You’re Not Broken. You’re Just Carrying Too Much.
There’s a moment in almost every therapy session when someone looks at me and says, “I know this probably sounds crazy, but…”
And I always want to say: It doesn’t. It sounds human.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve started treating the signs of being human - sadness, overwhelm, grief, disconnection - as symptoms of being broken.
Constant self-optimisation, emotional polish, resilience, and the pressure to do more while being less have quietly become the values we live by. We seem to have forgotten what it truly means to be human. Yes, emotions are (apparently) welcomed, but only when they’re neatly packaged, curated, and presented in a way that makes sense to others, without making anyone too uncomfortable.
The message is subtle but persistent: you should cope better, feel less, bounce back faster, and never need too much. The expectations creep in slowly, quietly. We don’t even notice that what we’ve normalised is, in fact, not normal at all.
And then life happens. Inevitably. We lose a loved one, a pet, a job. We collapse under the strain of juggling a demanding career while trying to be a good parent, partner, friend. We’re tired. Overstretched. Over-burdened. And beginning to lose sight of what we’re even striving for.
We look at our life and panic because all we can see are the wheels coming off. We turn inward, and instead of seeing our anxiety, numbness, or ambivalence as a human experience, we see it as a flaw. We label ourselves as broken, faulty, or in need of fixing. We wonder, What’s wrong with me? And with a quick scroll or Google search, we add a few more labels: Depressed, ADHD, Social Anxiety…
And that’s where shame steps in. It intensifies our pain and deepens our suffering.
Social researcher and author Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
Shame doesn’t just notice our human experiences, it warps them. It filters everything through a lens of self-condemnation.
“I feel anxious” becomes “I’m too sensitive.”
“I’m tired” becomes “I’m lazy.”
“I’m overwhelmed” becomes “I should be able to handle this.”
And because I believe I’m somehow bad, I must try harder, struggle more, just to meet standards that were never aligned with my humanness to begin with.
But what if you’re not broken?
What if, instead of pathologising yourself, you could see that you’re simply responding to impossible standards you were never meant to meet? That your emotions and symptoms are messengers, not here to hinder you, but to guide you gently back to what it means to be fully human.
Instead of judgment, you could meet yourself with compassion. With an “Oh… of course. Of course I feel anxious, given everything I’m holding.”
When you hold yourself to impossible standards - always coping, always composed, always productive - it’s easy to start seeing very human experiences like sadness, anxiety, or disconnection as personal defects. But the truth is, these aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re signals that something in you is asking for care.
The problem isn’t that you feel too much. It’s that you’ve been taught you shouldn’t. The more you begin to understand this, the less shame gets to run the show, and the more space you create for self-compassion, healing, and honest connection.