Why I Had to Write “The Inheritance of Patterns” 

There are books you choose to write, and then there are books that demand to be written. “The Inheritance of Patterns” falls firmly in the second category.

I never planned to expose the most painful parts “Kidnapping to Survival” of my life to strangers. I never intended to dissect my childhood trauma on paper, to analyze how being kidnapped from my biological father at age two set the stage for decades of dysfunctional relationships. Who the hell wants to do that?

But here’s the thing about patterns that control your life from the shadows—they don’t stop destroying things just because you refuse to look at them.

The Breaking Point

I was sitting in my therapist’s office, six months after discovering my wife’s affair on my 50th birthday. We’d been working through the immediate crisis—the suicidal thoughts, the crushing betrayal, the disorientation of watching my carefully constructed life collapse around me.

But on this particular Tuesday, she asked a question that changed everything: “What would you call it if all these experiences happened to someone else?”

I sat in uncomfortable silence before finally whispering: “Trauma.”

That simple word broke something open inside me. Not in the cathartic, healing way self-help books might suggest, but in a terrifying way—like a dam rupturing, releasing a flood I’d spent decades containing.

The Decision to Write

The writing started as therapy—just journaling exercises to process what was happening. But something shifted when I shared a few pages with my therapist. She looked up from the paper and said words I’ll never forget:

“Writing isn’t just something that helps you. It’s who you are. It’s your path to healing.”

I’d always thought of myself as an IT professional who occasionally wrote, not a writer. But in that moment, I recognized a truth that had been buried beneath layers of adaptation: writing was the most authentic expression of who I really was.

I kept writing, not with any intention of publication, but simply because I had to—because these words needed somewhere to go besides circling endlessly in my head.

From Private to Public

The decision to transform these private writings into a book wasn’t easy. I wrestled with questions that still keep me up some nights:

Who am I to write this? What makes my particular flavor of dysfunction worth anyone else’s time? Aren’t there already enough trauma books written by people with actual credentials?

But then something unexpected happened. I shared a few excerpts on social media, and the responses stunned me. People I’d never met were messaging me saying things like, “How did you get inside my head?” and “I’ve never heard anyone describe exactly what this feels like before.”

That’s when I realized: the very specificity that made me question whether my experience was “worth sharing” was precisely what made it resonate with others. By getting brutally honest about my particular hell, I was somehow touching on something universal.

Writing Through Resistance

Let me be clear—creating this book has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There were days when writing a single paragraph left me physically shaking. Days when I’d have to stop mid-sentence because I couldn’t breathe through the anxiety.

My inner critic—that internalized voice of judgment I break down in Chapter 9—had a fucking field day:

Who do you think you are? Nobody wants to hear this shit. You’re just trauma-dumping on strangers. You’ll embarrass yourself and everyone connected to you.

But beneath those attacks was a deeper fear, one I only recognized after months of pushing through resistance: I was afraid that putting these experiences into words would make them more real, not less. That naming these patterns would somehow give them more power instead of diffusing them.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Liberation of Language

What I’ve discovered through this process is that finding precise language for previously wordless experiences is actually the beginning of liberation. The patterns that control us from the shadows lose power when dragged into the light of conscious awareness and given specific names.

This is why I’ve been so goddamn meticulous about language in this book—why I’ve labored over finding exactly the right words for experiences that exist at the edge of what language can capture. Because I know now that naming these patterns is the first step toward breaking free from them.

“The Inheritance of Patterns” isn’t the book I wanted to write. It’s the book I needed to write. And maybe, if you’re still reading this, it’s the book you need to read.

Not because I have all the answers—I don’t. But because I’m willing to stand in the wreckage of patterns I didn’t choose but spent decades recreating, and say: there’s a way through this. It isn’t quick. It isn’t easy. But it’s possible.

And that possibility makes all the difference.