I have no doubt that when I look back at this season of my life, it will be remembered as the single most trying, chaotic, faith-strengthening roller coaster I’ve ever experienced. Looking back at the last 10 months, the total of events is overwhelming and astonishing.
It all started in September 2025 when I began to feel escalations in my mental health—particularly mania growing stronger and stronger. I felt myself speeding up. I felt myself losing control. I felt hopeless and sad about everything I had experienced up to that point in my life. I had already lost my son for two years at that point, and my daughter’s contact and time with me were very limited. It felt like everything I had worked toward—family, career—was all for nothing.
After Charlie Kirk was killed in September 2025—someone I respected and admired very much, especially for his faith and convictions—seeing him die in such a brutal manner, with so many questions circulating, convinced me that we were being lied to and that something very foul was afoot.
At that same time, I experienced the greatest spiritual revelation of my life: a moment where I truly felt connected to God. Jesus was speaking to me from my heart. It started with a restless night in Coronado, during which I believe I navigated the astral plane—as often happens when I enter psychosis and extreme mania after multiple days of no sleep. In that moment, I felt God’s presence. I even went as far as hearing my beloved father-in-law Keith say, “Hey big boy,” his trademark phrase.
The following night the encounter became even more profound. I could feel the darkness doing jumping jacks in the house and in my body. I knew I wanted to expel the darkness—the satanic, demonic presence that is all over the world. I learned that the demons are as thick as fog in the space in between, the space we can’t see. The best thing we can do is clear as much of that clutter as possible and maintain some connection to our Lord and Savior, Yeshua Christ.
When I relinquished my long-standing demon pattern, I felt something exit my body. I felt the darkness leave me. I heard something in the darkness behind me, as if someone was there. I turned and saw what looked like black fog pulling back and away and out of the garage I was in.
I immediately started crying at the connection and presence of our Heavenly Father, stating, “I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy,” and crying and crumbling down. After that, I couldn’t put my Bible down. I wanted to read about everything. I wanted to understand Revelation, prophecy, principalities, demons—everything. I journaled, did my devotion, and read my Bible more consistently than I had ever done in my life. I felt truly connected and restored. My life of suffering and torment up to that point had meaning because I could glorify God.
I was already on the cusp of having to take a medical leave for multiple reasons, but with the spiritual awakening and some of the psychiatric issues happening, I absolutely had to take the leave at that point, which was early October 2025. I took the leave with the expectation that I’d be back to work within 12 weeks, on January 5. Not only did I address many psychiatric issues, I also addressed my increasing back pain, had an emergency MRI and an emergency epidural, esophageal surgery, and a knee scope. I was getting stuff done and cranking through the list, all the while investing my free time into learning about the Ethiopian Bible and the hidden books, and understanding alternative history—understanding how things we are told are simply not true. I asked God to lift the veil from my eyes, to give me eyes to see and ears to hear, and it felt like I was wearing special sunglasses that allowed me to see all the fake, all the fallacy, all the untruth. I journaled about this. I wrote on this webpage about it extensively—the divine click and the aftermath thereafter.
Principalities, demons, and darkness are absolutely real. They flood every square inch of the air and the space around us, even though we can’t see them. I find it quite telling that the moment I had the biggest spiritual awakening of my life—ready to use my story of addiction, loss, mental health crisis, and injury to witness and proclaim the goodness of God and how He has a plan through everything, including suffering (I even read Job very heavily at this point just to understand his suffering and relate it back to mine)—little did I know that while I was looking backward at all the suffering I had experienced up to that point, it was really God’s way of getting me ready for the next wave of suffering, which would be considerably more difficult and painful than ever before.
My family was coming on a big vacation to the Caribbean on a cruise. It had been planned by my parents way out in advance. I desperately wanted to go just to be part of the family. Unfortunately, my children were out of contact, so they weren’t going, which was already heartbreaking enough in itself. I asked my wife repeatedly to go on this cruise with me, and she refused repeatedly. I was still in the mode of Christ-centered devotion, so I didn’t press the subject too hard in the moment. I told myself that when we went on date night the second week of November, I would gently bring it up one last time to see if I could get her to go, because I did not want to go by myself and be alone again.
After doing that, shit hit the fan. Sparks flew. She left the restaurant. I followed her home and came into the house to her as the aggressor—running around yelling, slamming doors, getting in my face. I have all of this on recording, which is important because it saved me from going to jail that night.
In the midst of Kristen being the aggressor, she threatened to call the cops, and I immediately laughed because I wasn’t doing anything but taking the beating. I was shocked to hear the sheriffs when they came up. I was embarrassed and thought, “This is absolutely ridiculous, and this is a massive, massive wedge in my marriage now.” After obtaining the 911 recording, she elected my bipolar diagnosis as justification. She said that I was charging her (which I wasn’t—she was the one charging). She said that I was slamming doors, yelling, and cussing when I was not—and that’s exactly what she was doing. So when the cops got there, they pulled me outside and asked me what was going on. Without her knowledge, I had a recording of everything, so I simply played my recording for the cop and for his body camera so it would be on record. The cop concluded our interaction by saying, “We’re very sorry for wasting your time. Have a good night.” That’s indicative in itself. If there was even a one percent chance that what she said was true, they would have had to, by law, remove me from the home. But that’s how flimsy those accusations were.
I was so angry I could barely move. I was shaking. I called my brother and ran it by him while I was packing up my SUV to go camping in the desert overnight by myself. I had no other interaction with Kristen even though she had just tried to have me wrongfully arrested. I thought, “This is some extreme damage that’s going to take a lot to come back from.”
After sleeping that night in the desert, completely torn to shreds, I came back into town to meet with my friends and see some other faces. While we were at the bar/restaurant, three sheriffs came in and were all asking for me. Of course, neither I nor my friends elected that I was the person they were looking for, and they left. The bottom line is that after my wife called the cops and they left the house, the next day she used the location tracking on my phone—and direct coordination with the police—to locate me and serve me paperwork in front of all my friends, which she also would have known would basically drop a bomb on everyone about all our dirty laundry.
I had to sleep a second night in the desert. I came home first thing in the morning only to find four cop cars rushing me the moment I got out of the car. They approached me and told me that there had been an approved protection order she had filed the day before, citing all the things she had falsified to the cops the day prior—citing things that are completely irrelevant and had nothing to do with any domestic violence: things like a missing doorstop on the garage door causing the door handle to punch into the drywall, or an electrical wall plate that was out of alignment with the switch, or really cheap solar lights she put up in a rock that fell over and created trip hazards that I had thrown away, or an event that happened a full year prior where she claims I head-butted her. I was told I had five minutes to get my belongings and exit the property immediately.
No chance for defense. No warning. No conversation. Just instant loss of my home, wife, family, dogs, gym, back-coping mechanism, office, clothes—everything taken from me. And for what reason?
At this point, knowing all these facts, I was 100% convinced that my family would back me up and have my back through all this. As I came into San Diego and saw my parents for the first time, my mom told me that I had a rotten heart and that I was sick, among other insults. I knew that I was in the same position I was with Christina 15 years prior. I was not welcome in their home. I didn’t feel welcome around them. They didn’t want to listen to my side of it whatsoever. To top it all off, Brandon took that rant I had said to him in private—as my best friend and brother—after she tried to have me wrongfully arrested. I chose to not have contact with her to safeguard her and our marriage. Yet when I vented to one of my closest people, that was used against me and played in front of the family.
I have three sons. If I knew the circumstances of this fact—that my daughter-in-law fabricated and manipulated information to steal my son’s home, life, office, dogs, everything from him—I would be 1000% on my son’s side and fight that woman tooth and nail. But that’s not how it works in my family. Even as a blood relative, as the oldest firstborn son, when push comes to shove and these situations arise, the default position is “anyone but Darrin.” It’s been proven time and time again over many decades.
So now I had lost my home, wife, dogs, office, kids, extended family, best friend, and brother because no one would listen to me whatsoever. Even when I was showing them proof with recordings and bogus police reports, still no one had my back. No one came to help me. My best friend of my whole life abandoned a trip that I had planned to go see him—which was desperately needed at this point—and he chose to cancel it because of all this going on, not giving me the benefit of the doubt either. I also missed the cruise while they went on the cruise.
I was then checked into an inpatient treatment facility in Orange County, California. I was there for three weeks. It was generally really good. They got everything straightened out and got my head on straight, but there was a falling out with the owner because of free speech I was exercising that he did not like, and so he kicked me out for it. That’s okay, because I got enough from them.
After discharging from the hospital, I came home and things were smooth and okay, but I knew there was a massive monkey on our back regarding the whole event and everything that happened. We cruised through December. We went on a little road trip like we try to do every year. It was fun. I kept a lid on it. I kept compartmentalizing all the trauma and PTSD that I had just encountered from how they handled it.
After inpatient, I was sent to an intensive outpatient program for four months. This was very humbling and awkward, sometimes painful, but I stuck through the program. I didn’t miss a single day. I stayed on target and wrapped the program up mid-April.
I had to extend my work leave from three months to seven months to accommodate the new treatment program, which was approved and sanctioned by my employer. As I approached the time to return to work, I was very nervous—especially because the last time I took leave, they eliminated my position illegally, and I was barely able to retain employment. So this time when I went back, I was very, very apprehensive. But when I turned on my laptop and successfully logged into all the services, I knew that I was still an employee, and I felt a wave of relief and loyalty. I was so thrilled that I had this consistency here and that I could just invest in my work and continue going forward. I told my boss when I met with him and he welcomed me back that I was touched at how LinkedIn handled my leave, and that I was going to work harder for him and the company than I ever had because I had a sense of undying loyalty now—because of how well it was handled and how much I appreciated them allowing me time to get my health on track.
I was back to work for eight whole days when our new CEO sent out a letter saying that we were doing a 5% reduction-in-force layoff. I was unfortunately affected. So after 12 years of working for LinkedIn, and after coming off of this entire episodic nightmare—inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, PTSD, family abandonment, law firm involvement, complete erosion of my confidence—I still got to have my job back, but for only eight days, and then the rug was pulled out from under me completely.
LinkedIn targeted personnel who had been there for 10 years or more, who had been on leave anytime in the previous two years (including people who had babies), and anyone who had stayed at the same level without promoting for their duration. The entire time I was there I was told I was at a high enough level that I could just stay put and didn’t have to worry about promotions—and then that was used against me.
So it’s freak-out time. The tech market is flooded with people because of the layoffs. The world is going to shit with wars we shouldn’t be in. Currency, precious metals, and crypto are all being manipulated. Evil is everywhere. Now here I am trying to find a new job, reestablish myself, meet new people, understand new processes, understand business models—all on the heels of everything aforementioned—while still dealing with a chronic mental health condition.
Given what I wrote at the beginning of this post, I had the most profound spiritual connection I’ve ever had in my entire life. I felt God within me. I have had His presence over me. I feel Him talking to me, and I was fired up for Him. I was fired up to tell people about Him. I was fired up to finish my memoir site. And then what happened? I was attacked from all directions—by my wife, by my family, by my best friend, by the demons that are manipulating the situation or whatever it may be—with the hospitalizations and the ending of that going bad, and then IOP, and then everything else. It just feels like the moment I connected spiritually, I’ve been attacked to a degree that I’ve never experienced in my life.
It’s quite interesting, and I pray to God right now that this lesson is over and that I can build from this—for fortitude, gain stability, gain momentum, and live for His glory only.