What if Everything You Think About Love, Dating, Sex and Relationships Was Wrong?

What if I told you that everything that you think about love, dating, sex and relationships was wrong? Well, maybe not wrong, but what if I told you that the things that you've been taught throughout the course of your life lead you down the path of who it is that you become, not only in your relationships, but in your life, the way that you have a proclivity towards certain sexual acts or kinks, the way that you think about dating, the way you think about relationships, and most importantly, how you either accept or reject love.

I'm Michael Anthony. I am an author, a speaker, and a coach. And for over a decade, I've helped thousands of people in their trauma transformation journey. And the reason that I'm creating this channel and this feed, and this podcast and all of the things that this is called Unbroken Love, is because I wanna help people understand the path to actually being able to be loved in my journey. Arguably, it's the hardest thing that I've ever had to do to learn how to accept that other people could care for me to be able to say yes and no to the things that I was into, to understand the social dynamics of dating, and most importantly, how to show up in a relationship when I'm actually in one.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. In fact, name it. I've done it from the worst things you can imagine to the greatest things from being a liar and a cheater, God's honest truth to someone who made a decision and declaration to never walk that path again.

I've written quite a few books, had millions of downloads on my podcast, Think Unbroken. I've even been on billboards in Times Square twice, and what I can tell you about my life as a man who is navigating the social construct, that is the world we live in today, is that like you, I'm learning. And my hope, my mission, and my goal with Unbroken Love is to also help you learn and even unlearn a lot of the things that have led you to where you are today and your romantic, intimate, and otherwise relationships.

Who is Michael Anthony?

But before I jump into all of that, I want to tell you a little bit more about who I am and why I decided to do this. In order to do that, I have to tell you about my background, my origin story, my Batman coming to story, if you will. Now, I won't go into the full depth 'cause we'd be here all year, but I want to give you some context so that you understand why I do what I do today.

So I was born in 1985 in a little small town called Indianapolis, Indiana, to a mother who was a drug addict and alcoholic. In fact, she actually cut off my right index finger when I was just four years old. So you can see multiple skin grafts, multiple discolorations, lots of surgery, a lot of, not only stigma, but embarrassment and shame came with that at a young age.

She married my stepfather, super abusive. The kind of guy you pray is never your stepfather, and to this day, I've never met my actual birth father. So you can see so much of what I understood about love started off on the wrong foot. Love to me, felt like something that constantly had to be earned. Love felt to me like something that if I wasn't always being someone else, I would never be seen or valued for who I was.

And so you learn how to effectively become a chameleon to get the very thing that we need more than anything. And Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after safety and security, we look at things like being yourself, self-actualization, love, and ultimately really, if you can ever get there, that place called Enlightenment.

The Teen Years

Now, when I went through my teens, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was and who it was that I was, and who I am and what I've taken from that and what I've taken from all of the lessons that I learned in my teens were that if you are not already some kind of popular kid or successful with successful parents, if you aren't a star athlete or if you aren't super attractive, you're going to have a really hard time dating, which, and you know, I think for a lot of high school kids, that was very true of me and my story.

Um, even though I was a four star athlete, and even though I was fairly popular in school, which is a weird thing to say, I still struggled deeply with talking to women. Girls. I mean, I guess at that age we're, we're kind of not there yet. But the thing that I realized at a very young age was if I didn't learn how to become a man, girls would never like me. I don't even know how I had a girlfriend in high school to tell you the truth.

And so after high school, I'm in this really weird, awkward stage where I made the decision to go and chase money. And I did that. And I did it very successfully. And the downside about money, and you hear people say this all the time, is it really exposes who you are. So it showed the world who I was. And I was this guy who was lost, who was hurt, who was unsettled, who was a chameleon. And probably more than anything, I was a guy who didn't know at all how to say no.

I could not be a more codependent yes man, people pleaser. And that came from childhood. One of the things that I've got to explore with thousands of clients over the years is how to let go of those childhood embedment and indoctrinations to ultimately be able to stand on your own two feet and figure out who you are.

Rock Bottom at 25

So inevitably, because this is the way that the world works, I had a rock bottom when I was 25. I was 350 pounds, smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep. I was high from the moment I woke up to the moment that I went to bed. I was cheating on my girlfriend. I was hooking up with so many people that I lost count. I was in crippling debt. My car got repoed. My little brothers would not talk to me and none of my friends liked me. But I had the nicest condo in town and a really, really nice car. Well, until I got repoed.

And so my life was a bit of a disaster at 25 years old because I didn't understand what it meant, not only to be healed, but to be loved by myself or by others. And so in this rock bottom, I ran into this really intensive question and it was a question that would forever shape who I am and change my life. And that question was, what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have? And the answer was, no excuses, just results.

Now I didn't know that that question would serve me the way it did and has since that moment, because I was in this process of repeating patterns, just constantly burning down everything that I touched, rejecting every person that came close to me, sabotaging my success. And worse, I was doing self-harm. I was drinking and smoking and partying and all of these things. And in this rock bottom moment, I realized, wait a second. Maybe I can do something different here. Maybe I could show up for myself.

The Irony: I Love Love

Now, here's the irony of all of this and one of the big reasons that I wanted to walk this path and tell you this story. I love, love. I love dating. I love relationships. I love sex. I love all of those things. But what I didn't understand at such a young age were those things are not commodities to be traded. Those are things that we should value and we should cherish, but how do you understand that if you've never been taught it? And that's what my experience was.

What's really fascinating as I look back in my journey, it's weird 'cause in some capacity, I almost feel like destined to be talking about this at a deeper level. A few reasons. One, I love romantic comedies. In fact, they are my favorite genre of movie, and I know that they are geared, generally speaking towards women, but I'm a romantic at heart. I can't change that.

I remember the first time that I saw Vampire in Brooklyn when I was like nine years old, and that movie actually shaped me in a lot of ways, some good ways, some bad ways. And in fact, because of that movie I actually wrote at a very young age, this is God's honest truth. I wrote a vampire romantic comedy. I'm pretty sure it was probably just a vampire in Brooklyn, but I did it anyway.

And I would read books about love and sex at a very young age, maybe too young to tell you the truth, but I was always fascinated by it. I wanted to understand it more deeply, and I've always loved romantic music. In fact, if you go look at a lot of the music that I listened to, everything from pop rock to R and B to hip hop, it tends to be something geared more towards love. Now, of course, if I'm hitting the gym, you better believe I'm listening to DMX or Tool, but that's another story for another day.

From Corporate to Wedding Photographer

I found myself really in this interesting place in my mid twenties because I left my corporate job and I became an international award-winning destination wedding photographer. Now I realize that is a massive mouthful, but it's just true and I photographed dozens and dozens and dozens of weddings.

And the one thing that I kept running into when I would show up to weddings, 'cause I'm six foot four covered in tattoos, I would have people ask me, you're the wedding photographer, which by all stretches of the imagination, you would never think that you would see a guy like me walking into your wedding day to take photos. But it was something that I loved because I'd been a photographer since I was 10 years old.

Even in the chaos of my childhood, my grandmother was obsessed with cameras and she gave me one on really the only field trip I ever took to school, which was to Washington, DC and she gave me three roll of film and she told me, Hey, when these run out, that's all you have. And I fell in love with it immediately probably 'cause she was in love with it and it brought me close to her because trust me, we had an incredibly tumultuous relationship.

But all of the things that I experienced in my teens and in my twenties had kind of laid this interesting foundation where I brought my business acumen into this photography industry. And I went from unknown to being in magazines and being on television and doing a whole lot of really cool things with that.

The Painful Contradiction

And then throughout the course of this rock bottom, the irony of all of it, and it's so weird to tell this story because I feel so incredibly removed from it, because this was an experience that at this point was over 15 years ago, is that I am going and shooting these weddings and these engagements and these elopements and traveling the world and doing all these really cool things while I am in a horribly toxic relationship. Well, I'm literally dating someone who is effectively my mother.

That's a conversation that we're gonna get into way later, but the reason that some of you are having such a hard time is you're dating your mother or your father. They just happened to be in a different body. And so that was like this really crazy moment where I came to the realization, the irony of, wow, I'm shooting people's happiest moments, and then I'm going home and I'm miserable. In literally the worst relationship to that point, and since now, luckily because of doing the work, something we're going to get into, I haven't been in a relationship even remotely close to that since.

I have definitely made mistakes. A lot of mistakes that I hope to teach you about that we'll maybe give you permission to one, forgive yourself and two to learn to not do it again. You know, there is the old adage that people say, once a cheater, always a cheater. I just don't believe that because at some point, if you are willing to raise your standard, everything around you changes. 'Cause I can say that with both truth and with knowing.

Moving to Portland: The Decision That Changed Everything

So I'm in this moment. I'm looking at my life. I'm having rock bottom 350 pounds. The irony of being a photographer, nothing is working. And I had that moment of being like, okay, change your life. The process of changing my life I never would've imagined would lead down this path of what I call the Think Unbroken era. And this was and has been most of the last decade of my life.

I moved to Portland, Oregon when I was 29 because I knew that if I did not leave Indiana, I was going to die. And I mean that like in a very literal sense because I was on this path to ultimate self-destruction, even though I'd been doing a little bit of the work, it wasn't deep enough and nobody really understood. Then one day I found a therapist who was in Portland, and his story mimicked mine, and I was really, really fascinated by him, and I made this decision to call him, which was terrifying.

And I'll tell you this, you know more about me in 15 minutes than people who knew me my entire life. I hid everything. I kept it under the rug, I kept it shallow. I couldn't touch it, and it was eroding me. It was like eating me alive. Eventually it started to come up to this boiling point where I recognized that if I didn't address this, everything in my life was gonna be over because, well, my life might be.

So I pick up the phone and I call this guy and I say, Hey, tell me about your life. Tell me about why you do what you do. He tells me, and I'm like, you're the guy for me. I know that you can help me. Do you do Skype calls? Now, this is again, 15 year, well, excuse me, at this point, this would've been 11, almost 12 years ago. We didn't have Zoom, we didn't have Google meets iPhone video chat wasn't really a thing. And he says, no, I only do in person.

And that was a really interesting moment for me because I had to make a decision. And the decision was, well, do I move to Portland, Oregon or do I try to find somebody here in Indiana? The hard part about Indiana is that I had tried and I tried and I tried and I tried. I could not find the right person.

So I go to Portland, Oregon, I make the decision, and it was a very difficult decision, but it shaped everything that would be next. And one of the things that I hope that you'll learn through your time with me here is how your individual decisions actually shape the greater whole of your experience of life.

The Leap of Faith

So I sit down with my girlfriend. I effectively tell her everything. I sit down with my brothers, I tell them everything. I sit down with my friends, I tell them everything, and I leave everyone with this. Next week I'm moving to Portland, and this is a crazy thing to do by the way, because at this moment, not only am I in debt still and my car had got repoed, I only have $500 to my name. I have nowhere to live and I don't know a soul in Oregon. Not a single person. I'd only been there one other time, but I got a rental car. I packed it with what little bit of things that I had, and I just went for it.

I drove across the country with no plan, terrified, just knowing that on Tuesday I had an appointment with this guy who I thought could change my life. On Monday, the rental car had to be back and I had no money and nowhere to live. And I said, well, what's the worst that could happen? And so I did it. I went for it. I went out there. That singular decision shaped and changed the way that my life has unfolded ever since.

The Think Unbroken Era

This Think Unbroken era has been really fascinating for a lot of different reasons. One is because I've gotten a amazing benefit of coaching over 3000 people through their trauma healing journey. And on that journey, all of these people at some point come to me and talk about dating relationships, sex and love. And I found that in those conversations, those were my favorite areas to help people not only like heal trauma around, but also learn how to be more assertive and to be more educated and to make more intelligent decisions. And I'm fascinated by it every single time that I would have these conversations like, oh, I love this. This lights me up, it fires me up. I really enjoy being in this space.

And so in that time, I helped coach over these 3000 clients. I've written multiple books, one of which became a bestselling book called Think Unbroken. I have a podcast called Think Unbroken, that's had millions of downloads. In fact, just the other week, um, I was lucky enough to find out we beat out some of the best podcasters in the world, in the top 10 rankings of mental health podcast, and that fills me up.

And I've been on billboards in Times Square, spoken on huge stages, made a ton of friends, and in the process also lost myself. And that's the thing that nobody talks about in this industry. When you're a coach, when you're a therapist, when you're whatever, you get caught up, you get lost in the fame, in the money, in the notoriety. And that happened to me.

Getting Lost in the Success

I got so focused on helping other people that I forgot why I did this to begin with. I got so focused on the money. I forgot why I began this to begin with. I got so lost on standing on stages that I forgot why I began this. And that company has transitioned where if you're watching this now, it means it's not really a thing. I mean, some of this stuff is still there 'cause obviously, but it's time to move forward.

I sacrifice so much and the lessons that I learned in that are wild to me. I lost the woman of my dreams, arguably the woman I should, I'll use the word, should subjectively here, be married to, 'cause I made mistakes along the way. I lost friendships because I didn't know how to handle what was happening around me. I got to have really cool experiences like flying in private jets and wearing $2,000 shoes and $4,000 custom suits and people shaking my hand and taking pictures with me and wanting autographs.

And in all of that, I lost myself. I lost all of me 'cause I stopped caring about the thing that brought me here and I realized that I was just at some point, keeping up with the Joneses, and you hear this a lot from people who are in the mental health space, who are coaches, who are therapists, who are influencers. We all say the same. They're all like, Hey, don't get caught up. Don't get lost. It's not about the fame and the fortune and the money. It's about the service.

And I just, I got lost in it and I can't hide that. And I won't hide it. And I won't lie about it. I got lost and I got lost in it 'cause to tell you the truth, it felt good to be seen at that level. It felt good to be on billboards in Times Square. It felt good to have people ask me for my autograph at basketball games and sometimes in bathrooms at airports, which I always thought was kind of strange, but it, what didn't feel good was all the losses.

It didn't feel good to put the work before myself, to put the work before my people, to put the work before my love, to put the work before sex sometimes. Holy crap. That's whole again, there's a lot of stories we're gonna tell at a later time, but the truth is, I lost myself in seeking. I didn't know who the fuck I was anymore. I just kept staring in the mirror and being like, what am I doing this for? Why is it the accolades or is it to help people?

The Realizations

And I realized a couple of things over the years that made a lot of sense about this journey. One is I burned myself out. There's just no better way to phrase it. Like I just overextended ad nauseam. And secondly, I was in a paradox because I was so good at helping everyone else that I forgot to help myself, and that ended up in this experience of taking basically the last year and a half off and spending a lot of time on myself and getting grounded and trying to understand what I want next, and not only what I want next, but what I want in forever, and not getting lost again, and being more grounded in my friendships and my relationships with my community.

And I had this bit of an awakening, and it's the thing nobody wants to talk about because I'll tell you this. Behind the scenes in that green room, behind the curtains, before we go on air, before we walk on stage, before we are on television, there's a whole collective of people like me who are the speakers, who are the authors, who are the podcast hosts and the coaches, and they are suffering hard. They don't know who to turn to, and I didn't either.

And so if anything, I just wanna shed a little light on it. Like I started coaching to help people, and even in having a coach and even in having a therapist, I still got lost in all of it. But the amazing thing that's happened, especially with the break of the last couple of years almost, is I now have the space and the freedom to create again.

Why Relationships Matter Most

What I find so interesting about this journey is that the art for me is the creating, it's the podcast, it's the coaching, it's the writing, the books, and I realized like every single person that I was coaching, they all needed help in this one area because it's ultimately our relationships that make us human.

It also required me to take this really intensive personal revelation and go and look in the mirror again and ask myself like, how healed am I? How much work have I really done? I can tell you financially it's about half a million dollars worth of work. How much success and fame and money do you need if you can't connect to another human being authentically and lay nakedly with them and express who you are? Is it worth it?

And then it was like, okay, cool. What about the sabotage? What about the places in your life where you didn't show up, where you didn't play all out, where you fell back into old behavior patterns and looking in this mirror made me have to face the truth about healing. That is the nomenclature for everything that I've built the last decade on, and it's that no matter how much work you do, if you sign on the dotted line that you want to become the best version of you, there's never going to be a day that it ends.

And that's true for me. As I sit here and share this conversation with you, like I feel like I'm just beginning and not beginning again or beginning over, but beginning like this is the start. This is the way that I felt. It's interesting 'cause I was having this conversation with my best friend the other day. This is how I felt when I started thinking Broken, when I was like, you know what? I want to go help these people. This is how I felt. I felt alive. I felt called. I felt like this is the thing that I'm here to do and I'm going to be more vulnerable, more honest, more forthright, sometimes very uncomfortably so, because I don't wanna hold anything back.

The People Who Inspired Me

There's a few people that have inspired me to go deeper into this. Then I think, that have sat with me, deeply, not in person, but through their own work to feel like I really have my head wrapped around what's next. And so if you're willing to walk this path with me over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, you'll see the plan that I have laid out. And I'm actually going to share the plan with you because I believe in not only accountability, but I believe in the idea that I'll come back and look at this video in 40 years on my deathbed and feel really happy about the work in a different way than I felt happy about the work leading up till now.

And so when I think about some of these people, Arthur Brooks, amazing, amazing book called Strength The Strength, everyone should read this. Mark Manson, the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, like really, really needed this book over the course of the last two years. Neil Strauss wrote the Truth. Yo, if you are suffering about your sexuality and your dating and your relationships, go and read the truth. It will change your life. Miguel Diaz like, go, excuse me, go and read the four agreements.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on. But those men and women alike because, excuse me, I mean, Brene Brown, I mean, come on, daring Greatly. Wow. Unbelievable. An unbelievable read Mel Robbins Five Second Rule. Yes, thank you. I mean, literally every book Oprah's ever written, you know, the list goes on and on. So this isn't about books, but you know, the last year and a half have been reading a lot more than usual, just creating and recreating this space that I'm in.

What Is Unbroken Love Really About?

And so this brings me to the next act. This brings me to the moment that we are here for that, I am here for that. If you're watching 20 ish minutes in, thank you for being here with me. Also, if you're listening, and that's about what is unbroken love really about.

My vision for this is that I want to be the go-to person when it comes to dating relationships, sex and love. Across the board, those four pillars to go deep about it. This is actually inspired by something that I've never shared publicly before. When I was young, I found out about the Kinsey Institute, so I grew up in Indiana. At IU there's a place called McKinsey Institute where they study and research human sexuality. I became obsessed with it. I did everything in my power to try to go to that school when I was 18 years old.

I didn't graduate high school and I don't have any kind of a degree, so I knew they weren't going to let me in. But still, even to this day, I think about it all the time, like, wow, I've spent a lot of time getting certified in a lot of different areas of mental health. In fact, I have over 40 certifications. I've worked with some of the greatest minds in the world, but I've always felt called to this thing about human sexuality.

So one of the really exciting things I'm working on right now is going back to zero and going to figure out how to get into that school, which I'm, or institute I should say, which I'm super excited about because I wanna be the go-to person. I wanna help millions of people, not even necessarily only people who had trauma, which I would argue 95% of people have. If you go look at the ACE survey, the Adverse Childhood Experiences survey, I think it will probably prove that to be true, but I want to be a bestselling author again. A New York Times bestselling author. I wanna write the greatest book about sex, love, dating, and relationships that's ever been written. Something that if people pick up, it'll change their life forever.

Building a Community

I wanna create a community of millions of people who have healed the thing inside of them. 'Cause here's the truth that underlies all of this. The success in dating, sex, relationships, and love, it starts with you. It starts with you. That's the craziest thing about it. We've been led to believe it's our partner. It's society, it's everybody else. Nope, it's you. We have to work on you first and and I want to do this by creating a massive community.

So in the description of this video or on YouTube or wherever you're listening, there is a link to come and join our community. It's free. Yes. It's free. I mean, that. Because I want to be able to be of service and ultimately, here's the way I look at it. I'm being selfish also, because every time that I've had to force myself into a new state of learning, it's raised the standard of who I am, and I want to have the best relationship of my life, the best sex of my life, the best love of my life.

In the same way that the trauma journey really transformed for me because of all of the work, all of the certification, all of the coaching, I believe that's gonna happen here as well. And so the thing that I keep thinking about is like, how is this different? Well, one, I'm not going to hold back. I'm going to tell you real stories.

The Stories I'm Going to Tell

And in fact, it's funny, I made a list, this isn't in my script for this, but I'm gonna share some of my list real quick. Just some crazy things that I'm going to talk about. These are just bullet point titles. So here's a handful that just pop out as I go through this.

Learning to say no. Getting rejected at a nightclub on my 21st birthday, going to swinger clubs, the books that changed my love life, learning and mastering being a pickup artist. That's real unlearning and un mastering. How to be a pickup artist. Dating apps. The Salt Lake City swinger party. The mountain lion breakup, the power of a hippie drug fueled orgy in Portland and the secret stripper pole cam.

Those are just some of the things that I'm going to talk about. And so this is also going to be in fold, not only my stories, but I'm going to give advice as well and talk about the things that we should consider when dating and in relationships and how to use dating apps and how to meet people and approach them in person and social dynamics and polarity and masculine energy and feminine energy and who does this and who does that? And what is right and what is wrong, and what is not, and what is in between.

But ultimately, how to help you have the unbroken love that you seek, because at the end of the day, I'm seeking the same thing in so many ways, and I know that by being a proxy for the education and helping you, that the karma energies of the world will return that to me. And so that's really exciting to me because I've seen karma play out over and over and over again. And in fact, sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. We will get into some amazing stories.

My Promise to You

Here's my number one promise to you. The only promise I'm going to make to you is just, I'm gonna tell you the truth. It's going to be gritty and grimy and dusty, and dirty, and wet and fun and exciting and kinky and weird, and all of the things that everyone is afraid to talk about. I'm just gonna lay it out here because guess what? We're gonna die. So who gives a shit?

And people will tell me that I watch on a long enough timeline. People will tell me I'm wrong. People will tell me I shouldn't talk about these things. People will tell me all the things about who I should be, and I'm going to keep going. 'Cause I have a vision of helping millions and millions of people heal all of the parts of themselves, understand the social dynamics, and most importantly, get to this place where they can actually ask for who, I wanna phrase it like this. They can get to a place that they can actually ask for what they want.

The Four Major Pillars

And there's four major pillars that we're gonna talk about throughout the course of all of this. We're gonna talk about dating in the modern world. This is the apps ghosting, texting, sexting, first dates, all of the chaos of it. We're gonna talk about sex and intimacy. The good, the bad. Then between the stuff people want to talk about the stuff that they don't, the messy and the fun and the exciting.

And then finally, personal growth, because guess what? You can't be with other people if you can't be with yourself. And so we're going to talk, we're gonna get raw, we're gonna get real. I'm gonna share. And you know, at the end of the day, I'm hoping more so than anything that you just get value out of this. I don't have an agenda other than to help. That's it. That's all I wanna do. That's all I care about.

A Little Bit About Me

So I'll share just 'cause I think it's fun. A little bit about me, just so you know who I am, and I probably clip this up into some smaller clips as well. But I am, I'm a guy who believes in love. I'm a guy who believes in fun sex. I'm a guy who believes that dating should be enjoyable, and I'm ultimately a guy who loves a relationship even though I've only been in a couple in the last decade. When I'm in them, they're amazing and they bring me joy.

I'm also fueled by coffee and gummy bears. To say that I'm a coffee addict would be an understatement. I probably need to go to like coffee anonymous. I love tattoos. I love rom-coms. If you wanna talk to me about coming to America, Forgetting the Sarah Marshall or Garden State, I'm your guy. I've practiced yoga for 17 years and done martial arts since I was 10 years old. I've traveled over 50 countries. I've lived in over 12, and honestly, I'm fascinated by humans. I'm a human and I'm like you.

And at the end of the day, my hope is that you take away something from every interaction we have together and that it makes you different in some way. And that's it. That's a lot. I know that's a ton to throw at you if you watch this far. Thank you. I love you. Please subscribe, comment, like, share all of those things.

And I'll tell you this. I don't have all the answers. I probably am not going to be right about a lot of the things that I talk about, but I'm going to do my best. And in the places I make a mistake, I'll admit it. And in the places that I knock it outta the park, I will celebrate it and I'll celebrate you, and I will honor you and I will usher you in to the unbroken love that you deserve.

So my friend, thank you for being here. Until next time, take care of yourself. Take care of each other, and be unbroken. I'll see you.