You're Not Broken, You're Just Human
People come into our office all the time thinking something's fundamentally wrong with them. They're anxious, or depressed, or struggling, and they've decided that means they're broken. Defective. Less than.
You're not broken. You're having a human experience, and a lot of human experiences suck.
Here's what I mean. Your brain is designed to worry about threats (anxiety), shut down when overwhelmed (depression), remember bad shit that happened (trauma responses), want things that aren't good for you (addiction), and avoid pain (avoidance).
All of that is normal brain function. It's not a glitch. It's how humans work.
The problem isn't that your brain does these things.
The problem is when these normal responses get stuck on, or become the only way you know how to function, or start making your life smaller and smaller until you can't do anything.
That doesn't mean you're broken though. It means you're struggling with something that's hard.
There's a difference.
When you think you're broken, you give up agency. Broken things can't fix themselves. Broken things need someone else to fix them, or they just stay broken forever. That's a shit way to live, and it's not even accurate.
When you understand you're struggling with something hard, you still have choices. You can learn skills. You can get help. You can try different approaches. You're not waiting to be fixed. You're figuring out how to work with what you've got.
Most of what we treat isn't that exotic anyway. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. Trauma responses. Substance use. Relationship problems.
These are incredibly common human experiences. If you've got one or more of these going on, you're not special in a bad way. You're just dealing with something that millions of other people deal with too.That doesn't minimize your pain. It doesn't mean it's not hard. It just means you're not uniquely damaged.
Here's what our team sees every day: regular people going through hard shit. People whose brains work a little differently. People who learned some unhelpful patterns growing up. People dealing with genetics they didn't choose. People overwhelmed by circumstances that would overwhelm anyone.
None of them are broken. They're just human, dealing with human problems, trying to figure out how to function better.
Most of them do figure it out too. Not because they get fixed, but because they learn to work with themselves instead of against themselves. They learn skills. They try medication if they need it. They show up and do the work even when it's hard. They make different choices.
That's not magic. That's not even that complicated. It's just what happens when you stop waiting to be fixed and start figuring out how to move forward with what you've got.
So no, you're not broken. You're struggling, which is different. And struggling is something you can actually do something about.
