Peaceful Wolverine “My anxiety won’t let me.”
This is a real thought-feeling that oodles (and heaps) of people have, all the time. We can picture the sentence as a small play with two characters. One character would like to go to the party, or make the phone call, or just fall asleep. And then, enter stage left, there is a second character, called “my anxiety,” who has heard the request and refused it. The first character is you, the “real you.” The second character lives, apparently, in your head, has its own preferences, and holds a veto on your behaviour. In metaphorical play, it is you-but-not-authentically.
I haven’t seen it, but this is definitely a real play that has been performed somewhere.
Nobody who says “my anxiety won’t let me” means it literally. Like so much of our language, it’s a metaphor that most people cannot easily get around. “How else would you say it?” is a reasonable question.
When I get nitpicky about the grammar, it’s easy to agree that of course there is not a second person in there. But that is not the way we live, and it is not the way it feels. The truth is, “my anxiety won’t let me” and all its siblings and cousins are not a description. They are the shape of conscious experience. And the shape of the experience is where the trouble is.
The shape of our experience is where our trouble is.
I have been told, as mentioned previously, that I am socially awkward in a way the current meta would call autistic. I don’t mind. It’s a tough job and someone’s got to do it. But I have not adopted the label, and I don’t want to. This essay is partly about why, and it is not because I think the people who told me were wrong. It is because of what a label is, what it is not, and what happens to us when we mistake the second for the first.
The ghost in the grammar
By the nature of our learning and our evolution, human beings read intention into everything. This used to be religion, and still is for many, but even where we now know (like, really know) that it isn’t the case, it still makes so much sense to us that it is simply the way we talk.
The car that “refuses to start.” The weather that is “trying” to ruin the weekend. The printer that “hates” you, and only you. This is not a bad habit we picked up. It is the factory setting of consciousness, that feeling that even things, events, phenomena, and our own thoughts have an anima — Latin for soul. The equipment we use to understand other people, the part of us that models what another mind wants and what it will do next, is the main event of the social animal’s brain, and it does not switch off when there is no other mind in the room. It models the printer. It models the weather. And it models the one creature that is always in range, which is us. Our own states get rendered in the same format we use for everybody else: As a someone, with wants, viewed from a slight distance. Not identical. Not… “me.”
I have written about this at length elsewhere, and I will not re-run the argument here. The short version is that the sense of a second party in your head, or multiple parties, is not evidence of them. It is the fingerprint of the tool that built the picture.
So when a mood arrives, it arrives, ab initio, as a kind of face. The sadness “wants” you to stay in bed. The compulsion “demands” that you check the stove again. The dread is “attacking” you. Because the state has a face, it has intentions, and once it has intentions, you are in a negotiation with it, and you are losing, because it does not negotiate. It just refuses.
(And now I’m doing it, out of necessity of understanding — I’m personalizing the emotion. Anthropomorphizing it.)
Consider all the movies that portray our insides as busy places full of conflicting personalities. Consider how intuitive those movies are. I’m thinking of Inside Out, which is a children’s movie no one struggles to understand. It feels right.
It is not right. The thing about being refused by something that lives inside you and cannot be reasoned with is, it makes you helpless. Not metaphorically. Helplessness is the actual psychological state of a creature that believes its outcomes are controlled by something it cannot reach. It is near the top of every list of things that can make living things like us miserable, and it is the natural product of the illusion of the two-character play.
What a diagnosis is
A diagnosis is not the discovery of a thing. This needs saying plainly, because the word arrives from medicine, where it often is the discovery of a thing. A tumour is there or it is not. You can take a picture of it. It does not care what you think about it, and no amount of logical reasoning or talk therapy makes it smaller.
A diagnosis of depression is not that, and I’d like to clarify that I am not being nitpicky in this instance. I studied psychology, and this is the definition of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-5, which is and has been the official guide for many years.
A diagnosis from the DSM-5, which can only be provided by someone certified to do so, is a professional confirmation that the way you have been feeling and behaving fits a pattern, that a great many other people fit the same pattern, which has been named, and that some things have been found to help people whose patterns of behaviour are similar to yours. That is the whole of it. It is not a scan. It is not an identification of a resident. The DSM is a filing system for shared experience, assembled by committee, a big committee, and revised every decade or so, with categories that overlap so thoroughly that the typical person who qualifies for one qualifies for two or three. The overlap is not a flaw in the filing, it is intentional. It is a report on the reality of the field. The categories are partitions drawn across one continuous, messy human thing, and the partitions move.
The current trend of claiming diagnoses as identities and explaining one’s personality using the popular understanding of that diagnosis, can and will be upended when the next edition of the DSM comes out. The labels we currently use are not discoveries, like discovering water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. They are fluid and clinical, meant to reflect the current, best, strictly evidence-supported understanding. I won’t go into the history of the DSM, but it has gone through major changes, particularly when it comes to women, the LGBTQ+ peeps, and ethnic minorities. And major cultural shifts have always followed as the popular understanding changes in response.
There is a cheap version of this argument which I am not making. The cheap version says mental disorders are social constructs and therefore not real. They are not constructs. The patterns are demonstrably influenced by culture and society, with lots of evidence. They are also real, independent of the culture and society, and really distressing. Some of them involve responding to inputs that are not there, which is called psychosis and can be arrived at by many roads at various degrees of slope. It is as real as anything gets. Philosophically, experience is quite influential as a measure of real.
So, I am not dismissing or invalidating experience. What I am saying is narrower: The pattern is a pattern of you. It is not a tenant. It did not move in. There is nobody to evict, no switch to turn… no location to leave.
And that narrow claim has one consequence that makes it worth the trouble. If the pattern is you, then the pattern is very much in reach. You are not, in fact, helpless. Again, that recognition is not the flick of a light-switch. But it is better than believing that the switch exists, and the problem is you just can’t get to it.
The card and the identity
Roll into a room atop a wheelchair and the room knows what to do. It isn’t an equation. There is a ramp or there is not, and either way the response is organized. Walk into a room and announce that you have ADHD, on the other hand, and the room does not know what to do. Neither, if we are honest, do you. The announcement does not come with anything so obvious as a ramp. The only thing it reliably comes with is the label, officially applied from the DSM-5.
That is not an argument against accommodation. I think we have built a world that is bizarrely hostile to the animal we are, and the sheer number of people now carrying diagnoses tells us something about that world before it tells us anything about them. A species that evolved for villages of a couple of hundred people, mostly outdoors, mostly moving, mostly together, has been forced by economics into objectively miserable places (offices, factories, urban density, et cetera), and a large fraction of people are now being told, individually, that something is wrong with them. That something needs fixing. The implication is that if you get fixed, you’ll be happy no matter what. Does that make sense?
The more honest version, in many, many cases, is that the misery is totally justified. Rational, even. But… that’s the helplessness again. Out of your control.
Consider Viktor Frankl: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances…”
Also, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
That rings true. I won’t tell you whether it is. But I believe the labels so many of us now have are equivalent to a situation we are in. A reflection of our circumstances.
A label has two uses, and they point in opposite directions.
The first use is as a starting point. Here is a pattern. Here are the people who share it. Here is what has helped some of them. That is a membership card, and a membership card is a good thing to be handed, because the worst part of most distress is the certainty that you are the only one. That feeling leads, again, to helplessness. You are not alone. If your question is, “Do other people have these thoughts?” the answer is yes. Absolutely. In numbers that would astonish you.
The second use is as an endpoint. The finish line. The search is over, this is what I am. I have ADHD, so I am like this. I have anxiety, so I cannot. The same card, read as a sentence instead of a door. Nobody hands it out that way on purpose. It happens through the oldest mechanism we have, the one we share with everything that adapts to its surroundings: Passive, absorptive learning. A clinician does not set out to be an identity coach. A clinician is one anyway, by mechanism rather than intent, because the whole encounter is a person being told, with authority, what they are, with plenty of descriptive discussion of the typical patterns. Social contagion does not need a plan. It is simply how a social animal works, and everything we are is downstream of it: Our language, our mannerisms, our haircuts, our food, our gods. The idea that patterns of distress would be the one thing immune to it is the strange claim, not the other way round.
Self-diagnosis is this mechanism with the external standard removed. You can learn what a disorder means, model what it is supposed to feel like, and feel it, in good faith, until your self-report is indistinguishable from the real thing. Would you have qualified for the diagnosis anyway? Maybe. That is not knowable anymore.
This is not a special weakness of people who do it. It isn’t their scheme. It is a general capacity of us. Look to the most beautiful of our buildings, the most heartfelt of our longings, the most passionate of our poetry. Billions of us are convinced, sincerely, that the small sensations and intrusive thoughts we all just constantly have are messages… from an external being who delivers truth and instructions. And so, so many rearrange their lives purely on that basis, rejecting critical examination or pragmatism, because hesitation is doubt and not faith.
If that is not a socially transmitted pattern of experience with the capacity to produce distress, nothing is. I do not say this to mock the religious. I say it to make the point that the capacity is universal, and that the label-as-endpoint is only a smaller, more clinical version of the same move.
The thought that “isn’t you”
There is a piece of advice, well meant and widely given, that I believe does more damage than anyone knows. It goes: That thought is not you; you do not have to obey it.
The second half is spot-on. The first half creates the problem it is trying to solve, because if the thought is not me, then where did it come from? And now there are two of us in here again, and one of us is a bully the other can’t stand up to.
The better version, I think, goes like this. That thought is just arising. It is not a math equation. It is not the Golden Ratio, sitting in nature waiting to be found. It is not a prophecy. It is not a logical proof about what you are or what you will do. “It” came from you, but so does your imagination, and nobody thinks Stephen King is a supernatural horror entity just because he can produce one on demand.
You are a thing that produces arisings. Thoughts, yes, but the word is too small for it. That is what the system and process of you does. Memory, imagination, urge, feeling, sensation, and then memory again, and thought, and feeling again, and sound, and sight, and back to imagination — continuously, without invitation, without effort, without relief, and the unpleasant arisings are no more authoritative than the pleasant ones. You do not have to obey them, or dwell on them, or even particularly mind them. They can, with practice, be received with equanimity. And if you are wondering whether other people get intrusive, nasty, shocking, unpleasant thoughts, the answer is yes.
This version does not split you. It does not give the thought a face. It takes the intentionality out, and with the intentionality goes the helplessness, because you cannot be the victim of a process you are identical to.
The lever
None of this is about fault. It is nobody’s fault that they are conscious. You did not pick your parents, your wiring, your early environment, or the particular way the world has arranged itself to be inhospitable to you. The patterns you carry were co-produced by nature and nurture and then sharpened by a society focused, bafflingly, on almost anything other than whether its members are thriving.
But it is not “happening to you” either. There is no demon, no drill sergeant, no tenant. And that means there is also nobody else who can adjust it for you. Nobody can walk in and reset your perspective or swap out the mental routines that separate people with healthy/constructive coping skills from people with toxic/destructive coping skills. We do not have a pill for that. We have some pills that help some things, and I am not sneering at them. On the contrary, I’m grateful. But nothing in the pharmacy rewrites the thought routines. Cancer does not go away when you learn to think more clearly. The patterns we are talking about, to a measurable degree, do.
That is the one lever that is yours. Not your genes, not your childhood, not the economy. Those are not choices to be made. The routines can be. And here is my prediction from the theory: Anyone who gets to a competent therapist and does the work can learn to be a bit happier. Not happy. Happy is not a place you can live, and anyone selling you nirvana is selling. A bit happier. There is a good book called 10% Happier; I would settle for five. Five per cent, compounded over a life, is an enormous amount of actual enjoyment from being alive.
I know how audacious this sounds coming from a person who has never run a clinic. How dare I? I don’t have a master’s degree in counselling psychology. However, logically, that is an ad hominem objection. It’s an attack on me, not on my argument.
I do not see another way to say it. Once you have removed the ghost, which the evidence has, what remains is a creature that produces its own states and can, with effort, learn to produce slightly better ones. That is a smaller promise than the one you were hoping for. It is also the only promise that can be kept.