What's "Wrong"?

What’s wrong with me??? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself this.

I am reading In Search of Happiness: Understanding an Endangered State of Mind, by John F. Schumaker, as part of research that is helping me to develop the protagonist in one of the novels I'm writing. In it, he notes that Erich Fromm - a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist - “felt that the healthiest people in a society as sick as the one that exists today in the West are more likely to feel unhappy and abnormal.” Yup, American society does feel sick to me, but I am beginning to feel healthy in spite of it. I am beginning to see more clearly that society is what’s wrong - not me.

This basic concept was first brought to my attention a couple years ago when I was interviewing a leader in a resource center for LGBTQ2SA community members. He was talking about the need for mental health services that better reflect the experiences of queer and Black and Brown communities. I had heard others talk about the need for more queer, Black, and Brown service providers to better support people in need, but he took issue with the very nature of the profession, rooted in viewing our natural human responses to untenable conditions as illnesses to be treated.

This notion was and is revolutionary to me. It has completely upended how I was conditioned to think about my own struggles in life, conditioning that seemed to suggest that there is something “wrong” with me. I find myself thinking now, “It’s not me; it’s you,” with “you” being the systems that have created conditions in which Black and Brown and LGBTQ2SA community members and women and girls are disproportionately harmed and disproportionately lack access to critical resources to recover when we are harmed.

As it turns out, there is a whole cadre of professionals who take issue with the dominant Western cultural way of viewing mental health/illness. UN Special Rapporteur Dainius Pūras offers a useful explanation, writing that “mental health systems worldwide are dominated by a reductionist biomedical model that uses medicalization to justify coercion as a systemic practice and qualifies the diverse human responses to harmful underlying and social determinants (such as inequalities, discrimination, and violence) as ‘disorders’ that need treatment.” (See 2021 article by Peter Simons at madinamerica.com for more on this.)

This shift in thinking has validated the nagging sense I’ve had that there is nothing inherently wrong with me as I struggle and stumble my way through life after surviving childhood sexual abuse and abandonment, sexual assault by a group of teenage boys, date rape, a life-threatening set of several months of being stalked, and being unable to save the life of my 11-year-old daughter after our river float accident, plus trying to do that in a society that tends to turn its back on people who are suffering generally, to blame and shame sexual assault victims, and to structure systems to support the success of White, higher income, heterosexual, cisgendered, Christian men (the precise identity of all the people that harmed me in my past, by the way). “You try to do better,” I often muttered under my breath when reacting to people who seemed to want to push me to “get over it” or to diagnose me with a host of “disorders” that I would have to find a way to overcome or get around in order to function in a desirable way in “normal” society.

It’s no wonder I started getting angry with people who would laud me for what they saw as strength as I survived the compounding effects of each of these traumatic events and the insidious nature of trying to “make it” in systems not designed for a woman or someone identifying as queer to belong or thrive. In those instances, I was doing whatever I could to act as if I was doing ok, to be tolerable for others, to hide what was happening inside me in order to make money to survive and/or avoid social isolation. I was pretending, aided by multiple ways to hide or run away from my feelings, and that was not sustainable.

In the traditional Western psychiatric approach, I would be diagnosed with various conditions that could be managed by medication and talk therapy but that, at best, would likely be something that I would have to manage for the rest of my life and possibly live in undesirable conditions while doing so. As I write this, I think back to watching episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and arguing over the view that victims on the show were “ruined” because of what happened to them. I know there have been times I felt ruined, though I know now that isn’t true and argue vehemently against it.

However, during one of those times, I saw an older White male counselor who listened to a 10-minute version of my story and immediately diagnosed me purely on the basis I had been sexually abused as a child. I remember walking away from that session feeling angry, blamed, shamed, victimized, lost, doomed...doomed because of what someone else did to me. I went home and read up on the diagnosis, and those feelings got even more severe. I couldn’t sleep that night, and for part of it, I wanted to just end things because everything I read seemed to indicate that I would never lead a functional life and that others should be wary of me. Luckily, I came to understand that that was all a load of crap. Luckily, I was able to access real, thoughtful support that helped me reconnect with my whole self and discover new possibilities for my future.

One of the things I love about the more humanistic, contextual approaches that are emerging (like the Power Threat Meaning Framework) is that it feels less dooming, and I believe I could’ve gotten where I am now more quickly if I had been supported in this way sooner. In this alternative approach, we may see ourselves as "bent" not "broken", strong in our awareness of and attention to our struggles and in our decisions to prioritize care. In this view, there is hope for moving forward with our full selves intact, supported where and when needed in our recovery efforts while action is taken elsewhere to correct the problems in the system that make it seem ok to some people to harm others and that push people to medicate away our feelings with alcohol and other drugs. It views me and others with similar struggles as healthy and simply in need of support as we navigate through our natural reactions to untenable situations. It advocates for healing the sickness of our social structures and systems, while providing resources for, freeing, and empowering me and others to become our most beautiful, powerful selves, ultimately enabling us to offer even greater contributions into the world around us.

What’s “wrong” with me, with us? Absolutely nothing. We are freaking amazing!