If you have been one of my clients, or even just been around me, you know I have several catchphrases, so let’s break down another Melodie-ism. One of my favorites, and one I keep reminding people of, is “That is an explanation, not an excuse.” I find myself saying that to at least one client a day—and to my friends outside of work as well.
If you are female, or assigned female at birth/socialized as female, you may notice yourself taking part in an age-old tradition of hand-waving away bad behavior that is pointed in your direction. Things like “he’s only mean to you because he likes you,” “you know how your grandma is,” or “that’s just the way life is, you need to get thicker skin” may be repeated to you throughout your life to excuse other people’s bad behavior. The more you hear things like this in your day-to-day life, the more likely you are to internalize the message: “It doesn’t actually matter as long as someone has a good enough reason for what they do.”
Let’s take the example: “He is only mean to you because he likes you.” When we tell girls that cruelty or aggression is evidence that a boy likes them, we teach them something about what they should tolerate in relationships. That becomes particularly concerning when we consider the prevalence of dating violence among adolescent girls. In an analysis of the 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, Clayton et al. (2023) found that female high school students who dated reported significantly higher rates of physical and sexual teen dating violence than male students who dated.
“You know how Grandma is” can become a way of excusing racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful comments because we’ve decided that we can’t reasonably expect someone past a certain age to grow or change. While I think it is appropriate to be aware of who people are and what they believe, I don’t think it’s fair to ignore those beliefs and subject yourself to them.
So where does this turn from explanation to excuse? “Grandma grew up in a different time” may be an explanation. It may help me understand why Grandma believes what she believes. It does not mean I have to sit quietly while Grandma says racist things at Thanksgiving. Likewise, “My partner grew up in a family where everyone yelled” may explain why yelling feels normal to them. It might even help me be more compassionate about how they learned to communicate. It doesn’t make it okay for them to scream at me.
You are not only allowed to have boundaries; you are supposed to have them. You get to decide how you will allow people to treat you, who belongs in your inner circle, and who gets invited to the Labor Day picnic. Both things can exist at the same time: someone else is allowed to make their own choices about who they are and how they behave, and you have agency in deciding whether you want that behavior in your life.
The problem with agency is that we don’t only exercise it in response to other people’s behavior. We also have agency over what we do once we understand our own.
It can be natural, when we start processing trauma, healing, growing, and adding coping skills to our lives in therapy, to incorporate our diagnoses into the way we understand who we are as people. “I’m anxious.” “I’m traumatized.” “I’m depressed.” Or what have you. It’s an important part of the healing journey to understand what is going on and how our mental health affects our day-to-day lives, rather than ignoring our symptoms or the ways they affect us. There can be enormous relief in finally having language for experiences that previously felt confusing, overwhelming, or uniquely ours. But an explanation can become a problem when we begin treating it as a fixed definition of who we are or as a reason we cannot be expected to change.
I hear this all the time from clients: “Well, I can’t do [insert healthy life change here] because I have [insert mental health symptom here].” Then they look at me like I’ve simultaneously asked them to climb Mount Everest on a pogo stick while changing their own oil.
To be clear, mental illness can absolutely make healthy changes harder. Depression can make getting out of bed feel monumental. Anxiety can make something objectively safe feel terrifying. Trauma can teach your nervous system to respond to the present as though you are still in the past. Understanding those things matters. They are explanations—and good ones.
But “this is harder for me” and “this is impossible for me” are not the same statement.
Here’s a two-for-one Melodie-ism: “Discomfort isn’t going to kill you.”
That doesn’t mean all discomfort is good, that you should ignore your limits, or that you need to white-knuckle your way through situations that are genuinely unsafe. But growth is often uncomfortable. Setting a boundary can be uncomfortable. Having a difficult conversation can be uncomfortable. Trying something your anxiety has convinced you to avoid can be extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes discomfort isn’t a warning that you need to stop; sometimes it’s simply the feeling of doing something differently.
Your anxiety may explain why making the phone call feels impossible. Your trauma may explain why setting a boundary makes your entire nervous system scream at you to take it back. Your depression may explain why completing a basic task requires far more energy than it seems like it should. Those explanations matter because they help us figure out what we need in order to move forward. They don’t necessarily mean we don’t move forward. Gaining insight into who you are ought to expand your choices, rather than serving as justification that you lack choices altogether.
The interesting thing about our brains is how much what we repeatedly tell them can shape what feels possible. The more we rehearse a certain belief to ourselves, the more it begins to feel like the ultimate truth about our lives. For example, the more our anxiety whispers, “No, that’s too hard. You can’t make that appointment,” the more our brains repeat, louder and louder, that making appointments simply isn’t possible for us.
We want to provide our brains with data that our anxiety is not always correct. I want you to be anxious when you’re walking through downtown Chicago alone at 2 a.m. I don’t want you to be anxious when you’re making a phone call. The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety completely; it’s to teach our brains to get better at recognizing when anxiety is useful and when it is giving us bad information.
If we continually avoid the phone call because we’re anxious, we reinforce the message that the phone call was dangerous enough to avoid. If we make the call while anxious and discover that we can tolerate the discomfort, we’ve given our brains a new piece of information: I was anxious, and I did it anyway.
Just as we can hold other people accountable by recognizing explanations without turning them into excuses, we need to hold ourselves to the same standard. Find the explanation. Understand yourself as deeply as you can. Learn why you respond the way you do, where those patterns came from, and what purpose they may have served. Then make the distinction between what explains your behavior and what actually needs to change—and, perhaps more importantly, what would be healthiest for you to change.
Understand the explanation. Take it seriously. Have compassion for it. And then decide what you’re going to do with that information.
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