Fame, Addiction, Self-Sabotage & Redemption | James from Rise Above the Journey

There are some stories that can be summarized as transformation. Others resist such a tidy description.

They contain too many fractures, contradictions, reversals, and uncomfortable truths. They do not move cleanly from struggle to triumph. They circle back and begin again. Progress appears, disappears, and reappears in another form. The person at the end may look almost unrecognizable from the person at the beginning, yet the earlier versions never entirely vanish. They remain present as memories, scars, warnings, and occasionally sources of strength.

My conversation with James, the founder of Rise Above the Journey, belongs to this second category.

James presents as thoughtful, quick-witted, emotionally aware, and unusually open about the darker chapters of his life. He speaks about peace, safety, personal responsibility, and the slow work of becoming someone who no longer needs to run from himself. Yet the younger James he describes was angry, distrustful, manipulative, emotionally volatile, and driven by a deep belief that the world had treated him unfairly.

The distance between these two versions of the same man is enormous. Understanding that distance requires beginning with the moment his sense of safety disappeared.

James grew up in Liverpool, England. His earliest memories were filled with family holidays, football clubs, swimming, regular dinners, and the reliable rhythms of childhood. Life was not perfect, but it felt stable. Then his parents divorced, and the structure surrounding him collapsed.

The financial security disappeared. The emotional security followed.

At approximately twelve years old, James entered foster care. It was there that one of the defining moments of his life occurred. After a week, his father arrived and took James’s younger brother home. James believed he was leaving too. He was not. The explanation he remembers was that his father had a cat.

A single moment like this can become much larger than the event itself. Children rarely possess the emotional vocabulary or broader perspective required to interpret abandonment. They do not usually conclude that the adults around them were struggling with addiction, violence, poverty, fear, or their own limitations. Instead, they often arrive at a far more personal explanation; something must be wrong with me.

James waited for his mother to return. She was trapped within addiction and a violent relationship, unable to rescue him from the circumstances that had overtaken the family. He was left to wonder why she did not come, why his brother had been chosen, and why he appeared so easy to leave behind.

Foster care intensified this feeling.

James described himself as feeling less like a member of a household and more like a commodity within a business arrangement. He remembers being criticized for eating too much and being told that his carers were not paid enough to cover the amount of food he consumed. He remembers Christmas mornings when the biological children of the household opened piles of gifts while he received something far smaller. The pain was witnessing evidence of belonging while feeling that he existed outside it.

Childhood experiences do not mechanically determine adulthood. People respond to adversity in different ways, and no single outcome is inevitable. Yet early experiences can create powerful internal stories. James began constructing a worldview in which people were unsafe, love was temporary, happiness did not last, and vulnerability invited abandonment.

At the same time, he learned that he could depend only on himself. This created a brutal contradiction. James believed he was the problem, yet he also believed he was the only person capable of protecting him. He carried shame and self-reliance in equal measure. He felt defective, but he could not trust anyone else to help. That is an exhausting place from which to build a life.

During his school years, James fought, struggled to concentrate, and repeatedly found himself in trouble. From the outside, this could easily have appeared as misconduct. Yet behavior is often communication in disguise. A child who cannot explain instability may express it through aggression. A teenager who feels unsafe may attempt to create control wherever possible. Some teachers recognized what was happening beneath the surface. James still remembers them. Others saw only the behavior.

The story he began telling himself during those years was simple and devastating: I do not deserve to be happy. Good things will be taken away. People will leave. Never let anyone see the real you.

From that story emerged the masks.

James learned how to become whatever a situation required. He could charm, flatter, persuade, withdraw, explode, or manipulate depending on what helped him feel safe. These strategies were harmful, and he does not excuse them. Yet they did not begin as carefully planned acts of cruelty. They began as survival mechanisms. This distinction matters.

Understanding the source of harmful behavior does not erase responsibility. It does, however, make change more possible. People rarely transform through condemnation alone. They transform when they can examine what a behavior once protected, recognize what it now costs them, and accept responsibility for replacing it.

For James, the ability to read people and influence them eventually found an unusual stage. He appeared on the British reality television program The Circle, a social competition in which participants live separately and communicate through screens. Success depends heavily on popularity, presentation, and the ability to build alliances without face-to-face interaction.

In many respects, it was an environment perfectly suited to the skills James had learned in childhood.

He knew how to make people feel seen. He knew how to identify emotional pressure points. He knew how to adapt his personality to gain approval. On the program, these abilities brought attention and validation. When he received his phone back after filming, he discovered tens of thousands of followers and messages praising him.

For perhaps the first time in his life, James felt publicly chosen.The experience fed something that had been starving for years. He began walking through Liverpool expecting to be recognized. Opportunities seemed likely to follow. Television appearances, events, sponsorships, and a new career as a public personality all  appeared possible.

Then the COVID-19 lockdowns arrived. Events were cancelled and media opportunities disappeared. The next television personalities entered the public imagination, and the attention moved elsewhere. James had left his job believing fame would become a career. Instead, the validation evaporated almost as quickly as it had appeared.

For someone with his history, this was more than professional disappointment. It repeated an old emotional pattern. He had been loved, then forgotten. Chosen, then left. Elevated, then abandoned.

The public persona remained online, but the person behind it began to disintegrate. James posted photographs from hotels, restaurants, and carefully staged environments while privately descending into addiction. He wore designer clothes and projected success while his internal life became increasingly unstable.

This is one of the more revealing aspects of his story because it reflects a broader feature of digital life. Social media allows people to curate identities that bear little resemblance to their lived experience. A photograph can communicate confidence while hiding panic. A smiling face can conceal addiction. Apparent success can exist beside profound despair.

The audience sees the performance. The performer must live with the distance between the image and reality.

James describes approval as a drug. The comparison is not casual. External validation provides a temporary surge, but the effect fades. The next post must perform better. The next audience must be larger. The next compliment must arrive quickly enough to silence the underlying insecurity.

The person becomes dependent on a resource that can never offer permanent relief and no amount of approval from strangers could persuade James to approve of himself. As the attention disappeared, self-destruction accelerated. He experienced the collapse of a long relationship, returned to live with his mother, and felt that his life had failed. His anger became increasingly dangerous. He developed violent fantasies about the man whose abuse had contributed to the destruction of his childhood home. At one point, he drove around carrying a knife and searching for him.

The admission is deeply uncomfortable. It should be.

James’s story loses its meaning if it is sanitized into a pleasant tale about resilience. His transformation matters because the earlier reality was serious. He was capable of harming himself, other people, and the relationships around him. He had reached a point where pain had become identity and destruction felt more familiar than stability.

Then he saw a video about Thailand. He wondered whether leaving England might allow him to change the story.

Travel is often romanticized as a cure for personal suffering. New countries offer stimulation, distance, novelty, and temporary freedom from familiar reminders. Yet changing geography does not automatically change the patterns carried within us. Sometimes travel creates space for healing. Sometimes it provides a larger playground for avoidance. Thailand gave James access to both possibilities.

Instead of escaping his addictions, he found stronger substances and greater opportunities to disappear into them. Blackouts became more frequent. After discovering messages on a partner’s phone, an old abandonment wound reopened. He went out intending to numb himself and later woke handcuffed to a hospital bed in Bangkok, surrounded by police, with self-inflicted injuries and no clear memory of what had occurred.

He initially feared that he might have killed someone.

He had not, but the situation remained severe. He faced imprisonment, financial consequences, and the humiliation of calling his younger brother for help.

Even this was not the final collapse.

James later entered another relationship, moved to Australia, and briefly believed he had finally reached the life he had always wanted. He lived near the beach. He felt loved. The future seemed secure.

Then happiness itself became threatening.

Sitting alone on the beach, he experienced a moment of genuine gratitude. Yet beneath that joy, another voice appeared. Happiness did not fit the identity he had carried for years. Peace felt unfamiliar. Stability contradicted the story that good things always disappear.

So he made them disappear. He drank heavily, returned to the house, and destroyed it. Televisions, windows, and property were smashed. He was arrested and left financially indebted in a foreign country.

This incident reveals something difficult about self-sabotage. People do not always destroy their lives because they desire pain. Sometimes they destroy what is good because pain feels predictable. The nervous system can become so accustomed to chaos that peace registers as suspicious. A stable relationship creates something to lose. Success creates the possibility of future failure. Love creates the risk of abandonment. Familiar suffering may feel safer than unfamiliar happiness.

James summarized this dynamic through a striking phrase: intelligence can move faster than safety.

Intelligent people are capable of creating elaborate explanations for their behavior. They can justify avoidance, rationalize destructive habits, and build convincing arguments for why change should be postponed. Intelligence can illuminate a path forward, but it can also invent sophisticated detours around responsibility.

Self-sabotage does not always look like addiction, violence, or public collapse. Sometimes it looks like procrastination. Sometimes it is refusing an opportunity, delaying a difficult conversation, staying in the wrong relationship, or repeatedly choosing what feels safe over what might create a better life.

James’s examples are extreme, but the underlying mechanism is familiar. People often protect themselves from imagined danger by remaining inside patterns that reliably cause harm. His turning point came less as a dramatic revelation than as exhaustion. He could no longer continue abandoning himself.

Back in Thailand, he encountered the work of author Vex King. What resonated was not spiritual grandeur or academic language, but recognition. Here was someone discussing adversity in terms James could understand. The book opened a door, but James is clear that reading alone did not change his life. Experience did.

He began asking what might happen if he stopped drinking and allowed himself to encounter the emotions he had spent years avoiding. On November 21, 2023, he stopped. Sobriety did not magically resolve his past. It removed one of the primary mechanisms he had used to escape it. Without alcohol and drugs, the pain remained. So did the shame. So did the memories of people he had hurt, the choices he regretted, and the identities he had performed. Healing required him to experience these emotions rather than cover them with another mask.

One of the most refreshing aspects of James’s perspective is his refusal to embrace the fashionable phrase “no regrets.”

He has regrets.

He regrets the destruction he caused. He regrets the ways he manipulated people. He regrets selling access to his body online and later in person to fund addictions and maintain a false lifestyle. He regrets choices made while wounded, desperate, and disconnected from himself.

Yet regret, in his view, does not have to become a life sentence.

This is an important distinction. Denying regret can become another form of avoidance. It allows people to leap too quickly from harm to gratitude, claiming that every terrible choice was necessary because it led to growth. James offers a more honest position.

Some experiences should be regretted. The task is to feel that regret without allowing it to dictate every future decision. From his own recovery emerged the framework that now guides his work with others. Rise Above the Journey is structured around four stages: Recognize, Integrate, Shift, and Embody.

Recognition involves moving beneath surface-level awareness. It asks people to identify the masks they wear, the stories they repeat, the bodily sensations associated with emotional triggers, and the survival patterns that continue operating long after the original danger has passed.

Many people consider themselves highly self-aware because they can describe their personalities or explain their past. Yet genuine awareness is often less flattering. It requires seeing the difference between the identity we present and the impact we create. It requires recognizing that intelligence, knowledge, and vocabulary do not automatically produce insight.

The next stage, integration, focuses on emotions.

James describes this as inviting every emotion to take a seat at the table. Fear, anger, shame, loneliness, and sadness are treated as signals rather than enemies. Instead of immediately suppressing or acting upon them, individuals practice staying with the sensations for slightly longer than before.

One minute of discomfort may sound insignificant. For someone who has spent decades escaping a particular emotion, it can feel enormous. The objective is to learn that the feeling itself is survivable. The world does not end. The emotion rises, communicates, and eventually changes. Through repetition, a small gap begins to appear between reaction and response.

That gap is where choice lives.

Only after recognition and integration does James move into the shift. This is where visible behavior begins to change. People respond differently to triggers because they have developed a greater capacity to experience the emotion beneath them.

This sequencing is central to his philosophy. Many people attempt to change behavior immediately. They learn a new communication technique, make a resolution, repeat a positive statement, or promise themselves they will act differently next time. Yet when the underlying emotion appears, the old pattern returns. They attempted to shift before they had learned to integrate.

The final stage is embodiment.

This is where change stops feeling like an activity and begins becoming a way of living. A person no longer performs healing as a new identity. They are not endlessly announcing the work, collecting therapeutic language, or constructing a polished image of personal growth. They simply begin behaving differently.

James shared an example from his own professional life. During a discovery call, he realized the person speaking with him did not genuinely want coaching. She admired his lifestyle and wanted access to his story. In the past, this attention would have fed his need for validation. He might have remained on the call because being admired felt good. Instead, he politely ended it.

He protected his time, acknowledged the other person’s intentions without attacking her, and chose to live according to the boundaries he teaches.

This small decision may appear insignificant beside the more dramatic episodes of his past. In reality, it is precisely where transformation becomes visible.

Change is rarely proven through speeches.It is done through ordinary decisions made when nobody is applauding.

James now lives in Da Nang, Vietnam. He has a supportive relationship, dogs, a growing community, opportunities to speak and teach, and a life that resembles journal entries he once wrote when such stability seemed almost impossible. Perhaps most importantly, his mother has been able to visit him there.

During our conversation, James described taking care of her, helping her receive dental treatment, and watching her experience a life far removed from the shelters, addiction, and violence that once defined their family. His expression changed as he spoke. There are moments in an interview when words become secondary. The face tells the story.

When I asked what his life feels like now, his answer returned repeatedly to one concept.

Safety.

For James, safety is the ability to exist without constantly managing himself, other people, and the environment. It means no longer scanning every interaction for rejection. It means speaking freely, resting without suspicion, and feeling at home within one’s own life.

This may be the central thread connecting every chapter of his story. As a child, he lost safety. In foster care, he attempted to manufacture it through control. On television, he sought it through popularity. On social media, he pursued it through validation. Through addiction, he tried to numb the pain of its absence. Through relationships, he searched for someone who could recreate the security he had lost. None of these approaches provided what he needed.

Safety eventually emerged through accountability, emotional awareness, boundaries, sobriety, and the gradual recognition that he could become a secure place for himself.

This does not mean that people heal alone. James is clear about the role his mother and brother played in keeping him alive. His love for them became a reason to continue during moments when love for himself was insufficient. Recovery was personal, but it was never entirely individual.

Sometimes the belief that “nobody loves me” coexists with a profound love for others. That love can become a lifeline.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked James what people are ultimately searching for. His answer was immediate.

Safety.

People want to feel at home in their relationships, careers, environments, and bodies. They want to stop monitoring every room. They want to believe that happiness will not be suddenly removed. They want to exist without performing for permission.

This search may explain why success so often disappoints.

James once pursued recognition, followers, money, travel, attention, and the appearance of a desirable life. Yet when asked to choose between success and peace, he chose peace without hesitation.

Peace, he said, is success. That conclusion carries weight because it was earned through contrast.

James has lived with attention and emptiness. He has experienced adventure without stability, relationships without emotional availability, and public approval without self-acceptance. He now understands that excitement and meaning are not interchangeable. Adventure can be exhilarating, but stability allows a life to take root.

He also draws an important distinction between healing and acceptance. Healing involves changing what can be changed: patterns, behaviors, coping mechanisms, relationships, and responses. Acceptance involves making peace with what cannot be rewritten: the past, irreversible consequences, and decisions that remain part of one’s history.

Many people confuse the two. They attempt to heal what must be accepted and accept what they still have the power to change. James had to do both. He had to change how he lived. He also had to accept that no amount of personal growth would erase every injury he caused or every choice he regretted. His story is powerful precisely because it avoids the fantasy of becoming completely untouched by the past. He has scars. He has memories. He has regrets. Healing did not remove them.

It changed his relationship with them.

What emerges is a form of hope grounded in responsibility rather than wishful thinking. James does not claim that reading a book will change a life, that travel will erase pain, or that one breakthrough will resolve decades of conditioning.

The life he now enjoys was built through thousands of decisions made outside public view. A moment of restraint. A difficult boundary. A sober evening. An emotion felt rather than escaped. An apology. A pattern interrupted. A choice to remain present. These actions lack the glamour of a dramatic transformation story. Yet they are the transformation.

Perhaps that is why the idea of “rising above the journey” feels appropriate. It does not suggest denying the road or pretending the darker sections never happened. It means gaining enough perspective to stop being ruled by them. James’s past remains part of him. It is no longer in charge.

Today, his purpose is to become the person he needed when he was younger. He speaks openly because someone living inside a similar story may need evidence that another life is possible. He does not attempt to force people to change. His own experience taught him that readiness cannot be imposed. Instead, he tries to embody the possibility.

This may be the most honest form of influence available to any of us. People rarely change because they have been lectured into becoming someone else. They change when they see that a different way of living is real, when familiar pain finally becomes heavier than unfamiliar peace, and when they are willing to take ownership of the next decision.

James’s story contains suffering, but he does not glorify suffering as a requirement for growth. Challenge, he argues, is necessary. Suffering may provide fuel, but pain alone does not make people wiser. It can just as easily make them bitter, destructive, or numb.

Growth begins when pain is given direction.

For James, that direction became purpose. The angry child who believed he had been abandoned became an adult who helps people stop abandoning themselves. The young man who constructed masks for approval now encourages others to examine their own. The reality television personality who chased popularity now ends conversations that violate his boundaries. The person who once confused chaos with adventure now chooses stability. The man who pursued success now measures it through peace.

It is a remarkable reversal. Yet perhaps the deepest transformation is simpler.

James finally feels safe. After everything else, that may be the elevation that matters most.