In this episode of The Missing Conversation, host Steve Evans sits down with Travis — a licensed therapist and men's coach from Costa Mesa, California, whose senior year of high school was upended when his parents separated, beginning a long stretch of instability he'd spend years learning to understand.
Travis reflects on the quiet cost of that upheaval — the anger he internalized while trying to keep the peace, the way he moved through school and relationships to avoid being alone with the pain — and on the older men and steady friends who became his anchors when home no longer was. He traces the moment a college professor met his numbness with an invitation that changed everything: to sit down with a therapist, and finally begin to unpack what he'd carried.
He speaks candidly about walking away from a path he had no passion for, finding his calling in the very work that healed him, and the relationships that guided each turn — the mentors he sought out over coffee, the couple who helped him find his own "why," the wife he built a family with. He shares the honest strain of early fatherhood — home births, colic, the sheer exhaustion — and how he and his wife learned to externalize the hardship rather than let it become the story of their marriage.
With warmth, humor, and a therapist's hard-won self-awareness, Travis explores the leap he finally took — leaving the security of a corporate role to build work that gives rather than drains him — and what it cost and required to trust his own gut. He lands on what turned out to matter most: that the depth of his relationships shaped everything, that no man should walk it alone, and that the truest work of a life may be giving back what you were once given.
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