You’re Allowed to Become

What if nothing is wrong with you?

I don’t mean there is nothing you want to change. Maybe there are patterns you’re tired of repeating. Maybe you want to show up differently in your relationships, take better care of yourself, slow down, speak up, let go, or finally do the thing you keep saying you’re going to do.

There may be plenty you want to change.

But wanting to change doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you.

I've learned as a therapist that we often confuse the two. When something about ourselves or our lives isn’t working, we turn it into evidence about who we are. We’re lazy. Undisciplined. Selfish. Too sensitive. Bad at relationships. Bad with money. Bad at taking care of ourselves.

Shame says: This is who you are.

And once we decide that we are the problem, the conversation gets pretty short. We have our answer. We are the problem. There’s something wrong with who we are.

Control responds: Then we need to get you under control.

So we reach for more discipline. More rules. Better routines. Less indulgence. Another promise that this time we’re really going to get our shit together.

There is nothing wrong with discipline. Sometimes we need structure. But it’s different when discipline grows from the belief that we’re a bad person who needs to be corrected.

And when control doesn’t work?

Punishment says: Maybe you haven’t felt bad enough yet.

We criticize ourselves. Deny ourselves rest. Replay our mistakes. Compare ourselves to people who seem to be doing better. We imagine that if we can become disappointed enough in ourselves, maybe we’ll finally change.

But shame has already told us the ending: This is who you are.

We shame ourselves in the name of change and sometimes end up shaming ourselves into never evolving.

There is an alternative: curiosity.

Curiosity asks: What happened? How did we get here?

Why do I respond this way? What does this do for me? What am I protecting myself from? Where did I learn this? What am I afraid might happen if I changed?

These questions open the conversation back up. They give us room to evolve.

Understanding who we are and how we arrived at our behaviors gives us more choice about what we do differently in the future. We can understand that something made sense for us once without deciding it has to make sense for us forever.

This is one reason I don’t think therapy has to begin with something being wrong.

Therapy can be a place to understand the person you have become and decide, intentionally, who you want to be next.

Because sometimes the person we want to become scares us.

What if I’m less productive? What if I stop being the dependable one? What if I disappoint someone? What if I want more? What if I want less? What if the person I’m becoming doesn’t make sense to the people who know the person I’ve been?

There can be safety in staying who we have always been, even when that person no longer fits.

Love concludes: You are allowed to become.

Loving ourselves doesn’t require us to believe everything we do is fine. It means believing we are worthy now and capable of change.

When we decide we are broken, we make ourselves fixed things. But people aren’t fixed. We learn. We adapt. We change. We become.

You can be imperfect without being defective.

You can love who you are and still want something different.

You can be worthy now and still be becoming.

What might you give yourself permission to become?

Author’s note: The ideas and final writing are my own. I use AI as a tool in my writing process for brainstorming, editing, and refining my work.