🧩 The Cost of Giving It Away: Why Agency Is Non-Negotiable in Healing
Healing doesn’t happen when we hand over the pen and wait for someone else to write our story. Even if the pain isn’t your fault, reclaiming agency gives you back the power to shape what comes next. You don’t have to stay passive, you can take the lead.
When you give away your story, you give away your power.
Healing doesn’t happen when we hand over the pen and wait for someone else to write our story.
Even if the pain isn’t your fault, reclaiming agency gives you back the power to shape what comes next.
You don’t have to stay passive, you can take the lead.
🚫 The Pain of Too Much: Why Healing Requires Saying No
In modern rehab, we often confuse more with better. But healing doesn’t happen when we add more tasks, it happens when we make space for what matters. Inspired by Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, this post invites you to say no to noise and yes to what restores agency.
In a world of more, sometimes healing starts with less.
“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”
— Greg McKeown, Essentialism
In modern rehab, we often confuse more with better.
But healing doesn’t happen when we add more tasks, it happens when we make space for what matters.
Inspired by Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, this post invites you to say no to noise and yes to what restores agency.
❓ Start With Why (In Pain)
Simon Sinek taught leaders to start with purpose. What if patients and clinicians did the same?
This piece explores how reconnecting with your why in the healing process can restore clarity, agency, and momentum — even in the middle of pain.
Pain isn’t just a problem to solve.
It’s a signal, yes — but often of something deeper: disconnection from purpose, identity, or meaning.
In medicine, we often leap to what to do: the exercise, the modality, the pill, the injection, the surgery.
But what if the most important healing question isn’t what or how…
—it’s why?
This piece explores how the framework made famous by Simon Sinek — “Start With Why” — applies just as powerfully to healing as it does to leadership.
It asks:
• Why do you want to heal?
• What would feeling better allow you to do, be, or reconnect with?
• And is your care aligned with that purpose — or pulling you further away?
This Wondering offers a way to re-anchor healing in meaning, and introduces the “Healing North Star” tool to help clarify and reclaim your why.
✅ Are My Incentives Aligned with Their Agency?
You care. You want to help.
But in a system driven by productivity and compliance, even well-meaning clinicians can find themselves nudged away from what matters most: the patient’s agency.
This piece challenges you to pause and reflect — not just on what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it… and who it’s really serving.
It introduces an insight about realigning care with conscience — especially in moments of burnout, frustration, or routine.
You’re doing your best to help, but the system has its own agenda.
Sometimes, healing gets quietly replaced with productivity.
Agency gets overshadowed by compliance.
Care becomes protocol-driven instead of person-centered.
This Wondering invites a pause, a moment to reflect not just on what you’re doing, but why.
And who benefits from your current approach.
Because the truth is: misaligned incentives can sabotage even the best intentions.
This is a call to realign your practice with what matters most: their agency, and your integrity.
🧰📈 Reclaiming Work as a Health Outcome
What if getting back to work wasn’t the end of healing, but part of it? Work isn’t just economic. It’s emotional, social, and deeply tied to our identity. This piece rethinks how “return to work” can be reframed as a therapeutic milestone, not a discharge note.
Work isn’t just what we do — it’s where our identity, movement, and meaning often live. But when pain enters the picture, we tend to treat work as a risk factor instead of a recovery milestone.
What if we flipped the frame?
What if getting back to work is healing?
This piece explores how reclaiming meaningful work — not just as employment, but as purpose — could become one of the most powerful, overlooked outcomes in modern pain care.
🗽The Other Kind of Independence
“This July 4th, beyond the fireworks, lies a deeper freedom: freedom from pain, freedom of choice, freedom to reclaim your story. Independence isn’t just national—it’s personal.”
This July 4th, as fireworks explode, consider a different kind of independence—the one born in your body, your breath, your choices.
Independence isn’t just a national story. It’s personal:
Pain steals agency. It narrows your world and rewrites your story.
Claiming agency is an act of healing. It’s saying, “My pain doesn’t define me.”
Independence isn’t isolation. It’s the freedom to rest, move, ask for help, define recovery on your terms.
Small rebellions matter. A deeper breath. A step you thought you couldn’t take. A moment you reclaim.
This week, let your own quiet firework explode in your body. A declaration: I still choose.
What does independence look like on your healing path?
🔁 The Scapegoating of Pain: How Medicine, Meaning, and Identity Collide
When pain defies simple explanations, we often search for someone—or something—to blame. In medicine, that blame often lands on the patient’s own body. This piece explores how modern healthcare unconsciously echoes ancient scapegoating rituals, turning ambiguous pain into mechanical diagnoses and shrinking identities around fear. But there’s another way: one that restores meaning, agency, and the full complexity of what it means to hurt—and to heal.
When pain shows up without a clear cause, we panic — and medicine often reaches for easy scapegoats. “Bone on bone.” “Degeneration.” “Instability.” These labels offer comfort through certainty, but they can quietly erode a person’s confidence, identity, and sense of agency. We trade complexity for simplicity, and in doing so, the body becomes the villain.
But what if pain isn’t a crime scene… and the body isn’t the criminal?
This post explores how the search for answers in pain care mirrors ancient scapegoating rituals, where uncertainty is offloaded onto something we can name — even if it’s wrong. It challenges the biomechanical myths still dominant in medicine and offers a new path: one that honors complexity, restores trust, and rewrites the story from “I am broken” to “I am adapting.”