The Traps We Call Healing

We run for peace by doing more. We chase freedom by controlling harder. We read our way to enlightenment, collect affirmations and routines as proof that we are finally whole, and call it development.

The Traps We Call Healing is about exactly that paradox, how easily the pursuit of healing, freedom, or self-development can become a new trap, disguised as the solution. It is not a book that promises to fix you. It promises to look at why we think anything needs to be fixed at all.

I am an economist by training and am soon to be a registered nurse, and have spent large parts of my life in boardrooms and spreadsheets. I have also, in parallel, spent just as much time in the quiet, completely alone, and in healthcare where bodies and minds meet at their most vulnerable.

The book contains seventeen essays about seventeen traps, from doing and competing to money, love and spirituality itself, all the way to the realization that the pursuit of freedom is often the last, most sophisticated trap of them all, but seventeen is never a sure thing. Within each chapter there are more traps woven in and new threads to unravel. Most of the texts move in circles rather than straight lines, the same thoughts recur, from new angles, deeper with each turn, because that is how I actually think and how I believe real insight usually emerges.

I do not believe that anyone can show another person the way to themselves. The best I can do is point to what I have seen myself, and then step aside. Some of these texts will feel obvious, others will feel uncomfortable, perhaps even provocative.

You will find several of the essays published as standalones here on the website that you can read, share and return to. The book and audiobook weave them together into a whole, with a final chapter that is just there, a kind of conclusion that needs to be read in context to fully land.

Take what resonates, and leave what doesn't.