Awareness can heal — but identity, even a well-intended one, can keep pain in place.
Mental health awareness has never been higher.
Therapy language is mainstream.
Diagnoses are discussed openly.
People are learning to name their inner experience.
And yet — many people feel more fragile, not less.
This article isn’t a rejection of therapy, medication, or mental health support. Those tools help countless people navigate real suffering.
What this piece explores is something subtler:
How language meant to help can sometimes quietly stabilize the very identity that keeps suffering alive.
From the Dualistic Unity perspective explored in Proof That You’re God, suffering isn’t sustained by emotion itself — but by identification with the story of who is experiencing it.
Here are three ways mental health language can unintentionally reinforce that story.
1. Labels Can Turn Experiences Into Identities
Anxiety, depression, trauma, ADHD — these words can be incredibly useful.
They validate experience.
They create access to support.
They reduce shame.
But when a label stops describing an experience and starts defining a person, something subtle shifts.
“I feel anxious” becomes “I am an anxious person.”
“I’m experiencing depression” becomes “I am depressed.”
The book describes this mechanism clearly:
“At the core of these disorders is the fictitious self we’ve come to know so well throughout this book—the collection of concepts and assumptions that we mistake for who we truly are.”
When identity forms around a diagnosis, the mind begins protecting it — defending it, explaining life through it, organizing the future around it.
What began as understanding quietly becomes enclosure.
2. Self-Understanding Can Become Self-Maintenance
Modern mental health culture often emphasizes insight:
- Knowing your triggers
- Understanding your patterns
- Tracking your symptoms
Awareness is powerful — but awareness aimed exclusively at managing a self can turn into a full-time job.
The book points to this loop:
“As we cling to this false identity—and the world we’ve constructed to support it—we experience conflict with a world that will never be as simple or predictable as the thoughts we hold onto for comfort.”
When healing becomes about maintaining a conceptual version of yourself — even a healthier one — suffering doesn’t dissolve.
It gets organized.
3. Language Can Freeze What Is Actually Fluid
Mental health language often treats inner life as something stable and trackable.
But lived experience isn’t static.
Moods shift.
Energy moves.
Thoughts pass.
When we repeatedly name what’s happening, we can accidentally solidify what was never fixed to begin with.
As the book invites us to question:
“Who are you when you stop telling yourself who you are?”
Suffering tends to persist not because emotions stay —
but because identity forms around them.
This Isn’t an Argument Against Therapy
It’s an argument for clarity.
Therapy can be incredibly effective when it:
- Loosens identity
- Encourages curiosity
- Helps people see thoughts as thoughts
It becomes limiting when:
- Labels become self-definitions
- Stories become permanent
- Healing is framed as fixing who you are
From the Dualistic Unity lens, relief doesn’t come from perfect self-understanding.
It comes from seeing that the self being analyzed is a mental construct — not the one living life.
What Softens When This Is Seen
Nothing needs to be rejected.
Diagnoses can still be useful.
Support can still matter.
Language can still help.
But it’s held more lightly.
And when identity loosens, experience often does too — without force, effort, or improvement projects.
If this resonates…
These themes are explored more deeply in
Proof That You’re God
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKCMR183/
Not as a critique of mental health —
but as an exploration of how identity itself shapes suffering.
Open Reflection
What if clarity doesn’t come from naming yourself more accurately —
but from noticing what remains when the naming pauses?
