You Are Not Broken: A Twelve-Step Path to Freedom from Habit, Fear, and Self-Fixing

Synopsis

You Are Not Broken offers a radically compassionate approach to personal change—one that frees you from the exhausting cycle of self-fixing, willpower, and shame. Instead of treating your struggles as evidence of something wrong with you, this book reveals them for what they truly are: intelligent survival patterns, wired into your nervous system through lived experience. Once protective, these patterns now quietly run your life long after the danger has passed. Drawing on neuroscience, contemplative practice, and a modern reimagining of the Twelve Steps, Patrick Dahlen presents a practical, humane roadmap for real and lasting transformation. This is not about becoming a better version of your old self—it’s about learning how your system actually works and gently teaching it a new way to live. Through simple, experiential, and body-based practices, you’ll learn how to move from reactive autopilot to conscious choice, from fear-driven identity to grounded presence. The twelve-step journey guides you through waking up to unconscious patterns, opening to a deeper intelligence beyond the survival mind, reorganizing your inner leadership, mapping and unwinding your conditioning, releasing outdated identities, repairing what needs to be repaired, and learning to live with daily presence and integrity. The heart of this book is a liberating truth: healing is not about fixing what is broken. It is about outgrowing what no longer serves, retraining the nervous system, and reclaiming a life of wholeness, freedom, and authentic agency.