Homeless People Thinking



A lot of people are uncomfortable about not knowing things, especially about themselves.  Because of this they will make up stories, myths, whatever, to try and fill in the gaps of what they don’t know, all to relieve their anxiety about the unknown.  Often, when people talk about homelessness, they’ll say that homeless people choose to be homeless, that homeless people want to be homeless.  They’ll also say things like, homeless people could find a way out of homelessness if they just set their minds to it, if they’ll make the right choices in life.    But that’s mostly BS.  It’s an oversimplification of the situation of homelessness, and of how the homeless human brain works.

Belief is a very powerful thing, so is denial.   The ability of the human brain to avoid certain realities, and to create unrealistic perceived realities, is so powerful as to override the brains ability to understand what’s really going on in the world.

The triad of what people know, what they believe, and what’s actually going on, is critical to having a successful life.  In a person’s mind, if there is discord among those three, a person’s life can become so unstable as to make them vulnerable to homelessness.

From this, I think it is possible to extrapolate as to who would be vulnerable to homelessness, and who wouldn’t.   I disagree with the notion that homelessness can happen to anyone., or that homelessness is a matter of paychecks.    We’ve all heard the saying, “many people are just a couple paychecks away from homelessness.”   That’s just not true.    I have known too many people, myself included, who were able to maintain housing for months after the paychecks stopped coming.   Becoming homeless truly is more a matter of what a person thinks about their situation, than their actual situation.    For those people who have achieved harmony between what they think, what they believe, and what is real, homelessness is nearly an impossibility.  Add to that harmony of thought a great many resources including good friends and family, and those people will never become homeless.



About Kevin Barbieux

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