The Danger of Diagnosis
Major Depression.
Bipolar.
Borderline Personality Disorder.
Fibromyalgia.
Elhers-Danlos Syndrome.
Gardener-Diamond Syndrome.
These are some of the diagnosis that were given to me earlier in my life. Each one has been disproved. But gosh, it took a crazy amount of self-work to throw them in the trash. And it took even more to allow the medical world to agree that those labels were no longer relevant or true.
I am now a healthy diagnosis-free woman.
I do have some deep-seated trigger patterns. But I am aware of them. I manage them. And I am empowered to live my life with a level of self-awareness and compassion that acknowledges where I have come from and my ability to keep self-inquiring and redefining my experience of the world.
Yesterday I was talking to my therapist (yes, I have a therapist myself!) and as I explained a deep trigger reaction I had earlier that morning, she responded by telling me it was my PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) at play. I was very taken aback. In all my years of therapy, illness, recovery and growth, this label had never come up in relation to me.
I took most of the day to digest this label, to explore what associations were true for me and what were false. And then I threw it away.
For me, these labels have sometimes provided me a great sense of relief after years of not understanding my experience. However, they have also essentially caused a paralysis in my personal growth.
While they have allowed me to make sense of my condition at the time, and allowed others to have some context from which to relate to me, these labels have also caused me to identify with some level of innate failure or brokenness within one of my layers of self.
These labels may come with a polarised finite sense of identity. And I believe that the reidentification that may occur with these labels can be one of the biggest factors in stopping the natural path to recovery.
It is, in fact, our intrinsic ability to change that allows us to recover and continue to evolve. When someone tells you, ‘Hey this thing is wrong with you. This is who you are now. You have to deal with life as this kind of person with these kind of symptoms’, there can be an immediate disempowerment.
When we are disempowered, we cannot change. It is as if our personal will has no power to save us. And so, apathy sets in, which is the most stagnant of all states of consciousness. When our will is eroded or destroyed, when there I a sense of ‘I cannot change this’, there is a direct effect on our life force.
Our life force is the living, moving generative energy that allows our heart to beat, our lungs to breathe and our cells to regenerate. It is largely instinctive – we do not have to tell it to flow. It simply does. However, because we exist relationally and our layers learn through experience, when we receive messages or signals that say ‘you cannot, you will not, you shall not’, they are received loud and clear and adopted as truth. And this truth may seep from one layer to the others until it becomes an unquestionable reality.
So, when a well-meaning medical or mental health practitioner offers a label for our experience, while it provides a helpful context for making meaning, researching and entering treatment, there can also be this very debilitating effect on our will and life force.
I spent 18 of my 38 years living within the confines of these labels. I made the best of my life, within the parameters of someone with these labels. But I was apathetic to changing my label-oriented identifications. For every year I lived with diagnosis, my life force continued to be suffocated. And I was not able to recover. One day, I woke with an epiphany and decided I was done with all the labels and the life they afforded. And as soon as I threw the labels away, recovery began. (I don’t know what inspired this epiphany. It was a little like some greater force reached inside my psyche, gave me a good dose of will-power and told me it was time to wake up. And so, I did.)
So, there is a bit of a conundrum here… for us as clients or and also for us as practitioners.
As a client, I feel that when a practitioner decides to give me a label, it is my self-preserving duty to hold it at bay. To explore the possible meanings and associations, but not to adopt it… which can be a very hard thing to do and requires a huge amount of awareness and personal strength.
As a practitioner, rather than accept a polarised and finite diagnoses, I choose to explore the movement of a client’s experience. We take any existing diagnosis as a point for inquiry and contextual exploration, but we explore well beyond the boundary of its known associations.
In tandem with my clients, we explore where they have come from, where they are now and where they want to go. We acknowledge the dynamic of symptoms at every layer. Most importantly we acknowledge the existential nature of change and how it may reside in our humanness.
Once we can disidentify with the polarised and finite nature of a diagnosis, we can reconnect into our will to change our current state of existence. When we connect to ‘ I can, I will, I shall’, we reignite that intrinsic flow of lifeforce and the movement that is the source of all change.
Will is such an important factor in our journey of growth and recovery.
If you are reading this as someone living with a diagnosis, my hope is that you can now, in this moment, reconnect to your intrinsic will and expand your exploration of self beyond your diagnosis. And if you are a practitioner, my hope is, if you don’t already do so, that you start to work beyond the bounds of diagnosis.
