Growing Up in Chaos with Lee Greenhough

What happens when you grow up in chaos and just learn to get on with it?

In this episode, I talk with filmmaker and speaker Lee Greenhough about growing up around loss, addiction, and instability and how those early years quietly shape the choices men make later in life. Lee shares what it’s like to carry things you never dealt with, how that weight can surface through drinking, anger, or restlessness, and why change rarely comes from big moments or sudden insight.

Instead, this conversation is about responsibility, momentum, and the small decisions that slowly pull a life back on track, even when no one ever showed you how.

Lee talks candidly about losing his father at a young age, growing up with an alcoholic parent, and how unprocessed grief and trauma followed him into adulthood. He reflects on the years where drinking became the release valve, and the risk, and how close he came to losing the life he was quietly building.

Rather than presenting himself as “fixed”, Lee is clear about what actually helped: taking responsibility, putting himself in better environments, committing to work, movement, and creative outlets, and learning to challenge the constant negative voice in his own head. He explains why therapy didn’t give him the answers he needed, and why momentum, not motivation, became the thing that changed everything.

The conversation also explores creativity as a survival tool. Lee shares how writing and filmmaking became a way to process what he couldn’t talk about and why so many men abandon creative instincts they had earlier in life, often without realising the cost to their mental health.

This episode will resonate with men who:

• Grew up fast with little guidance.
• Feel functional but not settled.
• Rely on distraction, work, or alcohol to keep things contained.
• Know something needs to change, but don’t relate to advice or slogans.

There are no hacks here. No reinvention story. Just an honest account of how small decisions, repeated over time, can stop a life drifting off course, even when the starting point was far from ideal.

If you want to find out more about Lee’s films, visit his website www.greenhoughfilms.co.uk and to find out more about his speaking work, visit https://www.speakingwithlee.co.uk.