intervening years until adulthood went by, Naomi inherited relational, intergenerational and ancestral trauma from her diseased social environment. No matter where she went, she found that the people around her needed her to absorb their emotional, romantic, and sexual needs. She learned to keep her thoughts to herself, and to not challenge the people around her.

Over time, Naomi’s self-expression muscles atrophied. She lost contact with her ability to express her own perspective, and indeed, almost everything about herself. Inside, her self-knowledge remained tethered to the core understanding that the human system desperately needed to change, and that we, the humans, needed to be that change. 

By the time Naomi was 22, though she had created a successful business to fund this calling, she was in nearly constant sympathetic nervous system activation, living to avoid anxiety attacks, and collapsing under the weight of her trauma. Enter, Matthew.

Matthew also came up in a deeply diseased social environment, with a single, disabled mother, living in abject poverty. His family would go weeks without food. Childhood play with other boys was restricted to fight club. Gangs infested his house. To handle his personal meaning crisis, Matthew dedicated himself to two things: First, to finding the love of his life. Second, to escaping the deep, dark poverty that seemed designed to keep him in bondage. 

Though he encountered a lot of danger, and accumulated a lot of trauma along the way, Matthew fought with all his might to transcend his circumstances and achieve the American dream.

It was brutally difficult, but he did it: An executive-track job at a major financial software company, a wife, a house in the suburbs, and the car of his childhood dreams. And he still crushed it at basketball.

And yet, despite his achievements, Matthew found himself lost and deeply unfulfilled. What’s more, his marriage was failing, and his trauma was getting much worse, keeping him in constant misery and threatening his life.

By the time Matthew and Naomi met, we were both traumatized and hurting, caught in snarls of our own coping mechanisms.

While we don’t ascribe to labels, they do a good job of painting a picture. Some labels that described us at the time include: anxiety disorder, manic depression, complex post traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, hypertonia, arthritis, and chronic migraines.