The Scaffolding Outside the Finished Building

The arches were finished long before anyone checked whether the scaffolding still was….

A construction crew wraps scaffolding around a building going up, floor by floor, and for the length of the project the scaffolding is not optional. It’s how anyone reaches the seventh floor without falling, how the brick gets set true, how the whole structure comes into being at all…. Nobody questions the scaffolding while the building is unfinished. It’s simply there, doing exactly what scaffolding does, holding the workers where the building itself can’t yet hold them.

Then the building is finished. The load-bearing walls are load bearing. The floors hold weight on their own. And the scaffolding is still there, wrapped around the whole exterior, because taking it down was never scheduled, or because someone forgot, or because at some point it stopped being a tool for construction and became simply what the building looks like from the street.

People walk past and see scaffolding and assume the building underneath isn’t finished. Sometimes the crew assumes the same thing. Sometimes nobody has actually checked.

There’s a version of this that has nothing to do with buildings. A person builds an early capacity for achievement, for control, for being the one who handles things, and for a long time this scaffolding is exactly right. It gets them through what needed getting through. It is not vanity and it is not excess, it is structural, the only way the building went up at all under the conditions it went up in. Nobody would ask a person to build without it, any more than a crew would ask workers to lay brick on the seventh floor with nothing to stand on.

What doesn’t get scheduled, most of the time, is the removal. The building finishes and the scaffolding stays, because taking it down was never part of anyone’s plan, because it had quietly become indistinguishable from the building itself, because achievement and control had stopped being the method and started being read, by the person and by everyone around them, as the architecture. The question that never gets asked is the only one that matters: is the wall underneath actually load-bearing now, on its own, the way walls are supposed to be once the building is done. Or is the person still up on the scaffold twenty years later, still bracing something that finished bracing itself a long time ago, unable to tell the difference because the scaffolding has been there so long it looks like part of the view.

This is a harder question than it sounds, because the scaffolding, unlike a wall, was never meant to be permanent, and yet removing it feels like removing something structural precisely because it once was. A person doesn’t know, standing at the base of their own building, whether stripping the achievement and the control away reveals a finished structure or an unfinished one still needing the brace. The only way to know is the same way the contractor knows: by testing, carefully, in pieces, whether the walls hold weight on their own before assuming either that they never will or that they already do.

Some buildings, stripped of scaffolding, turn out to have been standing on their own for years, and the relief of seeing the actual structure is its own kind of finishing….

Others are found mid-construction after all, and the scaffolding, it turns out, still has work to do.

Scaffolding is meant to come down once the building can hold its own weight. Achievement and control aren't so different, useful for a while, load bearing for a while, and worth checking rather than assuming once the structure underneath has had time to finish.

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Nando Schlecht, LAC, is a trauma therapist in Tucson, AZ, specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation through DBR, Brainspotting, Ego State Therapy, and IFS-informed work. Sessions available in Tucson, AZ, and to adults across the state via online therapy Arizona.

Schedule a consultation: https://www.nandotherapy.com/therapy-contact