About how we lost ourselves, and the freedom to find home again
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.
Editions
Five Acts
The Traps We Call Healing moves through five acts, each one a different layer of how we relate to ourselves, our emotions, and the very idea of healing.
The first act stays close to the body, to survival and regulation, the patterns a nervous system leans on just to get through a day. These traps are the most visible ones. I recognize most of them in myself immediately: doing, struggling, wanting, controlling, all of them ways of coping dressed up as ways of living.
The second act turns inward, toward identity and self-worth, how we build a sense of value through comparison, striving, and mental effort. These traps are harder to spot, because society tends to reward them. They look like ambition. They look like intelligence. Sometimes they look exactly like growth.
The third act moves into emotion, meaning, and belonging, positivity, gratitude, money, love. Here the traps are quieter still. I use all four of these, sometimes without noticing, to manage discomfort and manufacture a feeling of safety, often at the cost of the honesty I actually needed.
The fourth act is the one I found hardest to write, because it turns the lens on healing and spirituality themselves, the language of awareness, transcendence, and self-work, and shows how easily the ego survives inside them, just in a more sophisticated disguise.
The fifth act is where I try to put the weapon down. Rather than offering another answer, it questions the belief that something was ever fundamentally wrong with us, and even the assumption that there was ever a trap to escape in the first place.
Taken together, these seventeen essays don't offer steps to follow or a program to complete. They offer a way of seeing. Not a way to fix what's broken, but a way to notice what may never have been broken at all.