What Is Wrong With Me?

You've asked Google this question. Maybe more than once. Late at night, after another fight, after another failure, after another moment where you looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the man staring back. "What is wrong with me?"

Here's the answer: nothing. Nothing is wrong with you. Something was done to you. And there's a world of difference between those two statements.

The Lie You Were Told

Somewhere along the way, someone convinced you that you are the problem. Your family. Your ex. Your boss. Your church. Maybe all of them. They didn't say it directly. They said it through looks, through silence, through punishment when you showed up as yourself. The message was clear: who you are is not acceptable.

So you edited yourself. You became quieter. Safer. More accommodating. You learned which version of you was allowed and you performed that version until you forgot there was ever another one. The real you got buried so deep that now, when you try to find him, all you feel is emptiness.

What Actually Happened

You were shaped by a system. Maybe a narcissistic family that needed a scapegoat. Maybe a father who was absent or abusive. Maybe a mother who was enmeshed. Maybe a church that taught you to suppress everything real and call it "dying to self." The system needed you to be small, so it made you small. And now you walk through life feeling small without understanding why.

The behaviors you hate about yourself, the passivity, the people-pleasing, the numbness, the anger that leaks out sideways, those aren't character flaws. They're adaptations. They're the strategies your child self developed to survive a system that wasn't safe. They worked then. They're destroying you now.

The Real Question

The question isn't "what is wrong with me?" The question is "what happened to me?" One question points inward at a defective self. The other points outward at a system that produced specific outcomes. Same man. Completely different frame.

When you shift from "I'm broken" to "I was broken by something," everything changes. You stop trying to fix yourself and start trying to understand yourself. You stop performing and start recovering. You stop asking Google what's wrong with you and start asking a guide to show you what happened.

Phase 2 of the Lion Protocol is literally called "What Happened to You." Because that's the question that sets men free.