A Fundamental Belief of Brokenness May Be the Biggest Burden on Our Mental Health and the Industry
How do we begin to address a core wound beyond symptoms?
This is modified from a thread I posted on X.
I'm not credentialed but I have decades of experience exploring my mental health as it has been a challenge since I was about 11 years old or so. Middle school isn’t easy on most kids and challenges at home didn’t make it much easier. So, over the years I explored various books and concepts to find out how I can keep living because I wanted to be here and persist through it all.
In that process, I came across various extremes of advice and I find that most bad advice consists of the word “just” as in “Just go for a run” or “just organize your life” or “just get out of bed” or “just back into your memories and rewrite the bad ones” or something like that. Since I’ve learned personality types I’ve realized this advice comes from our sharing our default modes with others but they don’t work for everyone, so I flagged them as not generally useful.
And because of that the extremes of advice frustrate me. No, you can't just go for a run and fix it. And no, trauma-bonding circle jerks don't do it either.
What my dives into the past have made clear for me is that If you fundamentally believe you're broken, that's what needs to change and anything you apply to that will just be adding cherries on top of turds. I didn’t realize how much I made clear to myself that I was fundamentally broken. I made a case for that on my own as a kid by saying I had bad genes, not the best upbringing, was not socially adept, was not the most attractive, was a small kid, and was having trouble in school despite knowing how smart I am. I convinced myself that I was fundamentally flawed, a belief that stuck with me for many decades. I wouldn’t say I blame myself entirely for this frame of mind but it’s what I experienced nonetheless.
What I learned from that realization is that you can't repress, dissociate, blame, shame, or guilt your way into acceptance. That’s the slippery mind at work dodging the fundamental problem. Acceptance is a letting go process of who is responsible, why this happened, how can I get away from it, calling myself bad or wrong, synthetic inflations of false temporary confidence or lacking forgiveness for myself as a result of choices I made from this place.
When I started this podcast, now publication, I was jumping to pathologies to reinforce the broken belief. While my original intent was to discover what was a mental illness versus what is my personality, I still leaned heavily on labels like ADHD, for which you can find evidence throughout my internal discovery process on the podcast. But no matter what label I took to or new thing I discovered it only became fodder for the belief I already had, making it much more difficult to want to keep on living with emotional crashes increasing their intensity.
I can’t say this is the same case for everyone but it’s starting to become a truth that I can’t unsee. This is particularly strong in anyone who has had any fundamental belief internally, societal messaging, or religious messaging of being inherently broken. This is a pattern I want to keep paying attention to. But as a result, I’ve found that the closest thing to a magic bullet for long-term mental health challenges is accepting you as human, imperfect. And this road has commonalities of being human but your story is unique to you and your life.
Exercising isn't going to alter this fundamental belief. It can give you confidence and move you up the ranking of publicly accepted humans but if your circumstances change you'll be right back where you started feeling low, inferior, and self-judgmental. Take care of yourself physically, yes, but it's only a piece of the puzzle if you’ve got more than physical insecurity on your plate.
Resharing stories and trauma bonding only re-traumatizes, a notion I picked up from The Crappy Childhood Fairy, which I stand by. The point of telling your story is to be witnessed and to process and release. If you're telling friends a story for the shock factor as if it’s a Netflix crime documentary then nothing is witnessed, validated, affirmed, or processed. I did this for years, creating and telling stories so I could have wild stories to tell and in retrospect doing so to see if anyone would stop me.
You can't just tell your story to anyone and expect proper witnessing. Not everyone can or will open their heart to you, nor should they. Professionals such as therapists, counselors, coaches, and people of later developmental levels can hold space with proper boundaries. It’s not fair to expect friends to be therapists or for us to be saviors of them. And frankly, we just don’t always do that well. What professionals do well is set boundaries and friends can struggle with that or can create too much enmeshment if they believe friendship has no boundaries. Boundaries changed everything for me, a recent revelation, as I let go of the expectation that someone was going to randomly save me, especially a romantic partner.
It all comes down to the way you talk about/to yourself and that's what pros reflect. Are you judgmental of different parts of yourself? Judgment is the defense of a belief. So there's some belief from one part of you contradicting another part of you. And yes, we all have different parts within ourselves as depicted in Disney Pixar’s Inside Out. If a part of you feels unworthy of love then it may sabotage or criticize the part of you that is most receiving love or working towards sabotaging healthy relationships. Internal Family Systems is a method of approaching these different parts with respect. You can do a deep dive into Richard Schwartz’s work with demonstrations on YouTube.
You may have some aspects of you that are not typical to the common human experience but I guarantee that those things are much fewer than you think. In my explorations I have discovered that I have auditory processing delays, quick executive function burnout, and dyslexia. All ways in which my productivity is massively affected, which can and has easily led to shame spirals in a culture that highly values productivity and as part of a generation that was pushed to succeed as part of no child left behind policies. Not point out those things to blame, but that’s what happened and part of what I need to release. The specifics of your experience can be accounted for with life adjustments after acceptance.
I was getting frequent headaches from working and had pushed through for years but as I’ve been getting older I’m just hitting a wall more frequently. So instead of ignoring the burnouts and headaches I began to explore and experiment to see when I did or didn’t get those headaches. Acceptance is simply seeing things for what they are and I allowed awareness that this burnout was happening I could now go toward designing my life with this reality in mind.
It’s easy to lean on pathologies as a reason to shift responsibility. “The schools messed me up and so the government needs to fix it. The system needs to change.” And while I don’t disagree, it doesn’t change who you are or what your situation is.
I appreciate some aspects of the shift to bring positivity into these mental health labels. “You’re not broken, you’re special, but also kinda broken, which is what makes you special!” That’s understandably both confusing and a bit alluring. Who wouldn’t want to be special? But remember that many pathologies are still being sorted out and many, who have business incentives, are trying to pad pathologies with positive traits to polish the turd. This doesn’t change any fundamental belief of brokenness, it’s just a reframe and in some cases a toxic positivity. I’m not claiming ill intent from anyone but overall it’s treating symptoms not the internal core belief.
Personality types have been a path for me to make a shift from seeing myself as a broken tangle of wires to accepting that I have certain styles of learning and making decisions. Once I understood those elements and bring in other frameworks such as the Enneagram then I can see what’s my personality versus a mental health challenge. In a way, it’s a method of letting go of the comparison game that plagues the idea of being neurotypical versus neurodiverse. You let go of the fear of being less than and transform into embracing the awe of humans being imperfect, diverse, and complimentary in our gifts.
Inattentive ADHD trait descriptions have many correlates with Extraverted Intuition Cognitive functioning, the ability to pattern between disparate ideas.
Hyperactive ADHD trait descriptions have correlated with Extraverted Sensing, seeking movement and immersion which brings calm through movement.
Autism trait descriptions have correlated with Introverted Thinking, a desire to separate from emotions and seek fundamental truths even if they contradict the beliefs of the group.
I suggest it’s worth looking into for greater clarity of your experience. I suggest looking into the work of Personality Hacker.
All of this is NOT to say you shouldn't feel frustrated or sad about your circumstances. Acceptance is likely on the other side of that wall. These are fluid emotions that must be felt as part of being alive. Feeling that sadness or frustration can lead to the belief underneath to then be released. So don’t take what I’m saying as an excuse to ignore those feelings. I say that as a life-long “toughen upper.” Whatever it is, don’t dodge your truth.
Whether or not you believe you're fundamentally broken will principally alter your approach to mental health. Resolve the belief of brokenness and you simply see what is. That’s no easy task even if I can put it plainly. When you have a belief, any strong belief, a lot of work is done internally to keep it. That’s the slippery mind idea I spoke about earlier. In that effort, the slippery aspects of the mind take the lead, which is intangible, timeless, and boundless and can drag you down into full-blown mental illness with enough persistence. Everything is given weight by the fundamental belief messing our ability to be flexible and adaptable.
Understanding I have an auditory delay means I need to bake into who I am the responsibility to step away from persistent talking and regroup if I’m going to function well. That's my responsibility for my unique circumstances. Proper exploration, distinctions, diagnosis, and awareness mean I can take independent responsibility for my wellness and path forward. I call this Mental Wellness, the actions you can take independently after proper discovery of your unique challenges. Mental Health is the awareness that something is off and I want to know what’s going on. It’s the discovery of the challenges I face with the help of a group, psychiatrist, research, etc. Mental Illness is when I require dependent clinical support whether because of the shame spiral, chemical challenges, or other extremes. I stress that this is my opinion and principle towards these ideas.
If I believe I'm broken then I believe I need saving and I believe the world needs to accommodate for my need. I hate to say it this way but some ideas beg directness. The world isn't fair and waiting for it to be fair is avoiding the grief from thinking you or the world should've been something different. This is a difficult process to accept and I hold great compassion for this journey.
Acceptance is on the other side of that grief. Perhaps that the child, adolescent, teenager, young adult, or you now needs more than what’s been provided. Letting go of past expectations of who your parents, society, yourself, your friends, your career, and your future are "supposed" to be is immeasurably beneficial to the next stages of life. Acceptance of what is can support the path to gratitude for what is, which can become a very divine concept as you can begin a process of wholeness with Self/Essence/Soul/Spirit or however else you’d like to define it.
Don't be ashamed to get support but navigate the waters responsibly. This is your life, which isn't over because it's not typical or doesn't meet your imagination. Get help when you need it. Set proper boundaries. Be gentle with yourself. Build strength and adaptability. Whatever forms those take is up to you.