No Diagnosis Big Enough
Like me, you may have noticed how attached we can become to our psychological diagnosis. They become something we cling to and appear to provide a strange form of reassurance: “Ah, now I understand the nature of my brokenness.”
Diagnoses are conceptual boxes that never fit everything we are. To try and fit into those boxes, we’re required to “shave off” parts of ourselves. We discard what won’t fit into the box, and in doing that, we sell ourselves short.
The result is, we see ourselves as less than we are. There is an absolute prerequisite for accepting a psychological diagnosis as an accurate reflection of who you are. You have to see yourself as broken.
It’s a bit like saying, “OK, I’ll agree to see myself as broken if you’ll tell me how I’m broken.” What a horrible tradeoff! But we agree to it.
Why? I suspect it may be because we seem to believe that “understanding” our discomfort will give us relief. It never does, but we’re stuck in a belief that says, “Liberation from suffering lies in an intellectual understanding.”
What we’re really believing is, “I’ll reduce myself to a list of symptoms, and then I’ll have a better idea of who I really am.” In other words, I’ll discard my true identity as what Teilhard De Chardin called, “a spiritual being having a human experience,” and identify myself as a list of troubling symptoms.
Like most of us, I have some experience identifying myself as a list of troubling symptoms. In fact, I have a long lifetime of believing I was those symptoms.
Here’s how it worked: the more caught up I got in my thinking, the more seriously I took that thinking, the more likely I was to believe the limitations those thoughts suggested to me.
Stay with me on this metaphor: I knew an actor years ago who had a recurring role as a villain in one of the many Star Trek series. At some point, his character was popular enough for a toy company to produce his character as an action figure. He carried one in his pack as a joke, and it was really funny when he would pull it out.
He got a kick out of it. Who wouldn’t? There was no point at which he actually confused the action figure of the character he played with who he really was. To do that would make no more sense than it does to define ourselves based on psychological diagnoses.
Just to beat that metaphor a little longer, imagine yourself carrying around your own “action figure,” but in this case, the figure has been crafted to physically display your diagnosis for all to see.
Maybe the figure has tattoos proclaiming itself as suffering from OCD, PTSD, ADHD, Anxiety, or whatever diagnosis you may have received. How much sense would it make for you to whip out your action figure, study it, and tell yourself, “This is who I really am.”
Maybe you’ll remember this next time you “take out” your psychological diagnosis and give it a closer look. No matter how much it may look like you, or feel like you, it’s not even close to who you really are. You’re so much more than a diagnosis. Look beyond that, and you may start to see just how much more.
