Self-Surveillance is Not Empowerment

How therapy culture creep has convinced us we need to solve the problem of our humanity.

Self-Awareness or Self-Surveillance?

Have you ever been thinking about something specific and then find yourself reading an article or overhearing someone talk about that same topic?

This happens to me all the time. Just this morning as I sat down to write this, I read an article by culture writer Freya India titled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore,” and knew I had to respond to it. The entire article is worth reading; it’s about how we have become near-obsessed with searching for diagnoses and labeling our characteristics, quirks, and uncomfortable experiences as symptoms or evidence of pathology. As India says, “In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained.”

She goes on to give numerous examples about how we—the collective, general we—are consumed with trying to explain everything about ourselves and our lives: we want to know why we’re attracted to so-and-so, or why we have a hard time with rejection, or why we behaved in a certain way with a certain person. We want to label our attachment styles, our communication styles, our personalities, and dig to find our “hidden motives” for whatever we are feeling or doing.

Now, I certainly would not argue for us to quit pursuing self-awareness. (Which is not what India is arguing, either.) Becoming aware of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors has the potential power to help us be less miserable. Noticing patterns in our lives that lead to undesirable outcomes may indeed help us figure out how to achieve more desirable ones. Being aware of what’s wrong may help us turn it into something different. And—too much effort toward analyzing ourselves may also be making us miserable.

As India astutely points out, the effort to persistently self-analyze why we behave or feel the way we do, or why we are the way we are, is not as empowering as it’s made out to be. In her words:

“I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads.”

I have experienced firsthand the effects of too much self-analysis; as India terms “self-surveillance”. At the height of my self-surveilling activity, I spent many an hour performing self-hypnosis, attempting to discover which occurrences of my childhood led to my current problems. I had also convinced myself that every thought and corresponding feeling I had was evidence of my intuition trying to warn or prod me in a certain direction. As many of my passing thoughts and feelings are neurotic, this made me quite paranoid. (Luckily I learned that fearing a car crash is not predictive of getting in a wreck later that day, nor does anxiously worrying that people are mad at you mean they are actually mad.)

At another point, I fretted that I had no personality, at all, as many of my character traits match the qualities often associated with the diagnosis “Anorexia Nervosa”, a disorder I did struggle with for many years. I had not then considered that such qualities of my personality—rigidity, perfectionism, high-achievement—may have predisposed me to the development of this disorder, rather than the disorder eclipsing my own personality.

Constantly monitoring myself and labeling my personality traits as disordered made me more miserable, rather than feel empowered, as self-analysis often promises. While self-analysis is not all bad, if it’s not helping, it may actually be hurting.

(Not) Doing the Work

As I’ve written about before, I have strayed away from the self-development world, as well as decidedly taken a ‘No, thank you’ stance against pop-psychology and therapy culture creep. Still, it’s all over the place, and I still feel the pressure to provide labels and evidence of why-I-am-the-way-I-am, even if just to myself.

Nevertheless, some part of me seems hell bent on retreating from “doing the work” (the phrase designated to describe personal growth and self-defined “healing”). It is not without guilt that I admit that I haven’t been journaling or self-reflecting much, lately. I haven’t been reading self-help books. I haven’t been turning over the pieces of my subconscious mind, nor have I been trying to analyze my feelings too much. In my free time, instead of performing self-hypnosis, I’ve been going to the pool, cooking pasta, reading novels. I’ve been going about daily life in a way that is not dictated by trying to understand everything that’s going on, but rather, to simply feel what’s going on. What I’m discovering is that it feels…relieving. It feels remarkably good not to try to figure out why I’m like this, or to try and fix my perceived personality flaws through monitoring my behavior and feelings, vigilantly combing for hidden meaning. It feels empowering to accept what my life looks like right now rather than take a shovel to it; to let my feelings come and go without labeling and laminating them, without hammering them into the wall of my psyche, where they take up permanent residence.

I cannot give a reason for why this change has occurred within me, this lack of wanting to dissect myself or to “figure out” who I am. Perhaps I’m just growing up. Perhaps I’ve become more willing to accept that uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. I am not a code to be cracked, nor am I a collection of symptoms: I am a dynamic being, to be discovered and created throughout my lifetime, and many parts of who I am remain unknown to me. With that surrender to a lack of knowing comes a certain peace, and I am attempting to live more in that state, to be brave enough to accept the unknown.

As Freya India writes,

“We keep being told that the bravest thing now is to do the work. But I think it takes courage not to explain everything, to release control, to resist that impulse to turn inwards. And wisdom too, to accept that we will never understand ourselves through anything other than how we act, how we live, and how we treat other people. We are thinking about ourselves enough. We don’t need more awareness or answers. My worry is that after a lifetime spent trying to explain themselves, solve their strong feelings, standardise their personalities, and make sense of every experience, a generation might realise that the only problem they had, all along, was being human.”

As the above paragraph highlights, the answer—or lack of an answer, rather—to why we are so convinced we need to find a reason why, or a label for, our way of being, is because it’s scary to face uncertainty. It’s scary to confront the fact that a lot of life is simply unexplainable, and out of our control. It makes sense to want to seek answers and to categorize ourselves—and, as India suggests, resisting that impulse to continuously turn inward might be what allows us to focus on experiencing, rather than analyzing life.

Who we are is not about what labels or diagnoses or sets of symptoms we can tack on to ourselves: it’s about how we live, what we do, the way we show up with other people. The self-awareness we may find more fruitful does not involve finding the right answer to why we are, but being present to the way our life feels, right now. There is a place for reflection and awareness, but let us not get lost inside our psyches (or on the internet, for that matter).

When we find ourselves excessively self-analyzing, or hunting for reasons to explain away our problems or justify our challenges—maybe it’s time to look outward, instead.

Maggie