About LT Vale

I didn't lose everything in my divorce. I just lost the most important things.

My identity. My role as a husband. The daily access to my kids that I had taken for granted. The version of myself I had built over years inside a marriage that, toward the end, had become something I didn't recognize.

I've spent 24 years in military and federal service. I deployed to Kosovo and Afghanistan. I've worked alongside protective security teams, managed critical infrastructure risk, advised on emergency preparedness. I am, professionally, someone trained to remain functional under pressure.

None of that prepared me for the first morning I woke up in an apartment that wasn't a home.

I went looking for a guide. Something written for men — not generic recovery content, not female-centric self-help, not a therapist's clinical breakdown of the grief stages. Something honest about the actual experience of being a man who has lost his family structure and doesn't know who he is without it.

I couldn't find it. So I wrote it.

Divorce and Rediscovery is a five-part framework built from that search. The Fall — what the first collapse actually feels like and how to survive it. Identity — rebuilding who you are when the role that defined you is gone. Grounding — the physical and mental tools that create stability when everything else is shifting. Reconnecting — learning to reach back out to the world. The Rebirth — not going back to who you were, but becoming someone you recognize.

Each part comes with worksheets and tools, because insight without action is just grief with better vocabulary.

I'm LT Vale. I'm currently serving as a Protective Security Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security. I wrote this book because I needed it, and because no man should have to rebuild alone.

If you're reading this at 2am wondering who you are without your marriage — this is for you.