On fixed identity and why real change begins deeper
In my practice I hear it often. Someone leans forward slightly, sometimes almost relieved: “I’m highly sensitive.” “I’ve been diagnosed with autism.” Or with a mix of resignation and clarity: “I have burnout.” “My ex is a narcissist.”
Sentences like these bring order. They give language to something that previously felt confusing or diffuse. Sometimes there’s relief in them, sometimes recognition, sometimes finally the sense that there are words for what has been there for a long time.
And yet, more and more often, it evokes a double feeling in me. I see how a single word suddenly becomes the whole story. As if it explains everything.
My resistance to labels is not about naming. Naming can be helpful. What unsettles me is the moment when a description becomes an identity. When “this happens in me sometimes” turns into “this is who I am.” Or when “this is behavior I see in the other” becomes “that’s just who he is.”
That tipping point is subtle, but essential. Because once identity hardens, the deeper inquiry often stops.
When a label becomes identity
Last week I worked with a client who describes herself as someone with commitment issues. Everything was viewed through that lens. Doubt in relationships, pulling away, tension when someone came close — it all confirmed the narrative.
In itself, that wasn’t untrue. The label described a pattern. But it described it from the outside.
I know how that works. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I looked at myself in the same way: analyzing, explaining, but not yet really feeling.
So when she said this, we slowed down. I invited her not to analyze, but to notice what was happening in her body as she imagined a moment of closeness. Her chest tightened. Her breath became shallow. There was an impulse to withdraw.
And beneath that impulse was an old moment of overwhelm — an experience in which closeness had once been too much.
That is what we call commitment anxiety. But now it was no longer an identity. It was a protective response. And a response can change. An identity, much less easily.
In mental health care and coaching we have become accustomed to approaching problems as something that needs to be understood. We make the story coherent. Insightful. Intellectually sound. It feels professional. Careful.
But understanding is not the same as shifting.
As long as it remains insight, the nervous system does not automatically move with it. “Commitment issues” may remain a logical story, but not an experience that rewrites itself.
When something is recognized as a protection strategy rather than a character trait, space opens up. Not because the label was wrong, but because it was too coarse to do justice to what was actually happening.
Why diagnosis → project-thinking often keeps people stuck
This example is not an exception.
In many traditional trajectories, it starts with a diagnosis. A category. A name for the problem. From there follows a plan: this is the complaint, this is the protocol, these are the steps, this is the goal. It offers clarity. Sometimes it works. Structure can be supportive.
But underneath lies an implicit assumption: that the problem can primarily be understood cognitively and solved in a linear way.
That’s where it often falters.
Much of what people experience — fear of rejection, perfectionism, people-pleasing, relational blocks — does not resolve cognitively. These are embodied survival responses that once made sense in a particular context.
You cannot reason a nervous system that has been on high alert for years into calm with a treatment plan.
I regularly see people who can analyze their pattern perfectly. They understand it. They can explain it. They know where it came from. And yet their body continues to respond as if it is still unsafe.
At that point, therapy subtly shifts into symptom management. Not because someone lacks motivation, but because the intervention is happening on a different layer than where the pattern originated.
Not a linear problem, but a living system
The diagnosis-project approach assumes a linear model: cause → intervention → solution.
But a human nervous system does not function linearly. It responds contextually, relationally, often unconsciously. What feels “too intense” in the present may still be linked in the body to an old experience of overwhelm or rejection.
In such moments, explanation helps only so much. Presence, slowing down, and attuned attention help more.
This is also why a recent LinkedIn post by professor of psychiatry Jim van Os struck me. He argues that psychiatric classification should not be confused with explanation. A DSM diagnosis says little reliably about care needs, prognosis, causes, or specific treatment.
At its core, the DSM is a classification system meant to organize. Yet we have come to treat it as if it describes reality itself.
His alternative does not begin with a label, but with questions:
What happened?
What are your sensitivities and talents?
What matters to you?
What do you need?
That starting point resonates deeply with me.
The label “narcissist” — and how it can freeze a relationship
In relationships, too, I see how labels can solidify.
“I now know my ex is a narcissist.”
There is often strength in that sentence. Relief. Finally having words for confusing or destabilizing behavior. I recognize that.
And let me be clear: narcissism exists. It plays a significant role in many relational dynamics. Not seeing it – especially its more subtle, hidden forms – can keep people stuck for years. It can be deeply confronting to acknowledge that someone systematically manipulates, diminishes, or distorts reality. Sometimes it feels like the ground drops away beneath you.
I have written earlier about how destabilizing hidden narcissism can be, precisely because it is so difficult to recognize. Naming it is not exaggeration. It can be a necessary step in regaining your footing.
Where it turns
But there is also a turning point.
When the other person collapses entirely into the label, further inquiry often stops. The relationship is reduced to a type. The dynamic to a diagnosis. What disappears from view is the interaction itself – the moments you began to adapt, the doubt that was slowly planted in you, the old patterns that found each other.
I am not arguing for erasing the label. I am arguing that it should not have the final word.
Once “he is a narcissist” explains everything, there is no need to look at what happened in you. And that, to me, is the difference between recognition and fixation.
What is not examined does not disappear. It moves into the shadow – and often returns later in another form.
I know this not only from my work, but from myself. When I first wrote about hidden narcissism years ago, I initially placed it mostly outside myself. Analyzing. Distancing. At times blaming.
Only when I dared to look at what in me had been touched – and why I had participated in that dynamic – did something actually shift.
What once was a survival strategy did not have to remain an identity.
Why Brainspotting approaches this differently
What draws me to Brainspotting is that it does not begin with a diagnosis, but with what is happening in the body right now. Not: what is your disorder? But: what happens in you when you pause here?
Many deeper patterns are implicit, pre-verbal, and relationally formed. They are stored in the body not as narrative, but as experience.
Sometimes someone sits still, eyes focused on one point. On the surface, little seems to happen. And yet you see the breath soften. The shoulders drop slightly. Not because the problem is solved, but because the system no longer has to fight for a moment.
When the body experiences that the pace is safe and the attention is not forcing, something can begin to move – without first being fully understood.
What people often report is not that they have learned something new, but that something has shifted.
I recognize the strong tendency to understand everything first. Perhaps that is also why people often say they experience safety relatively quickly in sessions. Not because I stand above the pattern, but because I know that movement myself – from analyzing to staying present.
Not as a problem that must be fixed step by step, but as an experience that is allowed space.
When a label does help
Let me also say this.
A label can be profoundly supportive. Someone who discovers they are highly sensitive may finally understand why open offices exhaust them. Why social gatherings linger in their system. That insight can help them set boundaries, structure their life differently, reduce stimulation. It provides a kind of user manual.
At that level, a label can feel liberating. It enables practical steps.
But a user manual is not the same as processing.
Sensitivity itself is not the problem. It often remains part of who you are. What can shift is the charge attached to it – the old experiences that make a stimulus feel not only intense, but threatening. The tension that settles in the body.
If you work only at the level of the label, the risk of narrowing emerges. Everything gets explained by that one word. Life gets organized around the limitation, without exploring what lies beneath it.
When you look deeper – at what was once triggered, at how your system learned to respond – the intensity can lessen. The sensitivity remains. But the burden decreases.
The difference between naming and fixing someone in place
My resistance is not against naming. It is against fixing someone in place. Against the moment when something that was once a response becomes an identity.
What continues to interest me in my work is not which label fits best, but what happens when someone briefly sets the label aside and listens to what is happening in the body.
You are not one thing.
Not one diagnosis.
Not one pattern.
You are someone with a history that still moves through you. With ways of protecting yourself. And with everything else you are.
A label can help you see something. But it is rarely wide enough to hold a human being. And rarely deep enough to truly touch what lives underneath.
Too narrow for the complexity.
Too shallow for the charge stored in the body.