What’s in a name?
It comes as no surprise that few of us, perhaps none of us even, have the tools to cope when things go wrong, which is when we usually start to scour the internet for information about what we are going through. A simple search for “how to deal with a panic attack” brings up a staggering 171,000,000 results in less than a second.
I am willing to wager that if we could somehow sift through each of those results, we would find a lot of misleading, perhaps useless, and perhaps even harmful information. After all, click-bait articles thrive on topics that have to do with mental health, since their creators know that we can never get enough information to put ourselves at ease and call it a night.
So we search for explanations or diagnostic criteria and read through it meticulously, and perhaps even venture out to find a professional that can do that for us.
But here’s the trap: the diagnosis is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like a 16 bit image of a 4K original. It’s like trying to sum up a 500 page book with one sentence. To put it more precisely, it provides too simple a picture of what we are really talking about: LIFE, and how we try to cope with all the challenges it brings us.
And that’s a very specific and yet very subjective situation to be in.
As a consequence, any so-called expert’s explanation for what is going on in your life, is probably taking a lot of liberties and filling in a lot of gaps with their own biases and hypotheses.
Therefore it’s best to approach life, ourselves, every person, and every session, as exactly what they are: uncharted territory.
Although the uncertainty of such an approach to things may seem challenging, everything starts to fall into place when we embrace the fact that it gives us the freedom to discover, as if for the first time ever, what we have in fact been busy doing for all these years.
And that is a much bigger and deeper discussion than any diagnosis can possibly fit.
