Fällorna vi kallar läkande – Essäer

Essays on how we lose ourselves — and the freedom of finding our way home again

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

The Traps We Call Healing is about precisely that paradox, how easily the pursuit of healing, freedom, or self-development can become a new trap, disguised as the solution. It’s not a book that promises to fix you. It promises to look with you at why we believe something needs fixing in the first place.

I am an economist by training and have spent large parts of my life in boardrooms and spreadsheets. I have also, in parallel, spent just as much time in stillness, in healthcare, where bodies and minds meet at their most vulnerable, and in my own, slow work of seeing through the patterns that have governed me without my knowing it. The two worlds have rarely felt like opposites to me, rather like the same investigation seen from different angles, and this book is written from the place where they meet.

It 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 conclusive answer. Inside each chapter, more traps are woven in, threads I touch upon but never give their own space, seeds for conversations that are still ongoing within me.

Most of the texts move in circles rather than straight lines, the same thoughts return, from new angles, deeper with each turn, because that is how I actually think and how I believe true insight usually emerges, not through a single breakthrough but by going over the same ground again and again until something finally loosens.

I don't believe that anyone can show another person the way to themselves. The best I can do is to point, honestly, to what I myself have seen, and then step aside. Some of these texts will feel obvious, others will feel uncomfortable, perhaps even provocative, and I have tried to write without judging, but I have not tried to write cautiously, because some things deserve to be said directly.

You can also find several of the essays published independently here on the website, as separate texts you can read, share and return to one by one, while the book and audiobook weave them together into a whole, with a final chapter that is only there, a kind of conclusion that needs to be read in its context to fully land.

Take what resonates, and leave what doesn't. There's no rush in this. There never has been, honestly.