Tommy - Transference

In this episode, I’m joined by Tommy.

Tommy is in recovery. He is also a businessman, a dog dad, and the founder of Takeoff Monkey, a construction estimating business he built after drinking himself out of everything and starting again from nothing.

We sit inside recovery, accountability, and what happens when one person starts to wake up.

Not as ideas.
As lived experience.

We talk about what it means to admit fault in a relationship and then have that honesty turned back on you as a weapon.

We stay with the tension of that.

How owning your shit can be freeing.
How it can also be dangerous in the wrong relationship.
How one person doing the work cannot carry the whole burden for two.

Tommy speaks openly about sobriety, obsession, and what happened when he got sober and realised the life he was in no longer fit. Not because she was a bad person. Not because he was above it. But because waking up changed the whole dynamic.

We also talk about transference.

How addiction does not just disappear.
How alcohol can become work.
How the pub can become the gym.
How the same unconscious drive just puts on different clothes.

This is not a conversation about being healed.
It is about being honest enough to see the pattern.

We talk about masculinity, emotional safety, repair, and how rare it is for two people to both take responsibility in the same moment.

Because when they do, something shifts.

Not perfectly.
But enough.

The question Tommy leaves for the next guest is this.

Share your most guarded secret.
Your most embarrassing fear.
The thing you least want to say out loud.

It’s You, Oh Fuck, It’s ME In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor

No tips.
No fixing.
Just real conversations.

Tommy Lather can be found at 

www.takeoffmonkey.com

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommylather/

Book- https://cxv22j-gy.myshopify.com/    Discount Code: PODCAST20

Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/chadtaylor.itsyou/?hl=en

Tiktok- https://www.tiktok.com/@chadtaylor.itsyou?lang=en

Email- chadtaylorpsychotherapy@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

I'm Chad Taylor, psychotherapist, author of It's You, Oh Fuck It's Me. No tips, no fixing, just real conversations. So today I've got Tommy. So Tommy, who the fuck are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Well, I'm an alcoholic, I'm a businessman, I'm a dog dad, I I'm a lot of things, but the thing the thing I guess I I remind myself is I'm just Tommy the alcoholic in recovery.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

I'm glad you added that in recovery there.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Because I think for people out there listening, yeah, they don't at no point I I try not to let myself ever believe, like, oh, I got this, I got this, because that's when I might start thinking that, oh, I can have a beer or whatever, but I can't. So I remind myself all the time. And it helps keep me grounded and keep me humble.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Because when I hear you're an alcoholic, if I was just a listener out there, I'd probably think, oh, well, Tommy's coming in from the park with the brown paper bag.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah, I slept under a bridge last night, and yeah, I haven't gotten a haircut in months, and I smell like shit, but no, I'm I'm just a regular guy living a pretty regular life. I just happen to be an alcoholic.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Which is, you know, the people I love to hear the people I want on here are the real and raw people like you, the people that are ready to own their shit and be honest. So the next part of this podcast, I usually ask people, do you run a business or what do you do for work?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

So I've worked in construction, some form of construction my whole life. Most of my career has been in cost estimating, figuring out how much it costs to build a project and what you can sell it for. I moved up here from Texas in 2018. I drank myself out of literally everything, came up here with no job, no plan, no nothing. And I started this business helping contractors estimate better, and it took off. Ironically, it's called Takeoff Monkey, although that takeoff term means to count and measure materials on blueprints. I started that business in 2019, and now it's a thriving business. We've raised capital a few times, and we have a few hundred customers, and they're all very, very happy, a very happy team, and that's what I spend my time doing.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

That's exciting. I knew that straight away when I seen that. I was a plumber, I had a pretty successful plumbing business in a in a former life, it feels like a lifetime ago. So when I when I seen the email address that was Take Off Monkey, I thought straight away this dude's in construction.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

You you knew most people think it's like airplanes or or something like pornographic, but no, that's awesome that you knew that. I had no idea.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

So where can people find you? Give yourself a bit of a plug here. A short podcast, but there's time for that. Where can people find if someone's listening to this who's a tradie and likes what they've heard, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Sure. They takeoffmonkey.com. I'm just Tommy at takeoffmonkey.com. Website has blog posts and information about what we do and how we work and all that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Do you work internationally like a lot of my listeners are in Australia?

SPEAKER_00 3:42

We would do would you work with somebody over there, or is it a bit hard to so my production team is actually in India, all over India. All of our customers are in the US. We do a little bit in Canada, but we would just have to change our settings to uh from Imperial to Metric, I believe. But yeah, we could absolutely, I'd love to work with someone in Australia, actually.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Oh, all right, guys. There's plenty of tradies that listen to this, so give Tommy a call. And last bit about the plugging, because I'm not a life coach that'll DM me now. At the end of the show notes, I'll put your info anyway when I write the intro up. Okay. Awesome. So something I do on this podcast, the last guest leaves something for the next guest, and the last guest was me, because every third one I try and do a solo session and I left. Have you ever admitted you were wrong or at fault? And it was used as a weapon.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yes. Yes. Yeah, when I admit that I'm yes, mostly in relationships. Do you want me to elaborate?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah, go for it. What what happens to you when you hear that? What part of it resonates with you, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 4:58

About admitting that I'm I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

When you admit have you ever admitted you're wrong? And then someone's used that as a weapon. In other words, speaking about recovery language, have you ever tried to make an amends or admit fault or caught yourself mid-argument that, oh, actually maybe I'm the problem here, maybe they actually aren't the problem in this? And then was that ever used as a weapon back to you? In other words, did they not hear you in that? And what was that like?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

The first thing that comes to mind is in previous relationships, we'd have an argument about something, and maybe it's jealousy. And you know, maybe I found myself being jealous, being outwardly jealous to my partner, like, hey, what are you doing talking to that guy? And then I kind of caught myself and reeled myself back in and thought, you know, that's not okay. She's not doing anything to hurt me. That's okay, honey. I'm sorry, I was wrong. And then that turned into a ticket to go do whatever, knowing that they had like a new sword in their belt that they could use against me. Like, oh, well, you admitted you're a jealous person, so fuck off with that. You're just being jealous, you're screwed up in the head. Don't worry about it. When in reality, I really should be worried about it.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yeah, and we're all screwed in the head, right? Like every fucking one of us needs to look in the mirror, look into the mirror rather than through the window. The reason I asked that question is I guess part of my book, the theme of it is if two people are in a relationship and they aren't both willing to look at their own shit, one person doing this work can almost be used as a weapon. Sophie and I, my partner, we're both in recovery. So we're both uh practicing on a daily basis, that whole when we have an argument, I believe she's 90% the wrong and I'm 10% in the wrong. But if I go back to the conversation with my 10% and she comes back to the conversation with her 10%, then the rest of it seems to heal itself out. But in previous relationships with somebody who wasn't on this path and didn't really do as much self-improvement, I guess, or self-reflection is the word I'm looking for, then that could be used as a weapon.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

And then you or we become like the beast of burden, and we're carrying all the wrongs done in a relationship. And if it's a real relationship, that is way too much burden for a single person to um and maintain their path.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Definitely, and I see that a lot. When one person starts to wake up, unless both people start to wake up, the relationship has an end date. And I see that a lot in addiction recovery as well. Some somebody might have stayed together for a long time while one partner or both partners were in active addiction or alcoholism. And then when one person wakes up and starts to do work on themselves, whether it's therapy or AA or smart recovery or whatever it might be, I do go to AA and I do a lot of other things outside of AA. So I'm not an AA Nazi, but I'm a proponent for the sort of 12-step program. When one person starts to work on that, if the other person doesn't have some sort of program or some sort of way of seeing that they did play a part in that relationship, even if it was only 10% or 5% or 1% or 50%, if relationships seem to, in from what I see, relationships seem to end quicker when one person gets sober in this dynamic, or one person starts going to therapy if both people don't take on the same journey.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yes, absolutely. When I finally got sober for the last time, I was in a relationship with a girl I was with for I think a close to a year. It was a significant amount of time, and uh we were drinking buddies. She very much wanted me to get sober. I had all kinds of physical health issues, and I was a much, much worse alcoholic than she was. But when I got sober, everything changed. My perception of her and our relationship changed, everything completely changed. And really, I gave her an amends years ago, but I feel like I still owe her one because when I woke up, I didn't know what I was doing. What am I doing with this woman? She drinks every day, I can't be around this. She was really hurt because the relationship ended at my hand really, really quickly after getting sober. But it was like I woke up a completely different person, no longer compatible with her.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, and it is literally waking up out of a blackout. And I've had experiences of that through my life where I've almost woken up out from a blackout, but I hadn't even been drinking. I'd just become unconscious and addicted to something else, or I was so driven that alcoholism in me become workaholism and become drag racing a holism and become whatever else it did. And then I almost got to a point where through therapy and through mentorship and through recovery, it was almost like shit, where am I? How did I get here in this relationship? And I've been sober for 15 years, and wow, it's almost like coming out of a blackout sober. So just because we put the drink down or the drug down, we don't change the behavior. It doesn't nothing changes. You know, there's a cliche in recovery, which I used to hate, which says nothing changes if nothing changes, and it's so fucking true.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yeah, yeah, it is. You know, when I first got sober, I needed something to just obsess over, just something to immerse myself in completely. And that that thing was my business, and it worked out well, but for the first couple years, man, I mean, I was at my desk for 18 hours a day, easily. I didn't think about anything else, I didn't do anything else, I didn't care about my physical health, I ate like shit, I didn't exercise, like I was just obsessed with building this business. A little bit healthier of an obsession than beer, but still there was some cost to it. And it took me another two years to figure out how to stay in a happy medium in all things in my life and not just not be so all or nothing.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah, and the technical term we'd use for that is transference. And I think I wrote in the book I've seen every form of transference and probably partook in half of them, or if not more, in my almost 25 years of recovery, right? Like the transference. Some there's there's people out there who are sober now, and their partners have lost them to the gym. They first they lost them to the pub, now they've lost them to the gym two hours in the morning and three hours after work. And I know you that you know exactly what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

I I do, I do, and you know, they they always say, and I've lived this myself, every time I would quit and then start drinking again, each time was exponentially worse than the last. Like I would show my ass even more, I would get in more trouble, something much, much, much worse would happen each time. And even though I didn't pick up a drink again, the obsession with my business was much more intense than my last obsession with alcohol.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Great to hear that stuff. So obviously, you've read my book. What from the book, what out of my book landed for you? What was a few things or one thing that landed for you? And where do you know that and still don't live it in your life?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

The the title of your book is what struck me the most. So many people still in my life today, so many people I encounter are are just bound and determined that they are correct, that they are right. Everyone is so afraid at taking ownership of their own bullshit. And I find it very freeing. I feel so much lighter when I can tell someone, you know what, you're right. I fucked up. But that is really, really hard for a lot of people. People in recovery and out of recovery, people who don't even know what recovery is. But that's a really, really hard thing to do, to have that humility and humble yourself to another person, especially when tensions are high in the midst of an argument or battle of some kind.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Yeah, and the American Indians talk about the black wolf and the white wolf inside of us, and the problem is we're all most of us are predominantly black wolf now, right? Which almost feels like we're gonna die. So for most people, if we admit fault, unconsciously there's a part of us that feels like we're gonna die. So either black wolf almost takes over, or we could call it egocentricity, doesn't really matter what it is, and I wrote a lot about that in the book. The forms in childhood to protect us, and then it imprisons us, and then it's the one that won't won't allow the fault, you know. And the crazy thing is, like you just said there, that humility or the feeling, there's actually dopamine gets released, and there's actually a form of if I admit fault to my partner, there's actually oxytocin that gets released between us. So it can actually be foreplay. The original name for my book was going to be called Before it quite got finished being written, was gonna be called I'm fucked, you're fucked, why being wrong is foreplay.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

I like that, but there's a lot of truth to that, you know. The term, at least we have it here, makeup sex. You have an argument, you have sex, and and that's true. And I never truly experienced that until my relationship now with Amy, and I'll use her name because I'm sure she won't care. But when we have an argument, luckily she's she's very willing to admit when she's wrong, as am I, but we both admit where we were wrong, like you said, we each bring our 10 or 20 percent or whatever, and then it's like the most explosive best sex ever. And we make up and we put it behind us, and we're stronger for it.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

And I think because you do on the makeup prior to the sex, I think what happens is we almost get programmed unconsciously because people like Joe Dispenza, who I love, and you know, so many sciences backing up what spirituality has said for thousands of years, that 95% of what we do in our daily lives by the time we're 35 is unconscious programming. So what ended up almost happening is that the makeup sex, we almost create an argument unconsciously because we're all on autopilot, if you don't believe me. Drive somewhere in a long distance and tell me you were present for the whole fucking drive, like you were when you tried to learn how to drive. If you're only thinking like most of it, it's like fuck, I don't even remember going back through that town. Did I stop? Was that a red light back there? Or you know, start brushing your teeth with your opposite hand. These are all things I tell my clients when they want to argue with me that they're not unconscious and they're fully conscious. Like, for most of us, I get up in the morning, I hit the kettle, and I I'm not focused on okay, I'm gonna hit the kettle. My mind is a million miles elsewhere. So where I'm going with this is it almost we almost create. I don't know if you've ever heard of Pavlov's dog, and for anybody out there, I'll give you the two-minute version that Pavlov was a scientist and he was trying to work out why association happens between us, and this is in line with the makeup sex. So he was doing this experiment on these dogs, and it wasn't cruel for anyone out there that loves animals, including you, Tommy. Uh you said you're a a dog dad. That he started ringing the bell and then he'd feed the dogs, and that's we all know that kind of stuff, right? Pretty quickly, as soon as he rang the bell, it didn't matter what time of the day was, the dogs would come running over to the bowl. The thing that was really important was uh then he started hooking up sensors to see what was going for them inside their body, away from their brain, away from their thinking function. And these dogs, when he rang the bell, they would start salivating, their digestive system would actually kick in the gear and start producing digestive enzymes as if it had already received food. So that was the main takeaway from that was that when the bell got rang, the dog's digestive system would start, not just they'll run over to the bowl and wait for the food, their digestive system was already kicked in. So where I'm going with that is that sometimes when we've got the makeup sex, which can be pretty amazing, right? Because you're almost part of that is you're free in that moment. You're like, I don't really care. I love them, but I don't like them. And I don't really care if they reject me at the moment. So I'm actually probably a bit more vulnerable in doing things that I wouldn't normally do, or maybe being a bit more aggressive or a bit more dominant on both sides. Man, woman, man, man, woman, woman, don't really matter. So where I'm going with that is I think sometimes the programming in the relationship, we almost unconsciously cause the argument to create the intimacy, and we don't even know what the fuck we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

I think there's definitely some truth to that. I think there's a lot that can be gained by recognizing that and learning that and managing that because nobody wants to be in a relationship where you only have sex or you're only intimate when you fight. You want to be able to get there other ways. But yes, 100% I agree with that completely.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

And in my therapy room, I see so many young, healthy looking couples in their mid-30s, uh, late 20s, early 40s, late 30s. And they're not having sex. And some of them haven't had sex for three years, and they're like nice, fit, uh good-looking people because of these dynamics, these power dynamics that happen. And it's almost like, well, I'm not gonna give that person A sex because person A hasn't given me emotional connection, and there's no way I'm gonna reward them with sex. It really, this it's you, oh fuck, it's me. Some couples, after a while, I'll almost go and say, You need to emotionally connect with her and you need to maybe give him a hug. It really does get to this point where we don't even know what we're doing. It's the fucking blind leading the blind in this world because we've lost structure and we've lost the understanding of what it was like. Like I know no one ever taught me what it was like to be a man growing up. Who should I be in a relationship as a man? As a safe, masculine, healthy individual. No one taught me that.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

No. Me either. No, I mean, I love my dad, my parents are still together, but my parents have their own thing, no doubt. But the way my dad is to my mother is not how I think a man should be to his wife, which is available and safe and non-judgmental and supportive and intellectually stimulating. And you know, maybe they had that at one point. My mother can also be very domineering. I'm being careful here because they might hear this. My mother is an extremely strong personality, and uh sometimes I wonder if maybe my dad has just sort of been beaten down so far that all he can do is just sort of hang his head and obey my mother, or else. But yeah, no one no one taught me either how to how to be a real man, and uh that's the thing that Amy loves best about me, that she can be in her feminine and I can be in my masculine, and and it works no matter what the feminists want to say, and you know, all this stuff, there there are differences between man and woman, and that dynamic needs to operate in a certain way at its at its base level.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Yeah, and I think we all have feminine energy and masculine energy inside of us, and I think what you said there, I think as long as it's okay for the relationship, right what I'm saying is that sometimes I see two types I either see toxic masculinity or I see no masculinity in my therapy rooms. It's either when they come in and they sit down, it's either he's pretty abusive or he has no masculinity. And that's not her fault, and that's not his fault. It's the blind leading the blind. Like your parents and my parents, they didn't have this information available to them. They almost have an excuse, right? They didn't have this information available to them like we do. We don't have a fucking excuse. So anyone out there listening, your parents did what they did because unfortunately for them this information wasn't available and things were different, and we don't go around fucking blaming them. We all operate from the level of consciousness that we have, and I think our responsibility is to get more conscious. And right now in 2026, we all have the opportunity, free of charge, to get as conscious as we want to get, just be fucking disciplined. I'm pretty strong in this because we don't have to live like this anymore. So what I see in my relationship in my therapy room is either, oh, how many kids have you guys got? And she'll speak up and say, Oh, we've got two, but three if we count Tommy. Where she's carrying the load, right? And that's not her fault. That might be because this man has grown up in a single-parent home, which a lot of us has now, right? Or the father was absent at the pub. So it's not actually it's not the women's fault, it's not the men's fault, it just fucking is. You know, the patriarchal system really fucked things up for a long time, and the pendulum's going out the other way in a way, and it sort of has to come back to the middle.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

It it does. And and I think 50 years ago, 80 years ago, at least here in the States, the woman's place was at home. A married woman, her place was taking care of the children and doing laundry. That's how most of my peers were raised. Their mom stayed home and took care of the house and things like that. But then we have this whole advent of you know, feminine power, equality, and all, and all these women started entering the workplace and started being quite successful. But then you've got this whole generation, our generation of men who enter into a marriage where their wife is a corporate powerhouse, their wife is out there making maybe more money than they are and killing it, but he still expects her to do the laundry, take care of the kids, take them to all their activities, do all this shit. And women, women can't do all of that, at least not comfortably in their feminine. I mean, many of them do, but it doesn't make for the happiest relationship.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Well, sir, most men out there really want a mother. They don't want a partner, they want a mother. And I've got to be careful that I don't, you know. My partner said yesterday to me she was thinking about going overseas because all her family live overseas, and she was thinking about going overseas to visit her dad because our parents aren't getting any younger. That, you know, as soon as we get into the 40s or late 30s or 50s, what doesn't really matter what it is. And instantly there was a part of me that felt like, why would you want to do that? You know, like and this is me getting honest and real on here, trying to be a proponent of what I want other people to do. And I thought, why would you want to do that? And I even said, Oh, that's gonna cost a lot of money, you know, we're already going in September. And then I caught myself and thought, you selfish fucking prick. Like, you know, I still haven't processed at all, but I think part of it was little Chad, little me, probably felt a bit abandoned in that, you know, and a lot of people will listen to this and think, oh wow, this guy's really not that well. Should he be a fucking therapist? Don't kid yourself. We're all having these thoughts, we're just not conscious of them, we're just not connected in. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Amy has a girls' trip. We have spent every last weekend, every free moment of time we've had together nonstop for the past nine months, and this will be the first weekend that we're not together. And she's going on a girl's trip with girls she's been friends with for 10, 15, maybe 20 years, and I love that. But yeah, there's a little part of me inside that's like, what am I gonna do? But what am I gonna do? I got a house full of shit I can do, and I got plenty of work, and I got my own friends, and that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna encourage her to go and enjoy it, but it takes a little bit of extra thought, a little bit of extra humility to say that, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Thanks for being so open, Tommy. You know, not many people can get on just between me, you, and the rest of the world, really. Yeah. Yeah. The more, you know, my whole process of this book and this movement, you know, and I don't want to get into this whole thing of I'm giving it to the world, but it came to me pretty freely. I wrote that book from start to finish. My therapist said to me yesterday, how long did it take you to do that book? And I know he's always got an angle with his questions, and I said, 47 years. And he laughed and he said, No, no, I mean how long. And I said, From start to finish, that book came out of me in four weeks. So I was pretty much channeled, like from starting the first word to finishing that book and literally hitting publish and sending the manuscript. It was a four-week period over what was meant to be a holiday. So talk about when we talk about we've got an addiction or an obsession going, but I fit time in for AA and we went walking every day and you know, we had lots of swims, we went to Bali and uh all these amazing things. So I guess where what I'm saying there is my whole thing is I don't want this to make money. Every cent I make from sales of this book, my whole idea is hopefully the more the more people this book can reach, through audio, through book, it doesn't really matter what it is. I hope this will be in jails one day and things like that. So I don't want to make money out of it. For me, because it came to me so freely, it's more like this is you know, if one person improves their life through reading that, then it's done its job. Because I live, I'm not I'm far from rich, but I live a pretty comfortable life and I don't long for much. I've got a great partner, I've got amazing kids. I've fucking got a therapy practice that's booming, that I'm have so many amazing long-term clients, some of them for five years, you know, and I'm like, Do you want to go monthly? No, no, I'm still happy. Two weekly, it's I price it at the right price so that they can come regularly. You know, I've got a race car and I've got a nice old 67 Mustang and I've worked hard, right? Talk about transference into work, I've done that in my early sobriety. I'm super comfortable. So for me, I just want to congratulate you for being so raw on here because that's very rare, and this is what I want. It's not gonna kill you to admit fault, it'll actually free you from the fucking prison that you're in.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Absolutely, yes, it does feel good to say that.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

So we're at the end here, it's short and sharp. Uh what I do on this podcast is I get the previous guest to leave something for the next guest without knowing who they're gonna be. So, do you want to leave one statement, question, sentence, no teaching, just something that I can hit them with.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah. Share your most embarrassing, shameful fear, thought, whatever you can possibly muster out of the depths of your soul.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

Okay, that's a big one. So repeat that again for anyone out there so they know what they're getting into next week.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Share your most guarded secret, your most embarrassing fear or concern or whatever, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

Okay, great. I look forward to seeing the next guest squirm for people out there to see the video. They don't. So thanks, Tommy. I'm gonna put your details in the bottom for anybody that wants any construction work done. And for everybody out there, this is where we're gonna leave it.