Fixing what’s broken inside often makes things worse until rebirth

By David McElroy · July 6, 2019

The world is full of abandoned and broken houses. Many of them are grand old buildings which were allowed to fall into ruin. Some still look beautiful on the outside. They’ve been left to fall apart on the inside, though, because someone decided they weren’t worth the trouble and expense to save — to repair and make whole again.

The world is also full of broken people. Many look normal from the outside, but on the inside, they’re dysfunctional and falling apart. Most don’t even understand how broken they are. They’re full of invisible damage from their past. They hurt others and they hurt themselves, because it’s all they know to do.

These broken people need repair. They need to be made whole. Even if they figure out how much change they need, they often drift aimlessly or thrash about in pain and confusion.

I know this so well because it’s been my own path for many years.

When I was younger, I didn’t realize how damaged I was. I thought I just needed some minor adjustments. And then I slowly started breaking down my inner layers — stripping off old walls and floors to see the shaky foundation and crumbling supports underneath.

I eventually had to see my own pain. I had to see the damage I had unintentionally done to others. I was forced to acknowledge the source of my inner damage — and then to start taking painful steps to find healing.

When people try to restore old houses, they often take shortcuts. They put plasterboard and paint and new flooring over problems that are left in place. They sometimes spend a lot of money for work that just covers up the underlying faults that can be temporarily hidden. It’s not a wise investment, but people often get away with it. At least for awhile.

The alternative is expensive and time-consuming. It can require stripping everything back to the core of the building and fixing problems with the foundation or the support structure.

If you compare the two processes, one will appear to be making progress more quickly. If you just cover up the problems and make everything look nice with new wood and paint and flooring, a house can look great in a week or two.

But if you look at a house which is having foundational issues dealt with, it will look like a mess after the same week or two. You’ll see walls and floors torn out and you’ll see all the rotten wood and crumbling bricks exposed.

It’s the same way with people.

It’s easy to cover up problems. It’s easy to keep pretending that everything’s fine. And if you play the game just right, everybody will think you’re fine — or they won’t say anything if they suspect otherwise — and you can carry on as a depressed and dysfunctional and angry person inside. The internal details can take a million different forms, but nobody has to know about the demons inside of you.

If you invest the time and effort to really fix the underlying problems, that’s almost certainly going to be obvious to a lot of people. Others are going to know that you have issues. What’s worse, your emotional condition will probably look pretty unhealthy for awhile. Breaking down the damage requires tearing down the walls that you’ve used to hide from everyone.

But once you get that honest — with yourself and others — nothing will be the same. The repair process will be long and difficult. But when you get finished, you will be an emotionally healthy person who is at peace with yourself and with those you choose to love.

When I was young, I tried the “cover up” procedures. I thought that was all I needed. But new paint and floors didn’t fix things. I had to dig more deeply and find far more serious problems. I had to be honest — with myself and with others — about how damaged I was.

I’ve been going through a rough period for the last few weeks. I often feel like this as I’m breaking through another layer of internal resistance, after which I sometimes find the freedom to make changes I’ve needed to make. I couldn’t find that freedom without going through this painful (and often depressing) process.

Right now, I feel like walking away from something in my life. There are things I know I still need to change — which I haven’t allowed myself to change — and something in me feels like simply saying, “I quit,” whether it makes sense or not.

Everything about this would be easier for me if I were still in that place — where I was long ago — when I was in denial about how much needed to change. Lying to myself — and causing pain for those around me — was far easier, but all it did was set me up to keep hurting myself and others.

If you fix the foundational problems in a house, you’ll have a building which will last longer and will be worth more money in the long run. If you don’t fix the building’s core problems, you’re just setting yourself up for unexpected catastrophe when you can least expect it.

The same is true for a person or for a relationship. Dealing with core problems isn’t easy. It isn’t alway pleasant. But it’s the only way to be emotionally healthy and happy.

If a house or a person is worth saving, it’s worth doing the job right. It will take longer that way. It will have a higher cost. It will expose a lot of ugly issues along the way.

But the rebirth waiting at the end makes it all worthwhile.

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Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

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