We swim in the language of brokenness. It shows up everywhere, in expressions of blame and shame, in the culture of healing, and in performance reviews that read like a list of what is wrong with us.
But wholeness lives somewhere else.
My coach and I were exploring the lifetime of trauma that led me downward to prison when he said,
“Let’s stop trying to fix Doug.”
I saw the decisions I made and why I made them, and suddenly the power flowed in. I saw my actions rather than my brokenness or my shame, and I saw what those decisions were doing for me at the time I made them.
What if there were nothing to fix? What if I already have what I need inside me? That is the question I want to explore here: what life, work, and leadership look like when we move through the world deciding we are whole, including when we live with mental illness, substance use, and trauma.
Why We Reach for Fixing
Saying that a person is not broken could land as fiendishly insensitive, because much of my work, in trauma-informed leadership, regulated leadership, and more, hones in on the wound and on working through it.
Mental illness is real, and for many people it is devastating. It is also an avenue of growth, and a journey that inspires others. Substance use disorder is a vicious loop where the body and brain return to the drug or alcohol despite best intentions and best effort. People die inside it. If you have lost someone to addiction, or you are fighting your way out of it today, “you’re not broken” can sound like a denial of what you have lived.
People reach for the language of fixing for a good reason. The suffering is real, and fixing promises an end to it.
Recovering Wholeness
Trauma is where this becomes clearest. Trauma is a natural reaction to something beyond our ability to cope. The brain does what brains do, and the experience stays unresolved until there is an internal process of creating new expectations of the world.
One well-known theory of trauma describes it the same way. A traumatic event shatters our basic beliefs that the world is kind, that it makes sense, and that we are worthy. Recovery means rebuilding those beliefs.
We call that process healing. It is closer to recovery. Recovery means getting back something that was lost, and what we recover is wholeness, which was always at hand.
The same is true of addiction. Recovery is waiting, always there, always available once that pattern is interrupted and the brain heals past the point of relapse, even though the chance of relapse remains.
And it is true of mental illness. I still face mental health challenges. A person can live with an illness and still be whole, and therapy, medication, a certified peer, and a crisis line become tools a whole person picks up rather than repairs done to a broken one.
Living Whole
Living whole means my body’s reactions are normal and make sense. Much of what we call anxiety is an interpretation of what is happening inside us. We notice a sensation, we add meaning to it, usually something dire, and then we spin, or panic, or freeze. Thinking our way out rarely works for long. Calm one fear and another takes its place.
The alternative is noticing. I can live through the feelings and bodily sensations when I notice them. When I can’t do that on my own, I get help from a therapist. I’m still whole.
Working Whole
Working whole means my decisions are well intentioned, even when they cause consequences I didn’t want, and I am capable of learning from every one of them. There is no shame in the decisions and actions that cost me. They are part of a journey of growth and learning.
Responsibility grows from there. I am an empowered person who takes actions that create results. Sometimes those results impact others positively or negatively, and I must be responsible for that. Being whole is what makes me capable of that responsibility.
One study assessed nearly 500 people in a county jail and followed them for a year after release. Guilt says, “I did a bad thing.” Shame says, “I am bad.” The people who tended toward guilt were less likely to reoffend. Shame offered no such protection.
Stop fixing. Start living.
Leading Whole
This will show up for you as you lead others, whether you lead a nonprofit, a university, a foundation, or a company. It will be there when you model responsibility and treat others as whole. It will be there when you hold people to expectations and set boundaries. It will be there when you point the people you lead toward the resources available to them, such as an employee assistance program, a therapist, or a certified peer, instead of participating in their healing journey with them.
That can sound like blame. When I hear that, I say: “The harm someone else did to you belongs to them. What you do going forward belongs to you. I’m inviting you to be responsible for the impact you have, and there’s no judgment about you in that.”
It is the most empowered way to lead: holding people as whole, and as leaders who are capable. That’s radical. It becomes more powerful and more authentic when it comes from a leader who owns their own wholeness.
That is how we build leaders who build leaders.
If I’m not trying to fix me, then I’m living my own experiences. I’m feeling my feelings and learning from them. I’m making empowered choices that sometimes create phenomenal success and sometimes create failure for which I can be responsible.