Where Wounds Live examines how trauma can surface throughout a life and explores how greater understanding, boundaries, connection, and body awareness can support the complex process of healing. How did your experiences in nursing, midwifery, and trauma-focused work shape the way you approached the book?

Everything in Where Wounds Live is filtered through hands-on experience rather than theory alone. My path went from occupational therapy into nursing, and then into midwifery, where I spent years on hospital wards and supporting women through labour. That clinical grounding taught mehow the body actually holds and releases distress, not as an abstract concept but as something I witnessed night after night. It’s why the book keeps returning to body awareness as a real tool for healing, not just a wellness buzzword.

At the same time, my own path through depression, complex PTSD, an abusive marriage, and later a chronic pain condition and profound grief meant I was living the very material I was working with clinically. Nursing gave me the medical literacy to explain what trauma does physiologically; my own breakdowns and recovery gave me the lived understanding of what it actually feels like from the inside, including the shame and isolation that so often keep people silent.

Midwifery in particular shaped how I think about vulnerability and transition. Supporting people through one of the most physically and emotionally exposed moments of their lives taught me how much healing depends on being truly seen and supported, not fixed or rushed. That’s the same principle I try to bring to the book’s approach to boundaries and connection: healing isn’t a solitary, purely cognitive process, it happens in relationship, often through the body, and often slowly.

Later work as a trauma-informed massage therapist, training other practitioners, and serving marginalised populations (including trauma survivors and people with disabilities) reinforced something the book leans on heavily: that clinical knowledge without lived understanding, or lived experience without clinical grounding, both fall short. Where Wounds Live tries to hold both at once, which is really just a reflection of how my career and my personal story ended up intertwined rather than separate.

Why is the question “What happened to this person?” so important to the philosophy behind the book, and how does that perspective change the way we might understand addiction and other coping behaviors?

That single shift in framing is really the spine of Where Wounds Live. Most of us are trained, whether by culture or by clinical habit, to ask “What’s wrong with this person?” when we encounter someone’s addiction, self-destruction, or relational chaos. That question assumes deficiency. It looks at the behaviour in isolation and treats it as the problem to be solved, which almost always leads to shame, judgement, and a kind of clinical distance that shuts people down rather than opening them up.

“What happened to this person?” does something completely different. It assumes competence rather than brokenness. It starts from the premise that whatever someone is doing now, however destructive it looks from the outside, was once the best available solution their mind and body could find to an unbearable problem. Addiction, dissociation, self-sabotage, people-pleasing, the compulsive need to be needed: none of these arise from nowhere. They’re adaptive responses to conditions that were, at some point, genuinely overwhelming, usually because the internal resources for regulating those feelings were never modelled or offered in the first place.

That reframing changes the clinical and personal encounter entirely. Instead of sitting across from someone who needs fixing, you’re sitting with someone whose system found the best solution it could to survive something unsafe. Addiction stops being a moral failure and becomes a downstream consequence of fractured bonds and unmet needs. It also opens the door to real accountability without shame: a person isn’t responsible for the trauma that happened to them, especially in childhood, but they are fully responsible for what they do with that understanding now. Curiosity, not disgust, becomes the starting point, and curiosity is what actually makes change possible, because shame just feeds the cycle it claims to be fighting.

I also lean on Gabor Maté’s thinking here, particularly his challenge to the idea of being permanently “in recovery.” If addiction obscures the self rather than destroying it, then what’s being recovered isn’t some new, healed version of a person, it’s who they always were underneath the coping strategy. That’s the heart of the book’s philosophy: the wound explains the behaviour, it doesn’t define the person.

How can trauma influence areas of life that people may not immediately connect with their past experiences, and how can understanding the origins of a behavior encourage compassion without removing personal responsibility?

One of the central ideas running through Where Wounds Live is that trauma rarely announces itself where you’d expect. Most people picture trauma’s fingerprints on the obvious things: flashbacks, anxiety, nightmares. But it shows up in far quieter, more disguised corners of a life: professional jealousy, imposter syndrome, chronic people-pleasing, perfectionism, hyper-independence, difficulty asking for help, even physical conditions like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue with no clear medical cause. The book leans on Häuser and colleagues’ finding that a striking majority of people with fibromyalgia report childhood trauma, precisely to make that point concrete: the body often carries what the mind was never allowed to say out loud.

Part of why these connections go unnoticed is that people tend to define trauma narrowly, as overt abuse or violence, and miss what the book calls “the trauma of omission.” Growing up with food, shelter, and safety but without being truly seen, soothed, or accepted for who you are can quietly wire someone toward performance-based worth, comparison-driven self-esteem, or a nervous system stuck in survival mode. Someone who thrives at work while feeling threatened by a colleague’s promotion, or who can’t stop overachieving to feel enough, is often replaying the exact emotional logic they learned as a child, just in a setting that looks nothing like childhood.

That’s exactly why the reframe matters. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” the book keeps returning to “What happened to me?” — because that question locates the behaviour’s origin in something that once made sense, rather than treating it as a character flaw. Understanding that a pattern was adaptive, that it once protected you, opens space for compassion instead of shame.

But compassion isn’t the same as excusing yourself from the work. The book is careful about this line: the wound may not have been your fault, but the healing is your responsibility. A child cannot be held accountable for how the adults around them failed to meet their needs. The adult, however, is fully responsible for what they do with that understanding now, whether that’s a workplace jealousy spiral, an addictive coping pattern, or a habit of over-functioning to earn love. Understanding origin doesn’t hand you a pass; it hands you the information you need to actually change the pattern, with self-compassion instead of self-attack as the starting point. That combination, curiosity about the past paired with ownership of the present, is what makes the healing sustainable rather than just insight without follow-through.

With such a broad collection of topics, how would you encourage readers to use the book in a way that feels manageable and relevant to them?

I didn’t write this as something meant to be read start to finish in one sitting, and I don’t think it should be used that way. The range is deliberate: trauma touches body image, addiction, relationships, professional life, grief, identity, so a single narrow lens would leave most readers’ actual experience out. But that breadth only works if people feel permission to move through it selectively rather than dutifully.

My honest advice is to treat it more like a reference than a novel. Look at the contents, notice which chapter title makes something in you sit up or wince a little, and start there. That reaction is usually information. If “Why Do We Self-Sabotage?” or “The Hidden Burden of Imposter Syndrome” catches your attention more than a chapter on grief, that’s probably where something in you is asking to be looked at right now. Other chapters can wait, or may never be relevant to your particular story at all, and that’s fine.

Each topic is written to stand on its own, with the theory and research grounding it alongside practical, concrete tools, so you’re never required to have read the previous fifty pages to get something useful out of a chapter. That structure exists specifically so the book can meet people where they are rather than demanding a particular starting point.

I’d also encourage readers to go slowly and to let themselves stop. Some of this material sits close to real pain, and pushing through a chapter that’s activating something just to “finish” isn’t the point. Healing isn’t linear, it’s more of a spiral: you may return to a chapter months later and find it lands completely differently once you’re in a different place. Using the book that way, as a companion you return to rather than a syllabus to complete, is exactly how I hope people engage with it. If even one chapter helps a reader make sense of something they’ve been carrying without a name for it, the book has done its job, whether or not they ever read the rest.