What If You're Not Broken?

“I should be over this by now.”

It’s a statement I often hear during first sessions.

Many people come to therapy believing something is wrong with them. What if that’s the wrong assumption? What if the anxiety, self-doubt, overthinking, and other struggles aren’t signs that you’re broken? What if they’re signs that you’ve been doing your best to adapt to difficult experiences?

Questions like “Why am I like this?” and “What’s wrong with me?” are often asked by people who have spent years trying to figure themselves out. They’ve thought about it, analyzed it, and tried countless ways to feel better. Sometimes it reminds me of watching the protagonist in a horror movie move deeper into a haunted house. When we’re in the middle of our own story, there is only so much we can see. Maybe we can step back and look at it together from the audience’s perspective.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with you?” I often find myself wondering, “What happened to you?”

Not every painful experience is dramatic or life-threatening. Sometimes repeated disappointments, betrayals, criticism, misunderstandings, or emotional neglect teach us powerful lessons about ourselves and the world around us. Especially while we’re growing up.

We learn to adapt. We learn to survive.

If we never know how a caregiver will react, we may become highly attuned to the emotions of people around us. If keeping the peace feels safer than expressing our needs, we may avoid conflict. If mistakes lead to shame, we may overthink every decision in an attempt to prevent future pain. If our needs weren’t prioritized, we may learn to prioritize everyone else’s. 

The problem isn’t that we learned these strategies. Many of them helped us to survive. The problem is that we often continue using them long after they stop serving us.

Over time, we can become so focused on managing life that we stop paying attention to ourselves. We have probably heard, “don’t pour from an empty kettle” or some variation of that. But it’s not just pouring from an empty kettle. It’s trying to use an empty kettle. If you leave an empty kettle on a hot stove long enough, it eventually damages more than the kettle itself.

What helped us survive doesn’t always help us thrive.

Anxiety, burnout, relationship difficulties, feeling disconnected from yourself, and constant self-criticism can sometimes be signs that important needs have gone unmet for a very long time. 

Many people become frustrated with themselves without realizing how much energy they’ve spent simply trying to get through life.

One of my favorite parts of being a therapist is helping people move from self-criticism to self-understanding.

When someone walks into my office, I don’t see failure. I see someone trying something new because everything else hasn’t worked. Asking for help is often one of the hardest things a person can do, especially if they’ve learned they have to handle everything on their own.

Rather than focusing on what’s “wrong,” I’m interested in understanding your experiences, the stories you’ve learned about yourself, and how those stories continue to shape your life today. I’m curious about where those beliefs came from and who you are underneath them. 

Therapy provides a space to explore these patterns without shame. Together we can understand how they developed, determine whether they still serve you, and explore new ways of moving forward. Sometimes that process involves developing new skills. Other times it involves healing experiences that continue to feel emotionally stuck. Approaches such as EMDR can help process experiences that still affect us in the present.

If you’ve spent years believing you’re broken, I invite you to consider another possibility: What if your mind and body developed exactly the strategies they needed to survive?

The good news is that you don’t have to figure it out alone. Therapy can provide a space to better understand yourself and move toward healing with compassion rather than criticism. In my experience, shame rarely creates lasting change. Understanding and acceptance often does.

Holding space for whatever comes next,

Angelina Gutierrez, LPCC 18001