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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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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