On Not Being Broken

The first thing a lot of people say in a first session is some version of "I think there's something wrong with me." They've usually been carrying this idea for a long time. Sometimes since childhood. Sometimes it's gotten louder lately, after a relationship ended or a job fell apart or a body started doing something it didn't used to do. Sometimes they've come to therapy specifically to get the broken part fixed.

I've stopped finding this framing useful, and I've started saying so earlier in the work.

You're not broken. You're someone who developed, over a long time and under specific conditions, a particular set of ways to cope with what was once overwhelming. Those ways made sense once. They were doing real work — keeping you safe, keeping you connected, keeping you functional in a situation that might not have been workable any other way. Calling them broken misses what they are. They're survivals. They got you here.

The trouble is that survivals don't always know when their job is over. The thing that protected you at eight is still running at thirty-eight, and now it's keeping you from the very life it once made possible. The vigilance that kept you safe at home becomes the anxiety that keeps you from rest. The withdrawal that protected you from a parent's mood becomes the distance you can't close with your partner. The performance that earned love early becomes the exhaustion you can't admit to. The pattern isn't pathology. It's a strategy that outlived its situation.

This matters because what you do with a broken thing is different from what you do with a survival. A broken thing you replace, fix, or discard. A survival you understand. You ask what it was for, when it started, what it was protecting, what it still thinks it's protecting. You let it tell you about the world it came from. And then, slowly, you find out whether it's still needed in the world you actually live in now.

That's most of the work. Not fixing. Understanding.

The goal of therapy, as I think about it, isn't to make you happier — though that often happens. It isn't to fix you, because you're not the thing that needs fixing. The goal is to help you become more interested in yourself. More able to bear your own experience without flinching from it. More capable of the relationships and work and creativity that make a life feel lived rather than just endured.

Becoming more interested in yourself is harder than it sounds. Most people relate to themselves with some mixture of impatience, shame, and management. They want themselves to be different. They want the difficult feelings to go away. They want the parts they don't like to behave better. Therapy gradually makes room for a different stance — one closer to curiosity. What is this? Where did it come from? What is it doing for me? What would I lose if I let it go?

That curiosity is the thing that actually changes you, in the long run. Not insight, exactly. Not technique. The slow accumulation of being interested in your own life rather than at war with it.

People sometimes worry that if they stop calling themselves broken, they'll stop trying to change. The opposite is usually true. People who think they're broken spend most of their energy hating the broken part. People who think they're carrying survivals worth understanding spend their energy understanding them — which, it turns out, is what actually allows them to shift.

​You're not broken. You're a person with a history, and the history is still talking. Therapy is one place to listen.