When clients come into session with a brand-new kind of pain, a loss they didn’t expect, a transition they can’t navigate, a feeling they don’t have a name for, they almost always say some version of the same sentence:
“I should know how to handle this by now.”
And every time, I want to ask them: who, exactly, taught you?
Children are humaning from scratch. They show up with no framework, no manual for being a person in a world that’s brand-new to them every day. So they improvise. They cry to ask for things. They throw food to see what happens. They try on emotions like clothes. They don’t know how to be human yet, and nobody expects them to. We call it development. We call it learning. We rarely call it what it actually is, which is building a self from raw ingredients.
But somewhere along the way, the rest of us picked up a kind of manual. We watched our parents. We absorbed what our families did with anger, with closeness, with money, with grief. We learned which feelings were welcome and which ones got us in trouble. We took in our culture’s rules, our friends’ opinions, our teachers’ moods. By the time we were grown, we had a working framework, a box mix of how to be a person.
A box mix is fine, by the way. It works most of the time. It tells you what to do when someone asks how you are, when your sister calls upset, when you’re stuck in traffic and want to scream. Most of daily life is box-mix work.
The trouble is what happens when the recipe runs out.
Because somewhere, and you’ll know when, you hit a moment your manual doesn’t cover. A grief that doesn’t behave the way grief is supposed to behave. A relationship that ends without warning. A parent who gets sick. A job that disappears. A diagnosis. A betrayal. A child who needs something you were never taught to give. The box mix calls for an ingredient nobody handed you.
And in that moment, you are doing exactly what children do. You’re humaning from scratch again.
Here is the part that hurts: kids do this without shame. They try, they flop, they try a different way, they cry about it, they take a nap, they try again. Nobody tells them they should have already known how to feel about a balloon popping. Adults don’t get that grace. Adults human from scratch with shame, because we believe that by now, we should have the recipe for everything.
So we do the most human thing of all. We decide the failure is ours.
We tell ourselves: I should have figured this out. Other people seem to know. I must be the broken one.
But almost every time that voice shows up, what’s actually happened is one of three things.
One: the manual was faulty. Sometimes the framework you were handed was wrong from the start. Someone gave you bad recipes, a model of love that wasn’t loving, a model of strength that was just suppression, a model of “respect” that was actually obedience. The recipe failed because the recipe was never any good. That isn’t your fault.
Two: the manual was real, but it wasn’t built for this. Sometimes the framework you have works beautifully for everything you’ve encountered up until this moment, and then this moment happens, and it just isn’t on the page. Most of us never get a recipe for acceptance. For grief. For watching a parent age. For loving someone whose values are starting to drift from yours. The manual isn’t broken. It’s just not built for the dish you’re cooking tonight.
Three: there isn’t a manual yet. Sometimes you are at a frontier nobody in your life has been to. Nobody handed you a recipe because nobody has one to give. You are inventing as you go. That isn’t proof you’re failing. That’s the actual nature of the task.
When you can’t tell which of those three is happening, the shame fills the gap. And shame doesn’t help you cook. Shame freezes you in the kitchen wondering what’s wrong with you while the stove goes cold.
So here’s what I want you to consider, in the same gentle way I’d ask in session:
The next time a piece of your life lands and you find yourself in that familiar pit of I should know this, what would change if you gave yourself some grace? What if going back to scratch isn’t a sign of breakdown but a sign that you’ve hit the edge of someone else’s recipe, and now you get to write your own?
What framework are you cooking from? Who instilled it? And can you change it?
Those are the three questions the rest of this work is quietly asking.