Start Here
If you’ve just found Healing the Layers, welcome. I’m not sure there is a perfectly neat way to explain what this place is anymore.
For me though, I think that’s fitting. Because it began with my body. With uncontrollable eczema, chronic illness, and Topical Steroid Withdrawal (TSW). It started with years spent trying to undestand what was happening to me, how to make it stop, and how to get my life back.
But the longer I continued on my healing journey (and I don’t just mean trying to have “perfect” skin), the harder it became to tell where one thing ended and another began. My body itself led me to grief that had been suppressed my whole life. Grief led me to trauma. And trauma led me back to a little girl in Bosnia trying to survive a war she was too young to understand.
Somehow, as I continued on the spiral that is healing, all of that kept leading me into more and more questions. About relationships, identity, sensitivity, spirituality, meaning, and what it even means to actually heal.
For a long time, I thought I kept changing the subject. I listened to “gurus” online tell me to pick a niche and stick with it. But I couldn’t. It’s not the way my mind works, and it’s not the way my healing journey has been.
Now, I don’t think I was changing the subject at all
That realization became Healing the Layers.
I’m Nina. I’m a writer, a child of war, a trauma survivor, a highly sensitive person, and someone who has spent over twelve years living through Topical Steroid Withdrawal. None of those things exist separately inside of me. And neither does healing.
The physical touches the emotional. The emotional changes the stories we tell ourselves. Those stories shape how we relate to ourselves, other people, our bodies, and whatever we believe about being alive.
If you pull one thread long enough… to stay curious, to stay in the uncertainty, and to not grasp at an answer or conclusion, eventually, you find another. That’s mostly what I do here. I follow the threads. Sometimes they begin with my skin. Sometimes with something my husband said or did. Sometimes with war, medicine, advocacy, a pattern I’ve repeated for twenty years, or the true thing underneath all of those – a question I can’t leave alone. I write until I find what’s underneath it.
There is a framework growing with this work, too, which has expanded into something I never dreamed or thought of creating. Four layers: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, along with thresholds, relationships, and the different ways we meet what is happening to us.
But I don’t believe healing is a system you can master. And to be honest, I’m not interested in mastering it. I’m interested in listening more and grasping less. In more curiousity about what happens when we stop treating every uncomfortable part of ourselves as a problem to solve.
I don’t write from the other side of healing. I’m still in it. This is where my body of work continues to grow as I go through the different layers, thresholds, relationships. If something here helps you recognize a piece of your own life, I hope you’ll follow it. You don’t need to understand it all first. I didn’t. And I still don’t. just listen and feel the tug… and see where it takes you.
Pick up a thread
You don’t need to start at the beginning. I’m not sure there is one for everyone anyway. Start with whatever feels closest to where you are right now.
If your body has taken over the room – Learning to Live Inside it
For the strange and utterly exhausting reality of living in a body that demands your constant attention – and learning how to live alongside it, instead of waiting for it to disappear.
If you’re wondering who you are after survival – Coming Back for Her
For the parts of us that get buried underneath surviving, adapting, enduring, and becoming who we needed to be.
If you keep meeting the same thing in different forms – Healing the Layers Framework
This is where the map underneath much of my writing starts to take shape.. the layers, thresholds, and relationships I kept finding in my own life before I even had names for them or could put them into language.
If you want to know where all of this began – Twelve Years
The story of over twelve years of Topical Steroid Withdrawal (TSW), yes. But also when healing stopped meaning getting my old life back.
Or maybe you don’t know what thread you’re holding yet.
That’s okay too.
Sometimes all we know is that something is asking for our attention.
Where Am I?
One of the things I wasn’t prepared for in my own healing was how disorienting it would be.
Sometimes I knew something was changing, but I couldn’t tell where I was anymore. The old ways I measured progress stopped making sense. I wasn’t where I had been, but I didn’t know where I was going either.
I made my Where Am I? guide from repeatedly encountering that on my healing journey for over 12 years.
I think of it like a compass, not so much a map. A map says there is a route, but a compass just helps you orient yourself.
The guide moves through the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual layers with questions that help you notice what feels loudest right now, what might be underneath it, and what may be asking for your attention.
It won’t tell you where you should go next.
That part is yours.
But sometimes knowing where you are is enough to take the next small and honest step.