The Easy Healing Edition · July 27, 2026
Where the work meets the proof.
“What does a grieving man do when what I call easy healing won’t cut it?”
The Thought
I’ve been chewing on this idea I’m calling easy healing and I can’t get it out of my head. And the first place my head went was my dad. If he was on duty when you got hurt, you got the same two moves every time.
If you were sick it was do you want some ice cream or some ginger ale. If you were bleeding it was Dettol and a Band-Aid. That was the whole kit. And I swear if I’d come home carrying my left arm......Dad, this fell off......he’d have poured the Dettol on it, stuck a Band-Aid over it, and asked me if I wanted ice cream.
He wasn’t a bad dad. He just didn’t have a lot of moves. Some is good, more is better, don’t do that again, do you want some ice cream. That was it. Easy healing, man.
And for a scraped knee that’s the right call. But what if there’s a sliver in there. What if the wound needs scrubbing. What if the bone needs setting. Easy healing might get you through the day and never touch what’s actually wrong.
The trouble is you grow up and the wounds stop being on the outside. Nobody hands you a new kit when that happens. You just keep reaching into the same one, because it’s the only one you’ve got.
I lost my best friend, my dad, my marriage and most of my friends inside the same year, and I was so desperate to have someone, anyone, hear me. I found her. Sandra. I spent most of our nights crying and confessing with her hand on my heart, and I can see now how broken I was and how alone I was after losing everything all at once.
I wasn’t drowning in those tears like I thought I was. I was washing out years and years of grief. I’d been a moving target my whole life and I finally stood still and let it all come over me. Like DiCaprio at the front of my own Titanic, letting it go over me to see if I could swim.
I cared for her. The whole situation, hers and mine combined, was never going to last. And it’s still one of the most vulnerable, beautiful, honest things I’ve ever done with a woman. She got the whole thing. Too much of it, likely. It crushed her.
So I didn’t do easy healing. I did the hard version, and I still got it wrong, because I handed all of it to one person.
Eight months on I’ve built the room. Weekly counselling, new friends who are older and wiser and more heart aligned, writing every day, journalling, singing, writing songs, all of it in honour of my own feelings. Better self care. And I’m still lonely some days. But it’s a different lonely, and I know what to do with this one.
So Leo, what does a grieving man do when easy healing won’t cut it?
— Jhöl
Why I’m telling you this. I’m not standing here as the guy who figured it out. I’m the guy who did the hard version alone and still got it wrong, and only worked out what he’d done years later. If somebody had put words to it for me back then I’d have used them, so here they are.
Brother, you didn’t skip the grief. You stood still in the year most men run, and it still went sideways, because you handed the whole load to one woman who never signed up to carry a fire, a lake, and eleven other men. The research has names for both halves of that, and neither one makes you the villain.
— Leo
The Two Things
✱1
The rush toward someone new isn’t really about someone new.
Researchers looked at 201 people coming out of serious relationships, and men were more likely to be the ones in a rebound. What predicted it wasn’t lust, it was low social support......having nobody else to turn to. In the researchers’ own words it worked as a distraction from the old attachment and also as a source of support, which means he wasn’t only running from something, he was going somewhere to get held.
Shimek, C., & Bello, R. (2014). “Coping with Break-Ups: Rebound Relationships and Gender Socialization.” Social Sciences, 3(1), 24–43. DOI: 10.3390/socsci3010024.
MEDIUM
✱2
The first year is when the Band-Aid costs you the most.
291 people who’d lost someone were measured on how much they were avoiding it, then measured again a year later, and the avoiding predicted worse grief, worse depression and worse PTSD twelve months on. Here’s the sharp part......it only held for the people still inside their first year. The window where the quick patch costs you the most is the same window where you most want to reach for it.
Boelen, P. A., & Eisma, M. C. (2015). “Anxious and depressive avoidance behavior in post-loss psychopathology: A longitudinal study.” Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 28(5), 587–600. DOI: 10.1080/10615806.2015.1004054.
HIGH
Bottom line, gentlemen: say the thing out loud to one person you trust, and let them hear the whole of it before anybody tries to fix it.
Built on Claude Sonnet 5.
AI Use
Voice-first authorship. It starts on my phone. I talk, and what comes out is the wire......the shape of the thing, bent by hand. My agents pack the clay onto it. Then I work every inch of it back down myself, and nothing goes out that I haven’t. The thinking is mine and so is the last pass on every line. Full session records on request.
