09 Apr What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
What if you didn’t need to be fixed?
So much of the writing about mental health and happiness is about identifying faults and failings and then, trying to fix them.
Now this isn’t a terrible idea. But what if there really wasn’t anything wrong with you? What if your perceived faults were, in fact, just normal parts of being an imperfect human?
If that were the case, maybe happiness is more about accepting who we are, really, and learning to live with and love that…
via TED Ideas by Daryl Chen
While asking this question won’t change your life, it can help pause your inner critic and create space for possibility, says therapist Susan Henkels.
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
Susan Henkels has worked as a psychotherapist for more than 45 years.That means she’s spent decades smiling and nodding, decades handing over tissues at the appropriate moment — and decades hearing people tell her all the things about themselves that need to be fixed.
One day, as she was listening to a patient take her through the “whole list of what was wrong with her,” says Henkels, “I thought in the middle of this litany, ‘What? There’s actually nothing wrong with her.’”
From that moment, she realized there is a surprising power to be found in prompting people to ask themselves, “What if there’s nothing wrong with me?”
…keep reading the full & original article HERE