The Healing Scam
a forthcoming book

The Healing Scam

Heartbreak, Selfhood, and the Market for Closure
By Juni Kim
with Jeremy Whitt

“The great inconvenience of self-possession is that it cannot be consumed. The earned ability to keep pain from becoming a distorted map of reality has to be practiced, time and time again.”

— from The Healing Scam
The Thesis

Dating is scary. Uncertainty is scarier.

Closure is being sold to you. It isn't healing.

The Healing Scam argues that this market for closure trades in cheap certainty, and that the certainty it sells isn't recovery, rather, leverage in disguise. It presents itself as healing while wearing down the very faculties — discernment, dynamism, critical thought — that make real healing possible.

Self-possession can't be downloaded, scrolled into, or borrowed from a comment section. It has to be earned. This book is about how.

Inside

What the book offers

  1. A diagnosis of the market for closure. The platitudes, algorithmic advice, and personal-brand narratives that quietly sell us false healing — and the cognitive vulnerabilities they exploit.
  2. A working vocabulary for dating without static rules. B.A.D. (Behavior As Data), a dynamic way of thinking (prediction is the wrong tool for a complex adaptive system), and the difference between a constraint and a verdict.
  3. Tools for noticing Perceived Leverage Mode. How to tell when you've slipped from trying to understand reality into trying to win against it — and what to do once you have.
  4. The Self-Possession Sequence. A five-part practice for staying clear-eyed while dating.
  5. A return to the world. Why self-help can't solve a self-referential loop on its own — and what friction, plurality, and obligation can do that introspection cannot.

“It does not give us the clean pleasure of deciding that we were the victim, that they were the villain, that the lesson is obvious, or that the next version of ourselves will be immune to pain. Self-possession asks us to do something much harder: to stay in contact with reality while reality is still emotionally unresolved.”

— from The Healing Scam
About the Author
Juni Kim

Juni Kim is a writer and project manager at a tech firm. She studied literary journalism with a minor in philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, where her writing turned often to people and the places that shape them, and where she found analytical philosophy unexpectedly useful.

Born in Missouri and now based in California, she began writing The Healing Scam after a breakup that did not yield to thinking — and after watching the advice she found online deliver something other than what it promised. The book is what came of trying to apply systems thinking, careful inference, and a journalist's discipline to a problem that a narrative-driven culture was solving badly.

She has had several boyfriends and zero husbands, has yet to find closure (and has stopped looking for it), and is, by her own admission, a frequent practitioner of the material.