What If Healing Is Remembering?

For much of my life, I have been fascinated by what helps people grow, heal, and transform.

Looking back, I can see that fascination began long before I had language for it.

When I was younger, I learned that my last name, Dadsetan, roughly translates to “prosecutor” in Farsi. I loved the idea. It felt like destiny. I imagined myself pursuing justice, standing up for what was right, and helping create a fairer world.

There was a certain naivete in that vision, and perhaps a degree of privilege as well. I had not yet encountered the complexity of systems, the ways power operates, or the reality that justice is rarely as straightforward as I imagined. At the time, I thought right and wrong were more clearly defined. I believed that if people simply knew the truth, justice would naturally follow.

Life, of course, proved more complicated.

And that early desire to understand justice eventually led me into courtrooms as a prosecutor, classrooms as an educator, communities recovering from war, refugee settings, universities, nonprofits, and organizations navigating profound change.

Across cultures and contexts, I found myself asking similar questions:

How do people make meaning from difficult experiences?

How do we navigate loss, uncertainty, identity shifts, and transitions?

How do we repair relationships after harm?

How do we find our way back to ourselves after life changes us?

Looking back, I do not see a series of unrelated careers. I see a single thread woven through each chapter of my life.

I have spent decades exploring what it means to be human.

That curiosity led me through law, peace and justice studies, social work, education, and leadership.

At first glance, those fields may seem unrelated.

To me, they were all different doorways into the same questions.

Law invited me to explore justice.

My master’s degree in Peace and Justice Studies deepened my understanding of conflict, human rights, reconciliation, and the conditions that allow individuals and communities to heal after harm.

Social work brought me closer to the intimate realities of human suffering, resilience, caregiving, grief, aging, and the profound life transitions that shape us all.

Most recently, my doctoral research explored the lived experiences of newly arrived skilled immigrants navigating higher education in the United States. As both an immigrant and a researcher, I was struck by how universal many of the participants’ experiences felt. While their journeys were unique, the underlying questions were deeply familiar: How do we hold onto ourselves while adapting to change? How do we make meaning of transition? What helps us remain connected to who we are when the world around us shifts?

What I eventually realized is that I was never really studying separate disciplines.

I was studying what it means to be human.

What I have come to understand is that many of us spend our lives adapting.

We learn how to achieve.

We learn how to care for others.

We learn how to meet expectations.

We learn how to survive difficult circumstances.

And often, these adaptations serve important purposes. They help us navigate families, workplaces, relationships, and challenges. They help us belong. They help us move forward.

And sometimes, after years of adapting, we begin to wonder:

Who am I beneath all of this?

What do I actually need?

What parts of myself have I forgotten along the way?

What strikes me is that many of us were never taught how to understand what is happening inside us.

We learn history, mathematics, science, and professional skills.

We learn how to build careers.

We learn how to care for others.

We learn how to keep going when life is difficult.

And few of us are taught how to recognize our emotions as they arise.

Few of us are taught how to identify what we are feeling in our bodies.

Few of us are taught how to distinguish anxiety from fear, grief from sadness, exhaustion from disconnection, or intuition from old protective patterns.

Few of us are taught how to slow down long enough to listen.

Instead, many of us learn to push through, stay busy, distract ourselves, or judge what we feel.

Yet our emotions carry information.

Our bodies carry wisdom.

And often the very things we are trying to suppress are pointing us toward something important that needs our attention.

One of the most transformative lessons of my own journey has been learning that awareness is not weakness, self-indulgence, or self-absorption.

Awareness is information.

And information creates choice.

The more clearly we can understand what is happening within us, the more intentionally we can respond to our lives, our relationships, and the world around us.

For me, self-actualization is not about becoming someone new.

It is about remembering.

Remembering who we are beneath the expectations, fears, protective strategies, roles, and identities we have accumulated throughout our lives.

This understanding led me more deeply into trauma-informed practice, nervous system regulation, EMDR training, breathwork, and psychedelic/plant medicine integration work. Not because I was abandoning the work I had done before, and instead because I was following a thread that had always been there.

Again and again, whether I was working with leaders, students, immigrants, families, communities, or organizations, I witnessed a similar truth:

Many of the struggles people carry are not signs of weakness or failure. They are often intelligent adaptations to experiences that once required us to survive.

What if anxiety is not simply a problem to eliminate?

What if grief is not something to rush through?

What if our emotions are not obstacles, and instead information?

What if our bodies have been speaking all along?

And what if healing begins when we learn how to listen?

Over time, another realization emerged.

While so much healing involves learning to listen inward, we do not heal in isolation.

As an immigrant, a peacebuilder, a social worker, and a student of human relationships, I have repeatedly witnessed the profound role that connection plays in our well-being. The stories we tell, the people who accompany us, the communities we belong to, the cultures that shape us, and even the meals we share all influence our capacity to heal and grow.

This understanding is what eventually led me to create Enroot, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing people together through food, storytelling, and shared human experience.

Today, I see these as complementary truths.

We need practices that help us reconnect with ourselves.

And we need relationships and communities that help us remember that we do not have to do it alone.

In many ways, my work through Enroot, my years leading nonprofits, working with the UN, my research, and my work through Dr. Elika emerge from the same place.

A belief that healing, growth, and transformation happen through awareness, relationship, reflection, courage, and connection.

I do not believe self-actualization is a destination.

I believe it is a lifelong practice of remembering.

Remembering our humanity.

Remembering our values.

Remembering our capacity for growth.

Remembering our connection to ourselves, to one another, and to something larger than ourselves.

For me, that journey continues every day.

And perhaps that is the point.

Not perfection.

Not arrival.

Just a willingness to keep listening, learning, and remembering who we are.