You Can't Fix What You Won't Admit Is Broken

Human beings can have their lives falling apart around their ears and still put the kettle on as evidence that everything is basically fine.

We are astonishingly good at carrying on—even while using the same hammer, hitting the same thumb and wondering why it still bloody hurts.

It isn't always obvious to the person living it.

From the outside, though?

Sometimes I can see it a mile off.

I can see someone doing the same thing repeatedly, getting the same miserable result, becoming frustrated that nothing changes, and then doing exactly the same bloody thing again.

Different day. Same hammer.

There is a saying associated with psychologist Abraham Maslow:

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.

And I think that describes a lot of the coping mechanisms we pick up throughout life.

We find something that gets us through one horrible situation and our brain thinks, Excellent. That worked. We'll use that forever.

Except sometimes the thing that helped you survive twenty years ago is now absolutely fucking your life up.

Denial Is Surprisingly Efficient

Denial gets a bad reputation, but there is a reason humans do it.

It protects us.

When something is too frightening, painful, shameful or overwhelming to deal with, the mind has a remarkable ability to put a wall around it.

Nothing to see here.

I'm fine.

They're the problem.

It wasn't that bad.

I can stop whenever I want.

I'll deal with it later.

And for a while, denial can actually help you function.

The problem comes when the emergency is over but the wall stays standing.

Eventually there can be an enormous pile of unresolved shit sitting behind it.

I speak from experience.

One of the first things I learned through AA was that I had to become honest with myself.

Not slightly honest.

Not the carefully edited version of honesty where you admit the bits that make you look reasonably sympathetic.

Actually honest.

And once I did that, the wall of denial came down.

Boom.

And behind it was an absolute nightmare.

I could suddenly see where my life was heading if I continued doing what I was doing.

It wasn't dramatic imagination. It was simply the logical continuation of the road I was already travelling.

And there was no possible way I could fix myself while continuing down that same path.

So I changed it.

Not one convenient little section.

Pretty much every last bit.

Sometimes You Have to Admit You're the Dick

This might be one of the least fashionable pieces of mental-health advice available, but occasionally you have to consider the possibility that you might be part of the problem.

I know. Outrageous.

We naturally want explanations that make us feel comfortable.

They did this.

My childhood caused that.

This happened to me.

My brain works this way.

And all of those things can be completely true.

Understanding why you behave in a particular way is enormously important.

But understanding something isn't the same as having permission to keep doing it forever.

Sometimes growth involves saying:

I handled that badly.

I hurt somebody.

I keep repeating this.

I'm avoiding something.

I'm frightened.

I'm drinking too much.

I'm angry all the time.

I need help.

Or simply:

I've been a bit of a dick.

Oddly enough, that can be incredibly freeing.

Because once something belongs to you, you can actually do something about it.

Talking Is Not Weakness

Therapy matters enormously to me, but I don't think every useful conversation has to happen in a therapist's office.

Sometimes the first crack in that wall comes from simply talking honestly to another human being you trust.

Not performing.

Not pretending.

Not giving them the polished version.

Actually telling somebody what is going on inside your head.

There is something powerful about taking a thought that has been rattling around inside you for years and finally saying it aloud.

Once words are outside your head, you can examine them.

Someone else can question them.

You might even hear yourself saying something and suddenly think:

Jesus Christ. Why am I doing this?

That's useful.

We need people in our lives with whom we can be honest enough to say the ugly things as well as the respectable ones.

People who won't simply agree with everything we say.

People who can love us and still occasionally say:

Emma, that's bollocks.

Those people are valuable.

Seventeen Years and Counting

I started therapy after getting sober.

I'm still in therapy seventeen years later.

That isn't because therapy failed.

Quite the opposite.

My past doesn't disappear because I understand it.

Things happened. They shaped me. My brain learned ways of surviving them. Some of those adaptations were useful once and completely useless later.

There was also, as previously mentioned, rather a spectacular pile of shit behind that wall.

Seventeen years apparently wasn't excessive.

😂

Fortunately, I eventually found the right therapist for me.

And that matters.

A good therapist isn't somebody who just sits there nodding sympathetically while you tell them everybody else is terrible.

Sometimes mine feels more like a supervisor.

I have a habit of taking other people's problems onto my own shoulders. If somebody I care about is struggling, I want to help. I analyse, problem-solve, support, research and generally start carrying bits of their emotional luggage around with me.

That's fine up to a point.

But I need somewhere to put it back down.

Otherwise I'll eventually need institutionalising and she'll have created considerably more paperwork for herself.

So therapy is also maintenance.

A place where I can unpack things, examine what belongs to me, recognise what doesn't, and make sure I'm not quietly filling myself up with everybody else's problems.

Coping Isn't Always Healing

This is probably the biggest thing I've learned.

Coping and healing are not the same thing.

Alcohol was coping.

Avoidance was coping.

Denial was coping.

Shutting things away was coping.

Some behaviours genuinely helped me survive situations when I didn't have better tools available.

I don't hate myself for developing them.

But surviving with something doesn't mean you have to keep using it forever.

Sometimes we become so accustomed to our coping mechanisms that we stop noticing them.

We think they're our personality.

That's just how I am.

Maybe.

But sometimes “that's just how I am” really means:

That's what I've always done because nobody ever showed me another way.

Therapy gave me more tools.

Sobriety gave me more tools.

Talking honestly gave me more tools.

Understanding psychology gave me more tools.

Experience gave me more tools.

And the more tools I gained, the less often I needed that bloody hammer.

The Wall Has to Come Down Eventually

I understand why people stay in denial.

I really do.

Because when that wall comes down, you don't necessarily discover a lovely tidy room behind it with inspirational quotes and a houseplant.

Sometimes there is carnage.

You might have to look at childhood trauma, addiction, relationships, grief, behaviour, fear, shame, anger, mistakes or years spent living in ways that weren't actually making you happy.

That's frightening.

But the mess was already there.

Seeing it didn't create it.

Seeing it simply means you finally have a chance to deal with it.

And you don't have to deal with the entire pile at once.

I certainly didn't.

You take one thing.

You understand it.

You work on it.

You learn something.

Then eventually you notice something else underneath.

Apparently the human psyche is the world's most annoying archaeological dig.

But slowly, things change.

Honesty Comes First

Before therapy could help me, before sobriety could really work, before I could change anything meaningful, I had to stop lying to myself.

That was the beginning.

Not becoming perfect.

Not understanding everything.

Just becoming honest enough to say:

This isn't working anymore.

Those may be some of the most important words a person can ever say.

Because once you can say them, you can ask the next question:

What might work instead?

And that's when things can finally start changing.

The Girl Who Split to Survive

Before I could understand why I had built so many walls, I had to understand what they had once protected me from.

In The Girl Who Split to Survive, I tell the deeper story of the trauma behind those coping mechanisms, the extraordinary ways my mind kept me alive and what it took to begin facing the truth.

It is not a tidy story about becoming magically fixed. It is an honest one about survival, denial, memory and learning that coping is not always the same as healing.

Read Emma’s story

The Girl Who Split to Survive

A raw memoir about trauma, survival and the mind's extraordinary ways of coping.

View the book on Amazon UK ↗