Is It Time to Stop Pathologising Ourselves?

Lately I’ve noticed something. People walk into therapy already carrying labels. They introduce themselves not just with their name or their story, but with a diagnosis, a category, a list of terms they’ve picked up along the way. “I’m anxious.” “I’m avoidant.” “I’m depressed.” The language of psychiatry and self-help has become the language of identity.

And while labels can offer comfort — they can explain, normalise, even validate suffering — they can also quietly reduce us. They risk turning the fullness of our lives into bullet points, as if being human can be boiled down to symptoms and categories.

The truth is, you are not a label. You are not a pathology. You are a whole person.

A person who laughs too loudly at the wrong time. A person who grieves deeply, who loves fiercely, who sometimes says the wrong thing, who remembers the song that once lit them up, who feels lost and found, often in the same day. That can’t be captured by a word.

When we pathologise ourselves, we can forget that life isn’t meant to be neat or clinical. It’s messy, beautiful, painful, strange — and that’s the very texture of being alive. The role of therapy, and maybe the role of life itself, isn’t to reduce us down to parts or conditions. It’s to help us see ourselves in our entirety.

And maybe that’s where spirituality comes in. Because spirituality, in its simplest sense, reminds us there’s more. More than a diagnosis, more than the story we’ve been told, more than the label we’ve picked up. It reminds us we are layered, mysterious, and deeply connected beings. As someone once said, we are spiritual beings having a human experience — and that experience can’t be fitted into a box.

So perhaps the invitation is this: when you notice you’ve slipped into pathologising yourself, pause. Sit down for a moment. Put your hand on your heart and acknowledge the simple truth — that being human is messy, unpredictable, and imperfect. And that’s okay. That’s what life is.