The Only Thing Wrong with You

Spoiler: The only thing "wrong with you" is the belief that there's something wrong with you.

So often, when clients enter therapy they're seeking to answer (or, better yet, have answered for them) two deeply compelling questions: What's wrong with me? And how do I fix it?

The irony is that these questions themselves are what's "wrong."

It's not the need for change (which may indeed be very real), but the reasoning that motivates it, which causes this pain. It's the underlying story of brokenness, failure, unworthiness or deficit.

Where did these stories come from? Now, there's a better question! That question can help us reach back in time to free ourselves to move forward. It can help us look around at the cultural messages we've been fed and recognize them for what they are. Because these aren't our stories; they're not intrinsic parts of us. We picked them up somewhere along the way, and we can put them down again.

In my work with clients, I draw from many approaches to help them uncover, examine, and rewrite these stories, slowly releasing the weight of beliefs that don't serve them. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectal Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, and Psychodynamic approaches all provide tools I use in our sessions to shift from this pathologizing view of self ("What's wrong with me?") to one that acknowledges the origins of this story ("What happened to me?") and opens up paths of revision and healing.

If you're ready to take that step forward, remind yourself it's possible:

• To make improvements as an act of self-love, not atonement

• To hold yourself accountable with kindness, not aggression

• And to seek to know yourself better with curiosity and wonderment, not to ferret out flaws or to "fix"

There is absolutely nothing wrong with you.