Is there something wrong with you?
There may well be, and it might be how you're framing your struggle.
What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel this way? Why can’t I stop my thoughts from racing, from feeling like I’m going a million miles an hour inside of my head? Why can’t I concentrate on just one thing? When you walk into a psychiatrist’s office with these questions, dollar signs magically appear over your head. Traditional psychology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and therapy methods focus on immediate solutions for your mental distress. Those solutions aren’t cheap. Even with the Affordable Care Act in the US, co-pays and deductibles can quickly add up. So can medications.
Remember, to them, depression, anxiety, attention deficit, etc. are viewed as something “wrong” that needs to be fixed. Difficulties are seen as serving no purpose in our lives, and having no potential to transform into something meaningful. There’s no Hero’s Journey, no triumph over adversity, and certainly no struggle. We’re taught to refer to our problems using static language—I’ve got such-and-such “diagnosis,” “personality disorder,” “mental illness” - labels that describe fixed states, not dynamic processes.
Approaching our trouble this way isn't only ineffective much of the time, it actually cements it. We imagine our difficulties as a “thing” in us that we need to get rid of or suppress, and the more we relate to it this way, the more intractable it becomes.
Why?
Our struggles are there for a reason. They are not a meaningless curse but rather part of a meaningful story that needs to be unfolded. It’s only the tip of the iceberg poking out of our subconscious, irritating us and causing pain in order to draw our focus on to our process. But why focus on our process? Why not just find a way to get rid of the pain and live life? What are they trying to hide?
Our process is our true story; it contains all the unseen dynamics that not only cause us to suffer but also have the potential to guide us to self actualization. In other words, having a life problem isn’t wrong, it’s right! It’s our calling to change and growth. When I discovered my authentic self, my autistic self, my growth was amazing. I went from an illiterate and broken down former athlete to an award winning scholar with a PhD. No drug did that. My own autistic brain did that. What a powerful message.
Learning ways to make ourselves feel better in the short term is important but if this is all we do we never evolve into who we’re meant to be; we just “manage" symptoms. I’m not the sum of my symptoms or co-morbidities. These problems that I was experiencing were the seeds for my amazing growth as an autistic person. I didn’t need to be medicated. I needed to be shown what it looks like to live authentically as an autistic person - one who leans fully into that identity - living a purpose driven life.
No matter how bad it gets, our difficulties have an underlying logic, meaning, and purpose that's trying to wake us up to something positive and awesome. But how do we find this? We find ourselves, that’s how.
We express our identity through use of the word, “I.” “I’m this way but not that way. I can do this but not that. I believe this but not that.”
This is how we define ourselves and establish our personal reality. As the years go by we get more and more set in this image of who we are. We fossilize our psychology.
Enter problems. Problems are the antidote to our tendency to form static, unchanging identities.
Life is a process, not a static state, and problems are one of the main sources of fuel to wake us up and force us into action… if we choose to heed the call. Problems directly challenge the status quo of who we are by upsetting our intentions. In fact, this is precisely their purpose.
Our identity consists of a set of psychological patterns, and problems occur to disrupt these patterns in order to force us to evolve. This doesn’t mean there’s something inherently “wrong" with us or these patterns. It means our identity is designed to continually change, expand, and grow. A problem is our process of growth manifesting in a challenging way. It does this because we either fear and resist change or don’t even know how we need to grow. Some call this resistant process, an “edge," because it defines the edge of our self awareness.
On one side of it lies our current self and on the other side lies who we can become. Our edge can freeze us in our tracks. It's difficult to work on and easy to avoid. When we bump up against it we engage in avoidant behaviours. In the short term, we look away, change the subject, nervously giggle, swallow hard, or take deep breaths - all signs of discomfort. In the long term, we stay stuck in our depression, anxiety, attention deficit, addiction, etc., because we ignore, suppress, medicate, and rationalize these issues.
We must learn to identify and process our edges. We must recognise, then push past these boundaries.
This is how to integrate and live our problem's message of positive change and growth. As CG Jung said, “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next."
— December 16, 2023 Note —
Some of the materials herein have made it into my books, No Place for Autism? and Holistic Language Instruction. No Place for Autism was released in February 2023 from Lived Places Publishing and is available at Amazon and other major book retailers worldwide. Holistic Language Instruction will be out in 2024.