If You Ain't Broke, Don't Fix You
Have you ever wondered why people spend so much time in therapy? I mean, if it was going to work, wouldn’t it have worked by now?
10, 15, and 25 years in therapy is becoming more of a norm and less of an outlier.
Don’t get me wrong. I have a therapist. I don’t see her every week or anything, but I enjoy the occasional couch session. There are PLENTY of tears. I’ve never asked what my therapist is crying about, but I’m sure it is something important.
She brings in her dog when she knows I’m coming (I like dogs). Granted, her dog is barely accepted into the dog category. It’s more like a giant cotton ball that makes noise.
Still, isn’t it disconcerting to anyone else that therapy has been become a lifestyle instead of a treatment?
I’ve got theories.
First, I’ve read that therapy has largely moved to a management and medicative model (instead of a healing model). It’s swinging back, but it has a lot of inertia in the “medicate most things” mindset.
Second, we are working on other people’s crap.
Hear me out. If you’ve read this blog (or other psychology platforms), you already know that we internalize our experiences as children. The way we were treated often becomes the way we treat ourselves. We learn lessons from our parents modeling. Our connection (or lack of connection) with authority figures will teach us about our self-value. Etc.
This is fairly well known.
But, we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to fix our present day lives. We work on our self value, intimacy, career issues, relationship discord or disappointment, and so forth.
So why are we working on present day issues if the root system is in the past?
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d wager we’d get much more done if we understood WHY we believe something negative, or even WHERE we learned something negative. When we understand that many of our problems come from our childhood, we can recognize why those “lessons” are not facts, but one individual’s experience.
Let me give you a few examples:
A Man Stuck in Pornography: If you have any relationship with a porn addict (or are one), you know they work their ass off on trying to end the addiction. They feel shame, it messes with their relationships, and might even mess with their livelihoods. And yet, the addiction persists. What I have often found is that many of these men had unsafe or disconnected fathers. Their primary example of masculinity (their dad) is their archetype for men. And lo and behold, they are a man. Since they learned “men are unsafe,” they keep distance from women. They end up starving for intimacy, sexual activity, and so on. And because they are starving for intimacy they end up acting against their consciences by looking at porn. Ironically, they were trying to protect women from men (themselves) and end up creating a bigger problem.
The Daughter Who Didn’t Feel Loved: What does protection, prioritization, and attention all communicate to a child? That they are valuable! If a daughter doesn’t feel valued in these ways in early development, she won’t feel valuable. She’ll spend the following years (often into adulthood) trying to make up for her lack of worth OR proving that she is worthless in one way or another. It wouldn’t matter if she has a loving husband, friend, community, or anything; because at her core she knows that she is unlovable and unworthy of love.
In both of these cases, what was wrong with the child? Were they evil? Unlovable? Too annoying to care about? Unworthy of value or attention? Mean?
NO! Of course not. They’re children.
Quite simply, they internalized their life lessons and baked them into their subconsciouses.
So I ask again. . . why are we working so ridiculously hard on fixing ourselves when the problem was what happened to us and not what is wrong with us?
I’m not saying we pick up pitchforks and tar and feather our parents. Most parents were doing the best they could.
But, I am saying we must recognize WHERE our beliefs are coming from in order to replace them. If we are working on our “present day” lives to get emotionally healthy, we will never become healthy. We must understand that what happened to us (or didn’t happen for us), creates the basis for our self image and adult behaviors.
In an ironic twist, this recognition can IMPROVE our relationships with our parents. By recognizing where our pain is stemming from, we can often release it. Once we release it, the subconscious resentment towards are parents is removed. We’ll find more clear lenses towards them as HUMAN BEINGS, instead of THOSE WHO HURT US. And who knows, we might even develop compassion for their pain and journey.
Perhaps you have been someone stuck in introspection mode. If so, perhaps it’s time to do a little extrospection (don’t know if that is a word).
One symptom of too much navel-gazing is a commonality amongst self improvement junkies: frustration.
You see, frustration is simply feeling powerless towards something we want changed. The reason self improvement junkies feel frustrated is because they are trying to solve someone else’s problem by fixing themselves. The problem isn’t found there!
Are you tired of feeling powerless to your issues?
Here is an abbreviated exercise. It’ll be a primer for you to feel better. . .and disconnect from issues that aren’t yours.
The next time you feel a negative thought about yourself—what is wrong with me, I’m a burden, I’m unworthy of love, nothing good will happen to me, etc.—pause. Take a deep breath and get really clear on the negative thought.
Once you get it clear in your mind, think about your younger self learning to believe that about themselves. Think about how sad it is that your younger self learned that “lesson” from your experiences.
You don’t have to get crystal clear on where it came from, but just let yourself be compassionate for your younger self feeling that (about themselves).
When you feel that compassion, gently remind yourself that it is just as sad for you to believe that about your present day self.
When you perform this activity, you’ll be naturally disconnecting from the belief (specifically at the time where you learned it).
It is a gracious way to dismantle negative beliefs, and allow you to reconnect with healthy objectivity.
For now, that’s it! Don’t overcomplicate the process. Don’t try to understand everything. Don’t overthink it. Just appreciate that your negative beliefs are lessons you learned that are no longer valid. . .and likely never were.