Sometimes in therapy, I use the metaphor that our work is like inner architecture. Imagine walking into an old house you’ve just bought. Perhaps there’s a wall cutting awkwardly through the middle of a room, or an addition out back that looks like somebody built it over a long weekend, and as you take a look at the baseboards, you wonder if it’s safe to stand precisely where you’re standing. Your first instinct might be to fix what looks wrong. But before you start swinging a sledgehammer, it’s likely a wise move to learn more about what is actually holding the place up.
I think therapy could use a healthy dose of that same approach. People often meet with a therapist armed with a list of things they’d like to stop doing: overthinking, working too much, shutting down when things get emotional, needing to be in control, putting everyone else first. And it makes sense. We are taught to believe these patterns are mistakes, glitches in the system that should have been corrected by now. But what if they’re not glitches, but rather adaptations? What if this thing you want to get rid of is actually doing some important work to support you?
I spent a lot of my life thinking that my drive was just part of my personality. I’m ambitious. I work hard. I like doing difficult things. All of that is true. But when I started getting more curious about that drive, I could see some of the structure underneath it. I loved performing as a kid, and those performances were also some of the moments when I felt the full force of my family’s attention. I did well in school and was praised for that too. Nobody sat me down and told me that achievement was the price of admission for love, nor do I believe that was what my family intended. But children are very good at noticing patterns, and one pattern I learned early was that doing well was a reliable way to feel seen. Over time, that pattern became part of my inner architecture.
But I Like My Structures
The tricky part is that these structures often work. That’s why they last.
Drive can build careers, get us through school, help us survive instability, and carry us through periods of life that ask more of us than we thought we could give. Self-reliance can keep us moving when other people have let us down. Emotional distance can help us get through experiences that feel too overwhelming to deal with in the moment. Overthinking can create a sense of control when the world feels less predictable than we’d like. These things don’t emerge because we’re defective or broken. More often, they emerge because some part of us figured out a way to keep going.
Putting Curiosity Before Correction
That’s one reason that as a therapist I’m not interested in prescribing what needs to shift. I’ve spent enough time trying to evoke change in clients to know that people generally don’t move because someone else has decided they should. They move when something begins to make sense from the inside. That idea sits at the heart of motivational interviewing, an approach that I draw from to help people investigate change with curiosity rather than trying to convince them they’re wrong.
I find that stance to be incredibly useful, even beyond any one therapeutic model. Curiosity creates room. It lets us ask what a pattern has done for us before we ask what it’s costing us. It also lets us consider whether change needs to mean demolition.
If self-reliance has protected you for years, no one needs to pry it out of your hands. If achievement has helped you build a life you value, there’s no prize for becoming less ambitious. If shutting down emotionally helped you make it through something difficult, I’d say it deserves a little more respect than just being labeled a problem. The point isn’t to shame the strategy. The point is to understand the structure well enough to know whether it still serves the life you’re living now.
When Change Becomes Emergent
Old patterns often keep working long after the cost of running them has become too high. Maybe your drive still gets results, but you can no longer rest without feeling guilty. Maybe independence still protects you from disappointment, but it also keeps you from being fully seen by the people who love you. Maybe shutting down still protects you from being overwhelmed, but it keeps you from feeling things you actually want to feel.
Dissatisfaction can be useful information. It doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes it’s just the first crack that lets you see how the structure is functioning.
From there, maybe you do decide the house needs a gut renovation. Maybe you determine the foundation could use some reinforcement. Maybe you discover that the strange wall in the middle of the room is load-bearing and decide to leave it alone. What matters is that we begin to understand the structures we’re living inside.
The goal isn’t to tear down everything that got us here. It’s to have enough awareness that allows us some say in what we keep, what we change, and what we build next.
