You are not broken!

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

If you've listened to a few of my podcast episodes before, you won't be surprised to hear me say that I don't believe mental health is a root condition. Like anything, you can pick it, name it, ADHD, depression, anxiety, I think all of these are symptoms of a larger problem. And yet many people believe that once they have been diagnosed with a particular mental condition, that they have got the answer, that they are finished and they just need to learn how to manage it.

I was having a conversation with someone recently where they were basically taking the approach of, well, I've got my diagnosis now. I know that I'm broken and I just have to learn how to live with it, manage the symptoms that come with it and find a way to make peace with this diagnosis, which is seen as a long-term and terminal diagnosis. You are depressed and you have depression, which are two different things.

Depressed, if you are depressed, that's a temporary state. If you have depression, then they say that that's something much more permanent. But they're not. All of these things are symptoms of a larger problem. And to cut it down as rudimentary as possible, if you are anxious, you are living too much in the future.

And if you are depressed, you are living too much in the past and people will rightfully throw a tantrum at that kind of definition because they will say no i've got reason to be depressed you know this is a chemical imbalance or you know they get very very defensive over their illness over their diagnosis because it's something that they can latch on to it's something that gives them identity they can kind of point their finger

at it and say you're to blame this thing outside of me that's forcing me to think and feel a certain way and instead of taking an empowering approach and being like. Everything is on me. If I am depressed, I am doing something or I'm in a situation that is depressing. I'm causing myself to be depressed. And if I'm anxious, I'm not dealing with things. I might not have a plan in place or I might be letting myself get overwhelmed with all of the things I need to do.

As a rebuttal, people will tend to jump to the extremes of things and say, well, what about things like PTSD or people who have depression from a very traumatic situation? I would say that's more evidence. That isn't something that contradicts what I'm saying. It's actually the very definition of what I'm saying is that that trauma, when it is unaddressed, when it's untreated, that becomes this symptom of depression. It becomes the symptom of ADHD. It becomes the symptom of PTSD.

These are all symptoms of a lack of emotional development and suitable tools to process that trauma. And by no means is that a blaming statement. I'm not saying that people should have those tools and it's their fault that they don't have them.

It's just a simple statement that people do not have those tools unless they have development and for a lot of people when they go through a trauma it's the first time that they have to develop that and for many of us it's at a very very early age where we don't really have the resources or the power or the knowledge to deal with something in a healthy way to the point where we become so comfortable with the way that we have developed our coping mechanisms and our

techniques of dealing with pain we become so happy and comfortable and warm with those things even if they're harmful to us that we don't want to let them go i'm sure there's many things that you do when you're stressed when you're hurt when you're upset that you know is not really beneficial to you it's not lifting you up.

Sinking into that sadness sinking into the depression sinking in to the irrationality and the anxiety and everything else feeling that way becomes comfortable when you have felt it for so long whatever it is that you feel that you in your head you're saying like i really wish i wasn't like this or i really wish this would change somewhere in your own mind lives the hypocrite the person who doesn't actually want that change because as much as this is uncomfortable or as much as this causes you

some level of pain or grief that you have to deal with it's familiar and something that is familiar is better than something that is unknown or it might be that you have experienced something once before that was so painful so traumatic that it's just simply you're better to avoid everything because something might do that to you again and you don't know what it is. You don't know what could go wrong.

So it's best to do nothing. It's best to live your life in a way that avoids everything and inevitably you know that you can't do that. It doesn't matter how safe you play it, you can never avoid the consequences of life.

You can never avoid the risk of life so naturally you become anxious because as much as you know that you need to control all of these things to keep you safe you need to control your environment the people around you your relationships all of these different kind of things you have to manage all of this and keep all these spinning plates going and what happens if they fall you feel like your life is crashing down and that anxiety knowing that you don't have

the energy to keep those plates spinning constantly and sooner or later you're going to get tired and they're going to drop and that's how people feel about the weight of their life that they have to put all of their energy in just.

Maintaining their existence they're not living it they're just surviving and when you're in survival mode you're not in pain you're not suffering or it doesn't register as pain and suffering it registers as numbness you are burnt out you are overworked you are doing too much so it feels like you just like pile it on you know i don't even know like once you've got debt you know people who kind of get into bad problems with money and they have a lot of debt and then you know

if they have like 20 grand in debt that they know that they can't pay off you know if they get another 10k in debt they're just thinking well just add it to the pile like it doesn't even become a problem or a stress because they're so far in the hole already that adding to the top you know they don't even see it it's too far at the other end. And people get like that with trauma and pain, where they are so far removed from it, they're just kind of like, well, whatever.

I don't even care about looking after myself. I'm in so much pain all the time. I'm so numb. I'm so detached and dissociated from my life that it doesn't really matter what goes wrong because I'm not really there. And with that kind of lack of presence, that's where depression comes in.

You end up being tired of observing this character in so much pain you get desensitized to your own suffering and you are so exhausted that you're expected or the way out of it is that you have to get yourself out of it but you have no energy so it becomes this vicious circle this loop and you feel like you're broken you feel like you just simply can't get better because you keep trying to do more and you end up burning yourself out more putting yourself more at

the hole and anytime you make a bit of leeway you end up inevitably collapsing because you put too much pressure on yourself and you just get sick and tired of wearing that mask and you just feel like you want to burn your life down periodically you know like once a month you just feel like I just want to get rid of everything I just want to run away I just want to go live in a cave it's very extreme because the pressure and the pain of your life is so rarely acknowledged by yourself.

You don't allow yourself to feel the pain because it is too overwhelming. There's too much of it. And that's an indication that you should stop the pain, right? Like you have to address the things that are causing you all of this problem, all of this stress, all of this hurt, all of this pain, all of this suffering. That's what you have to fix because otherwise you're still taking on and doing everything that you are normally doing.

Change needs to be radical and we are very against radical change.

We build up these identities where we say, I'm this kind of person and we can be miserable for like 50 years and still go well I'm this kind of person that's just the way it is but it's not the way it is no one is forcing you to make these decisions no one is forcing you to live the life that you have chosen to live but it feels nice to be able to say that the same way with the identity it's something to latch on to it you can say well I'm just this way and that's

how i have to be and it's almost like a get out of jail free card of doing the work why bother trying to improve yourself why bother trying to heal or grow as a person when you can just say well i am who i am and there's no need to change then you're you're radically accepting this as if your identity or your life has been given to you and you've been it's been forced upon you and you've just had to accept it but that completely shirks any responsibility or any accountability to

live the life that you know you want to live or live in a way that is aligned with who you are that is your responsibility to figure that out to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live and who you want to be because it's not fixed you are not broken you are not stuck. You may be choosing to repeat the same patterns. You may be choosing to put yourself in the same situations or take on the same kind of responsibilities, but you're not broken.

You don't have this issue that can't be fixed. You don't have this condition that you are stuck with for the rest of your life.

What you do have is a set of really difficult decisions and choices to make.

It might be that in order to get better, you have to radically change everything about your life you have to change the people that are around you you have to change the food that you eat you have to change your regime and your hobbies and your interests it that might be something that you have to do but then you're not stuck you're making a decision if you choose to go against that you're saying i want this because there are other options but we get comfortable

convincing ourselves that there are no other options but there are. You can choose different things. You can choose to be whoever you want. You can choose to say whatever you want to say, to do whatever you want to do. And of course, there are consequences with that. But you make the choice. You either decide that you want this and you accept the consequences or you're going to stay as you are and suffer for the rest of your life.

But don't tell me that you don't have choice, that you are stuck where you are, that you have something that you can't get rid of. Because you can. It just might take a level of effort or a level of work or a level of change that you are not willing to put in. And that's also okay. But then accept it. Be at peace with your decision. Don't blame the universe or God or life for giving you a shitty deal. Things happen.

Events happen to us that are outside of our control. But right now, in this present moment, you are deciding to be who you are. You are deciding to make your choices. You are deciding to live your life the way you are living it.

And until you accept that or change, you will never truly heal you will be stuck repeating the same patterns confronting the same fears confronting the same pains and you will do this until you learn that you need to change you need to take responsibility you need to own who you are and you can always use extremism to invalidate a point you could say well i can't do this or you know what about somebody who's stuck in a domestic violence case or is in prison or doing this

or doing that and they're stuck and they're forced into this situation but I'm not talking about extremes here and I would argue that even in those situations responsibility and accountability will be what saves you that will be how you get out of that situation but don't use identity don't use diagnosis don't use anything to rob you of taking full accountability for your life look for every possible way to blame yourself before you say that something

can't be changed or that you were forced into this situation because i promise you if you really analyze everything that ever happened to you in your life there was probably some decisions some choices that you could have made that the worst things that ever happened to you might not have happened. And that's a really tough pill to swallow. That's so hard for people to accept. And that doesn't mean that you should be blaming yourself and saying, well, it's all my fault.

What it means is to say the most empowered and powerful that I can be is when I fully own my own choices. The only thing I can concentrate on or control or change is myself. So the only place worth investing time and energy is in focused attention on how you can do better or be more aligned with who you are. And I know it's hard and I know a lot of people will not want to hear that and will probably shout all kinds of abuse at me for that, but it's the truth.

And you can go and rattle in your head about every example of ways that that's not true or that this whole thing is rubbish. All you are doing is robbing yourself of a good lesson, of the ability to truly take ownership, to truly say, you know what, he's right. I need to own my mistakes. I need to own my choices. I choose to repeat these patterns. I choose to make these decisions. I choose to engage with these people.

I choose to not set boundaries and I need to change because I promise once you do this, things will get better you will realize that you are not being beaten up and thrown around by life you are not a victim you are in charge and you may not be able to control the external you can't control what happens to you but you can choose what to do next you can choose how you react you can choose the decisions that you make you can choose how

you show up to life every day you can choose your perspective these are all things internal to you and they're your choice, thank you for listening.