Every January, we are asked to initiate, accelerate, and reinvent ourselves—just as the natural world enters a season of dormancy. This essay explores what happens when we mistake winter for failure, and why endurance, conservation, and self-respect may be the real work of this time of year.

True healing doesn’t happen in comfort. Just as Tolkien’s One Ring can only be unmade in the fire that forged it, our deepest wounds can only be transformed when therapy brings us back into the emotional heat where our pathogenic beliefs were born. Rupture isn’t a setback—it’s the doorway.

Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story offers more than horror—it reveals the unbearable bind between love, dependency, and annihilation. This piece examines the series’ portrayal of Gein through a psychodynamic lens, tracing how engulfment, idealization, and identification turned filial devotion into true crime’s most haunting pathology.

We imagine the “good” therapy session as smooth, calm, and comforting. But what if the moments that feel hardest — when tension rises, when connection falters — are the ones that hold the greatest power to transform?

Real healing doesn’t come from avoiding the hard places—it comes from entering them with care and courage. We descend not to stay there, but to return changed. We descend to ascend.