Are You Building Your House With All Your Bricks?

Have you ever noticed that when you avoid difficult or painful experiences, you’re also quietly narrowing your options in life? It feels like a reasonable trade at the time — step away from the discomfort, feel better in the moment. But there’s a cost that’s easy to miss.

Let me share a metaphor I find really useful for thinking about this.

Life is like building a house.

You have plenty of construction material — bricks — lying around. These bricks are your experiences: your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. Some of them are clean and pleasant. They represent the good times, the warm feelings, the memories that make you smile.

But then there are the other bricks. They look a little rough. Maybe dirty. You’re not even sure you trust them. These represent the harder things — painful thoughts, difficult memories, uncomfortable feelings and sensations. They’re there whether you want them to be or not.

So what happens when you decide to only build with the nice bricks?

You have less material to work with. Your house ends up smaller. And here’s the part that really gets me — sometimes the nice bricks are sitting right next to a pile of painful ones, or even underneath them. If you won’t go near the difficult bricks, those good ones become off limits too. Your house gets smaller still.

Maybe you’re okay with a smaller house for a while. But what happens when you want to leave? All those painful bricks are still scattered around outside. You’d have to walk over them, or past them. Before long, you might find yourself trapped — living inside a house built from only the good stuff, unable to move freely in your own life.

That’s a pretty significant trade-off.

Now imagine something different.

What if you were willing to work with all your bricks — the pleasant and the painful alike? Suddenly the house gets bigger. You can walk out the front door. You have room to expand, to grow, to go places you couldn’t reach before.

This is at the heart of what I work with in my practice. The goal isn’t to get rid of the hard experiences — it’s to stop letting them wall you in. When we learn to make room for the full range of what life hands us, we get access to a much bigger life.

I explore this idea in this video — I’d love to hear how this resonates with your own experience.

If you want to find out more about my approach call me at 510-761-6706. You can also email me at . I serve the Santa Cruz, San Jose, Los Gatos, Soquel, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and Aptos area. I work with Adults and Teens and I have been in the mental health field for nearly 20 years.