When Being Human Gets Treated Like a Disorder

We are living in a time where more people than ever are in therapy, talking about mental health, and learning how to understand themselves.

Yet, many of them still feel like something is missing because some forms of suffering aren’t problems to solve.

They’re expressions of being human.

When those experiences are approached primarily through a clinical model, people can start to feel like they are perpetually unfinished. They are always working on themselves, always managing something, and always trying to arrive somewhere they never quite reach. That exhaustion is built into the premise itself.

I want to say something clearly, because this matters.

Therapy has helped me. There were seasons of my life when it gave me stability I did not have on my own. I have watched it help people I love. I have seen it help clients. Nothing here is a rejection of therapy or the people who practice it.

What I want to explore is something adjacent to it—the mental health model that therapy operates within, the assumptions that shape how distress is understood, and some of the unintended consequences that can emerge when human experience is filtered primarily through a clinical lens.

More and more people are coming into therapy not only with trauma or acute symptoms, but with something harder to name. A sense that life feels off. Questions about meaning. Disconnection that does not resolve, even when circumstances improve. A persistent feeling that something about being human is heavier than it seems like it should be.

These are not new questions. They are ancient ones.

For most of human history, experiences like grief, despair, longing, confusion, and existential uncertainty were not understood as psychological problems. They were understood as part of life itself. The assumption of a soul, or some animating essence, was woven into how people understood themselves. Mind, body, and meaning were not separated in the way they are now. When suffering emerged, it was often interpreted as a disruption in relationship with community, with nature, with belonging, or with something larger than the individual, not as an internal defect.

The responses reflected that understanding. Ritual. Storytelling. Initiation. Collective witnessing. Shared meaning-making. Sometimes nothing at all beyond recognition that difficulty was part of existence. Human pain was not automatically something to fix. It was a part of life.

Over time, this orientation shifted. Philosophy introduced reason as a way of engaging with experience, and eventually it was elevated to the status of the primary authority. The Enlightenment marked a turning point in how humans understood themselves, with thinking positioned at the center of identity. Later, the scientific revolution reinforced the idea that what could be measured was what could be trusted, and subjective experience became harder to legitimize in the same way.

Psychology emerged within that cultural moment. Early thinkers still tried to hold meaning, symbolism, and the unconscious as inherently protective rather than broken, but the field gained legitimacy largely through what could be observed and measured. Behavior became the entry point for understanding human problems, and changing behavior became the pathway to relief.

That shift brought both progress and harm. Over time, psychology evolved into something far more humane and compassionate than its early forms. Consent became central. Suffering was approached with care rather than control. Therapy, as it exists today, has helped many people in meaningful ways.

But the underlying model remained largely intact. Individuals were still understood primarily through symptoms and behaviors. Change the behavior, reduce the symptoms, improve functioning.

In many situations, this works well. There are experiences where behavioral interventions are incredibly effective. It would make no sense to dismiss that.

The difficulty arises when the same framework is applied to existential distress and to the deeper ache of being human.

Right now, many people are living with chronic uncertainty, disconnection from community, rapid social change, and an overwhelming pace of life. Anxiety and depression emerge in response to human conditions. They are not always internal malfunctions. Sometimes they are coherent responses to circumstances.

When those experiences are quickly translated into diagnoses, normal human reactions can begin to feel like evidence that something is wrong with you. The label may provide clarity or access to treatment, but it can also reinforce the belief that your experience exists primarily as pathology.

That belief changes how people relate to themselves.

I see this often in therapy culture, and I have lived it myself. People begin to approach their inner world as something to manage. Experiences are monitored, categorized, optimized, and corrected. Attachment styles, nervous system states, communication frameworks, boundaries, trauma responses—all of these can be useful ways of understanding ourselves. They can create insight and relief.

But when the deeper issues of longing, grief, uncertainty, and a sense of meaninglessness or disconnection are never directly addressed, the work can become endless. There is always another layer to uncover, another pattern to track, another response to regulate.

A person can end up living in a posture of self-surveillance.

And eventually, a question emerges:

Is this ever going to end?

When the original pain lives at the level of meaning or belonging, treating the person primarily through behavioral correction does not fully reach it. Symptoms may ease temporarily, but the underlying disorientation returns because the model did not meet the depth of the experience.

There is another layer that often gets missed. Humans do not exist in isolation. We are continuously shaped by the world around us—relationships, culture, loss, uncertainty, history, systems. No amount of personal development removes that reality. You can be self-aware and still be affected. You can be regulated and still feel grief. You can have insight and still feel lost.

That is not pathology.

That is the human condition.

This tension is part of what led me to develop The Process of Unbecoming.

I needed a way to sit with people that didn’t start from the assumption that something was wrong with them. A way to understand patterns as adaptations rather than defects. A way to hold distress inside the broader reality of the human condition rather than immediately translating it into pathology.

At its core, unbecoming is not about improving yourself. It is about loosening the assumptions that organize experience around fixing. The belief that wholeness is conditional, that struggle means failure, and that relief comes from becoming the best version of yourself.

When those assumptions begin to soften, the relationship to being human changes.

Therapy remains valuable. There are places where it is essential. There are clinicians doing extraordinary work inside the mental health model, but there are also people whose suffering lives at the level of being human, and they need somewhere to bring those questions that is not organized primarily around diagnosis or correction.

Not everything that hurts needs treatment.

Sometimes it needs recognition, relationship, and space to exist without being turned into a problem.

Because being human was never meant to be solved.

It was meant to be lived.