What If Nothing Is Wrong With You?
By Ryan Snodgrass, LMFT, LPCC
We spend so much of our time trying to figure out what’s wrong with us.
Why do I overthink everything? Why do I keep shutting down when I think people are upset with me? Why can’t I keep a relationship? Why can’t I just…? Some of this comes from genuine curiosity and a desire for growth or change, but underneath these questions often lives a quiet assumption: something is wrong with me.
Most of the clients I have worked with over the years have held this belief- some with the message reverberating in their minds and others with it sitting just beneath conscious thought. Either way, it impacts the way we view ourselves, our experiences, and even our path forward. If there is something wrong with me, then I need to change. If I am broken or damaged, then I need fixing.
But what if it’s not that at all? What if there is often nothing wrong with you, but something deeply wrong with the experiences or environments you’ve had to live through? What if, given what you’ve experienced, what you’ve learned, the relationships that shaped you, the resources you had access to, and what your body has had to navigate, your responses make sense?
What if even the patterns that are sometimes most painful make sense in the context of your life?
Your Responses Make Sense
Humans are profoundly adaptive.
We learn through our experiences. We discover what helps us keep others close and what pushes them away. We learn when it is safe to speak, to share, or even simply be seen. We learn whether support is truly accessible, if mistakes are tolerated, if rest is allowed, or if being ourselves is welcomed or threatens our sense of belonging.
Our bodies learn, too. They learn what deserves attention. What is dangerous. When to mobilize, how to disappear, and when letting our guard down feels possible. And then we carry that learning throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry it in ways that still serve us. Sometimes in ways that no longer do. We learn ways to protect ourselves and exist in this world, and sometimes what once served us eventually becomes a barrier or creates more pain than peace.
The person who learned to anticipate everyone else’s needs may become extraordinarily attuned to the people around them. That attunement may have helped them prepare for others’ responses or understand how they needed to show up. It might also prevent them from understanding their own needs, creating space for themselves, or showing up authentically now.
The person who had to become fiercely independent may have supported themselves through seasons when others weren’t reliable, available, or safe. They may also deeply desire connection and wonder why they struggle to let others in.
None of these responses appeared out of nowhere. They developed in context. They served a purpose. And often, when we live through unhealthy or painful circumstances, the protective response is the healthy response.
Of course they make sense.
“Of Course” Is Different From “It’s Fine”
Understanding why something makes sense is different from pretending it doesn’t hurt us, come at a cost, or need to change.
The patterns we develop to protect ourselves can also be the same patterns that hinder us later. We can avoid things we deeply want. We can hurt others. We can organize our lives around preventing experiences from our past. We can become so good at surviving a particular environment that we struggle to recognize when we are no longer in it.
Context doesn’t remove responsibility, and it doesn’t deny the hurt. Context helps create a bridge toward self-compassion, self-understanding, and letting go of self-blame or perceived defectiveness.
We can understand why we withdraw when conflict happens and learn to stay present. We can understand why letting love in is difficult and open ourselves to the experiences and relationships we desire.
Acknowledging that our patterns and responses make sense is different from letting them stay the same. It simply gives us a different place from which to begin.
When Growth Begins With Rejection
Many of us have learned to approach our healing through dissatisfaction with ourselves.
We don’t see ourselves as calm enough, secure enough, confident enough. We need to be less needy, less complicated, less reactive. We turn ourselves into a project. And therapy can become another place we do it.
We can walk into a therapy room with an invisible list of things we’d like to eradicate within ourselves and call the process growth. Many of our goals start with fix, change, remove, or eliminate. Each can carry a message of threat to our system and inadequate to our psyche. There is a meaningful difference between wanting more for ourselves and believing we have to become someone different to be acceptable.
Growth doesn’t require us to reject the version of ourselves who learned how to survive. And sometimes, the very thing we’re trying hardest to get rid of is simply asking to be understood and honored before being asked to retire.
From “What’s Wrong With Me?” to “What’s Happening Here?”
“What is wrong with me?” already contains an implicit assumption: Something.
Something is wrong with me. But what if we instead approached ourselves with curiosity and compassion?
What happens within me when this occurs?
How has this served me?
What am I protecting myself from?
What do I need that I don’t yet have access to?
And perhaps one of my favorites: Where did I learn to believe something is wrong with me? Whose voice was that before it sounded like my own?
Of course I would take that on. Of course closeness is difficult when it hasn’t always been consistent, available, or safe. Of course I have difficulty resting when my worth was tied to my achievements. Of course.
It is not that I cannot grow or that everything I do is okay. It isn’t that these responses are still necessary. It’s simply acknowledging: of course this came from somewhere. And many of us haven’t been taught how to thrive outside of the environments we once had to survive.
We Are Allowed to Learn Something New
There is something hopeful about seeing our responses as adaptations rather than defects. Adaptations can change. And we can honor the creativity and intelligence of something that helped us survive a season of life without allowing it to run every season.
There are a few things I find myself often saying in this work:
How resourceful that you were able to figure out a way to make it through that.
You are a human who had an understandable human response to profoundly painful circumstances.
There is nothing wrong with you.
Instead of rejecting that response, what if we thank it for what it had to do and let it know it can rest and retire now?
My wish for you is not that you change, but that you become more yourself than ever.
Who you are and how you’ve learned to show up are not the same.
I believe this work often begins with increasing access to ourselves- our real selves. Not the critical voice in our head that sounds like us. Not the expectations we’ve inherited. Not the masks we’ve worn for the sake of connection. It’s connecting to the part of us that knows we did what we had to do, knows we want more, and can allow us to graciously retire old patterns as we welcome in what we truly want.
When we have greater access to ourselves- when we can experience ourselves like our most trusted friend- we can still call ourselves up without shaming ourselves along the way. We can have compassion for the imperfect path of growth. When we find ourselves anxious, withdrawing, needing reassurance, or responding in ways we once judged, we can hold our own hand.
Compassion will get us further than shame ever will. And compassion begins with understanding, acknowledgment, and simply considering the possibility that there was never anything wrong with you.
What If Nothing Is Wrong With You?
There will always be parts of ourselves we want to understand more, patterns we want to change, or ways we want to grow. That’s part of being a self-aware human. But changing a pattern is different from changing self.
Changing me implies there is something wrong with me. Changing a pattern acknowledges that the pattern no longer aligns with or works for who I am now. And approaching growth that way makes the path feel a whole lot more like self-love than self-critique.
So what if we stop asking What is wrong with me? and instead ask:
Where did I learn this?
How does this serve me?
What does it cost me?
What else is possible?
The work doesn’t have to begin with deciding there is something fundamentally wrong with the person doing it. It can begin with recognizing that we want more. That we deserve more.
It can begin by looking at ourselves, our histories, our bodies, and the ways we’ve learned to move through the world and saying:
Of course. And then, we get to decide what comes next.
About the Author
Ryan Snodgrass, LMFT, LPCC, is the founder of EMBER Therapy & Wellness in Carlsbad, California. She specializes in experiential, relational, and somatic approaches to therapy, integrating Somatic Experiencing®, psychodrama, psychodramatic bodywork, EMDR, and other experiential practices in her work with individuals, couples, and families.
