Some Doors Don't Need to Be Kicked Down. They Need to Stop Being Opened.

Let’s be real about something.

We have become remarkably good at identifying everything outside ourselves that has power over us. The government. The economy. Our childhood. Our parents. The church. Corporations. Algorithms. Our ex. Our boss. The price of groceries. The political party currently pissing us off. The culture. The patriarchy. Our trauma. Our diagnosis. Mercury retrograde probably gets dragged into the lineup somewhere too.

Some of those things genuinely affect us. Systems can be unjust. People can abuse power. Childhood trauma can follow us for decades. Economic conditions absolutely change what families can afford, and governments make decisions that have real consequences. Pretending otherwise would be intellectually lazy.

But there is another form of powerlessness that nobody particularly enjoys talking about.

Sometimes the thing fucking up your life isn’t oppressing you. You keep opening the door and letting it in.

Psychology has language for pieces of this. An external locus of control develops when we increasingly experience our lives as being determined by forces outside ourselves. Learned helplessness can emerge when repeated experiences of powerlessness teach us that our actions don’t matter, even after circumstances change and choices become available again. We can also externalize responsibility because blaming something outside ourselves temporarily protects us from the discomfort of confronting what is within our control.

The uncomfortable word in all of this is agency.

Agency doesn’t mean everything that happened to you was your choice. God, no. There are doors that were kicked down. People violate boundaries. Children don’t choose their childhoods. Betrayal isn’t invited simply because you trusted somebody. Violence, abuse, illness, loss and tragedy are not personal-development assignments we secretly manifested because our vibration was off on Tuesday.

Sometimes somebody really did break into the house.

But once we understand the difference, we also have to become brave enough to notice the doors we keep opening.

You already know porn leaves you disconnected from actual intimacy, but tonight you open it again. You know gambling activates something in you that has nothing to do with entertainment anymore, but the casino app is still on your phone. Weed stopped being something you occasionally enjoyed and became the only way you know how to tolerate an ordinary evening. Alcohol keeps creating mornings you regret, yet somehow Friday keeps becoming an excellent reason to start over Monday.

Then there are the addictions we don’t call addictions because they arrive with free shipping.

Food. Shopping. Scrolling. Rage. Gossip. Validation. Work. Sex. Attention. Gaming. News. Even self-help can become compulsive. You can spend so much time trying to heal yourself that eventually being wounded becomes your primary hobby.

That last one probably stepped on somebody’s toes.

Good.

Because human beings are ingenious at converting avoidance into something socially acceptable. We don’t say, I’m terrified of sitting quietly with myself. We say we’re busy. We don’t say, I am compulsively checking whether other people approve of me. We call it engagement. We don’t say, I keep consuming content that makes me furious because outrage gives me a biochemical jolt. We say we’re staying informed.

Sometimes we’re not staying informed. We’re marinating.

The same thing can happen with medicine, and nuance matters here. Medication can save lives. Western medicine is extraordinary at many things, and needing medication is not a moral failure. There are conditions for which the responsible choice is absolutely to see a physician and take the damn medicine.

But medicine cannot do every kind of healing for us. A pill cannot establish a boundary, repair a marriage, make us sleep eight hours when we refuse to go to bed, process grief we’ve avoided for fifteen years, remove the alcohol we’re pouring on top of anxiety, create friendships, exercise our bodies, forgive somebody, give our lives meaning, or make decisions we’ve spent three years refusing to make. Sometimes we desperately want relief without wanting to confront the conditions repeatedly creating distress.

That is another door.

Our brains make this especially interesting because repeated behaviors don’t remain equally difficult forever. Reward and reinforcement help behaviors become increasingly automatic. Cues begin triggering routines before we’ve consciously decided what to do. The phone buzzes and the hand moves. Anxiety rises and the drink gets poured. Loneliness arrives and the old number gets called. Shame shows up and suddenly we’re standing in front of the refrigerator looking for something that definitely isn’t in there.

Eventually the doorway becomes so familiar that we stop noticing ourselves walking through it.

This is where compassion matters, but compassion cannot mean pretending we have no responsibility. Trauma may explain why a door feels irresistible. Attachment wounds may explain why you keep returning to someone who hurts you. Addiction changes reward, motivation and decision-making in ways that make “just stop” spectacularly useless advice. Understanding those mechanisms should make us less judgmental.

It should not make us less interested in freedom.

I think spiritually there is something even more interesting happening here.

Christianity has long used the language of strongholds, temptation, captivity and guarding the heart. You don’t have to turn every bad habit into a demon hiding behind the sofa to recognize the wisdom underneath that language. What we repeatedly permit can eventually gain influence. What begins as something we visit occasionally can become something we organize our lives around.

That is why I’m increasingly interested in the idea of access.

What gets access to my mind every morning? What gets access to my body? What gets access to my sexuality? What gets access to my marriage? What gets access to my imagination? What gets access to the part of me that decides what is normal, desirable, frightening or true?

We guard our houses more carefully than we guard our consciousness. We lock the front door, install cameras, create passwords, enable two-factor authentication and then hand our minds to an algorithm for four hours and let whoever paid the most money decorate the place.

That’s fucking weird when you think about it.

And somewhere inside all of this sits one of the strangest contradictions in modern culture. We say we want peace, love, acceptance, community and human connection while repeatedly consuming things that train us toward suspicion, contempt, tribalism and hatred.

We say we want unity and then spend three hours reading why half the country is stupid.

We say we want a better marriage and feed our resentment more consistently than our affection. We want our children emotionally healthy while modeling constant distraction. We want confidence while rehearsing comparison. We want peace while consuming outrage before our feet touch the floor in the morning.

At some point we have to stop pretending we don’t participate in the environments that shape us.

And yes, if I were looking for something spiritually dark in modern life, the relentless encouragement to divide human beings into camps and teach them to despise one another would certainly get my attention. Call it spiritual warfare, tribal psychology, propaganda, algorithmic incentives, human ego, or some ugly cocktail of all five. Hatred becomes remarkably easy to sell once you convince people that the person across from them isn’t merely wrong but dangerous, disgusting or less human.

The antidote isn’t pretending differences don’t matter.

It’s refusing to surrender your humanity while confronting them.

Free will isn’t the guarantee that nothing influences us. It means influence isn’t necessarily the final authority. We still get choices, although some are harder than others. We choose what we consume. We choose many of the rooms we enter. We choose which conversations continue. We decide whether to click, pour, purchase, text, swallow, watch, return, rehearse or walk away.

Not perfectly. Not without help. Sometimes not without therapy, recovery programs, medication, community, prayer, treatment or somebody physically sitting beside us while we make a different choice.

But choice matters.

Maybe that’s why real healing becomes uncomfortable after a while. In the beginning, healing often requires discovering what happened to us. We name the wound, understand the pattern and finally have compassion for the person who learned to survive it.

Eventually another question arrives.

Now that you know, what are you going to keep allowing?

That’s where the inner child and the adult self finally have to meet. The child can say, This is why I’m afraid. The adult gets to answer, I believe you. And I’m not giving fear the keys anymore.

One part of you may still want to open the door. That doesn’t mean you have to.

Some things in life absolutely do break in. Some battles find us without permission, and pretending otherwise is cruel.

But other things have been knocking for years because we keep answering.

Maybe freedom begins when we finally recognize the sound, walk toward the door, put our hand on the lock and realize something almost embarrassingly powerful:

I don’t have to open this anymore.

→Before you blame the world for what keeps disturbing your peace, take inventory of the doors you’re still opening.

What do you already know doesn’t belong in your life anymore, but you keep giving it access anyway? Maybe it’s a person. A substance. A website. An app. A habit. A conversation. An old resentment. A way of thinking. A version of yourself you’ve already outgrown.

No shame. No bullshit. Just responsibility.

What’s one door you already know you need to stop opening?

You don’t have to tell me what it is if it’s too personal. But maybe today is a good day to finally admit it to yourself.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.