What the Story Isn’t Doing for You

Self-pathologizing is something of a national pastime. Maybe it’s the effect of social media making pop psychology a kind of performance art. On the other hand, many people are feeling stressed, brittle, and driven to seek relief, which the wellness industrial complex is happy to provide, with no shortage of programs for self-understanding and transcendence on offer. But first, you have to accept their definition of your brokenness.

That’s easy enough to do, as there are plenty of valid-seeming—or actually valid—tests to take determining wtf is wrong with you. They all come with their narratives and promises. The question isn’t whether our suffering is real—it is—but whether the story we’ve made of it has become the lens through which we relate to our experiences.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If a diagnosis helps us navigate our own complexity and that of the world, great. But where it becomes another form of self-infatuation, it can paradoxically make us less connected to our lives, which includes our connection to others.

Diagnosis, formal or informal, can be an orienting frame that makes genuine self-understanding possible. It can also result in a kind of identity consolidation, flattening aspects of our authentic selves that don’t fit the applied criteria. And if this information doesn’t bring relief—or if remembering and applying strategies becomes too challenging—we may give up and return to our stuckness.

Although it can be incredibly powerful to discover communities of the similarly situated, it can also become a closed loop, where shared experience hardens into constricted self-identity. Something that might have been useful for self-orientation, understanding, and protection can become a fixed self-concept that must be defended, confirmed, and continuously supplied with material for its own construction. This kind of shelter doesn’t usually stand up to the winds of circumstance.

Once the story solidifies, it generates a permission structure. Then come the expectations of failure, fragility, isolation, unfitness. From there, we may develop further aversions to challenge, friction, and accountability. The self-story automatically runs interference on opportunities to embrace change and growth beyond what we’ve allowed ourselves to experience thus far.

We may be trying to protect something, and that’s okay. But what is being protected can be welcomed without judgment and given space to relax its grip in its own way. We can hold our histories without being constrained by them—including our diagnoses. To do that, we need to develop a friendship with ourselves that is open and nonjudgmental, one that can embrace a full range of experiences directly, without needing to pre-sort them into acceptable and unacceptable.

This isn’t a call to abandon self-knowledge or dismiss diagnosis, which can be both empowering and clarifying in terms of understanding what we’re working with. But we can also develop the capacity to recognize when the map has become the territory. Self-understanding can easily tip into self-curation, where we swap one set of fixed stories for another—this time with a new inventory of labels and expectations to fret over.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There’s no way to white-knuckle ourselves into acceptance and accommodation with what is present in our lives, or with what can potentially be metabolized, transformed, or released. If we are always needing things to be true about ourselves, we limit our opportunity to experience growth—including the enlivening feelings of challenge and progress. That would be selling ourselves short. And we’re totally over that.