I worked very hard for the life I felt I had earned in 2010. I was 35 years old and had a good, stable job with a Fortune 500 company doing work I loved and felt proud to perform. I was married to a brilliant and beautiful woman and our daughter was athletic, clever, and kind. My family had sacrificed much to achieve middle class security, including moving 1,700 miles from our home in Covington, Kentucky to Santa Barbara, California. My wife and I were best friends and had been for the 14 years we had been together, but the culture shock did test our relationship in new ways. We had our problems as every family does, but the summer of 2010 I knew peace and contentment for the first time in my adult life. I had hobbies. I was in school to be a clinical psychologist, a dramatic departure from my career as a software engineer. I participated in online forums and wrote open source financial software and online games, some of which were relatively popular for the time. I was a senior analyst for a global information organization, specifically in the realm of science and medicine, which at times involved sensitive information. I loved my job. I loved my family. I loved my life. I had reached, I felt, what was the top of my mountain. For not having any formal college education, I was very proud of what I had achieved before the age of forty.

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in late August when I went to our bedroom to take a nap in the warmth of the sunlight of Santa Barbara streaming through the window. I must have slept for hours because the sun had completely set when my wife shook me awake and told me to get dressed. The sheriffs were coming. Courtney, our daughter, didn’t come home for dinner on time. She was missing.

In January, we had become aware of someone grooming our 13-year-old daughter and took every measure under the law to prevent their interaction, including monitored internet and moving to a lazy residential suburb away from the west side of downtown Santa Barbara. This adult male was absolutely dedicated to the task of manipulating our daughter and it was made clear to me by my wife that he had finally succeeded, and my wife was the last person to see my child. Hours went by as sheriffs collected information and background from both my wife and I, together and individually in private. My first adult job was working for a licensed private investigator building data-based risk assessments for employers and investors. Stories, even weird ones, do tend to make sense when all of the facts are available. Around midnight my wife and I finally found ourselves alone in our home that now felt alien and empty. I began to process the thoughts and information and hunches which had evolved as the night wore on and there was a point where I began to resent the behavior and mannerisms of the police and detectives. They saw something I could not and it felt like it made the situation less urgent than it demanded.

When something like this happens, there are ten thousand things you think you should do but nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine are wrong. I agreed to allow the police 72 hours to do their job, but I did not sit on my hands. I was raised as a Master Mason in 2009, and our organization swears oaths to defend each other’s families. I called on those favors which activated masonic police officers in multiple jurisdictions up and down the California coast to help locate and retrieve my daughter. They offered information and logistics and support to the investigating officers, but none of it manifested in her return. Hours turned into days, days into weeks, and even child recovery professionals we hired at no small expense could find any trace of where she had gone. She was lost, and everything I had worked to achieve for my entire adult life was destroyed in one, warm summer evening.

Our families tried to support us as best they could from halfway across the country, and my mother-in-law even came and stayed with us for a few weeks to help us find a center. My wife and I became sad, lost people. I became depressed and contemplated suicide and my wife had descended into dangerously significant alcoholism. The only thing I feel that got us through those times was, at the time, my studies in clinical psychology as I was working towards a focus in transpersonal psychology. For the last few years I had been immersed in techniques and methods to address post-traumatic stress, addiction, and depression. I could not endure the pain any longer and with my wife’s consent, and armed with the therapies of doctors Stanislav Gras and Alexander Shulgin (both of whom I met in April of 2010) I began a treatment regimen which I was warned could have adverse consequences. I grew some psilocybin mushrooms which we consumed for 8 weeks, in an increasing amount each session to chemically alter our ability to process emotional content, and with guided therapy of a clinical provider the world began to make sense again. There is an ancient maxim which states “as within, so without.” Those thoughts and feelings within you manifest in your decisions and actions. My reasoning was if we could change ourselves on the inside in just the proper way, we can change the whole world and bring our daughter home.

By my birthday in November it had been almost three months since Courtney disappeared without any sign she was still alive. On December 6th, my wife and I decided that we needed to begin separating because if we were ever to see our daughter again I would have to do it myself and that person could no longer be her husband. I started to wind down some of my hobbies and pass off responsibilities to some people who I thought would carry the projects forward. My wife and I both knew that my entire focus was going to be on our daughter’s recovery because that was the only thing that would save her. I could not be a husband or a friend or a partner anymore. She could not join me where we both knew I had to go. She would not love the man I needed to become. I wasn’t sure I was built for it, but it was clear she wasn’t. When things first happened in August we couldn’t live without each other, but by December she had a gallon bottle of Sky vodka beside the bed and would take 3 shots before being able to leave it. We each had to deal with our own pain and it was so great that we could not be there for each other. I turned in my notice to my job, much to their disappointment, and began to arrange my finances so that I would be able to dedicate my life to a new form of education: I would learn how human traffickers worked because my daughter was drawn into a world which I did not know nor understand. I was going to become someone else. I was going to become one of them.

The first week of December saw my wife and I agreeing that we had to part ways so I could do what I needed to do. I had a limited amount of bandwidth and both my wife and my child were in crisis. Having to make such a decision broke my heart, but I decided my child came first. I needed a place to setup where I understood the rules but still had those criminal elements with which I needed to gain experience. By the end of January, I had left everything I ever wanted from life behind me and set out to move back to my childhood home in northern Kentucky. I was going to have to do things that were at best morally questionable.