THE PSYCHOLOGIZATION OF LIFE: WHEN PAIN BECOMES A DIAGNOSIS

When pain becomes a diagnosis, we lose the chance to live the crossing.
“Not all pain is pathology. Not all suffering demands a cure. Some pains actually require courage to be lived.” We live in times where the most fundamental human experiences — like grief, anxiety in the face of instability, fear of failure, or existential sadness — have come to be treated as clinical dysfunctions. It’s as if we are telling the world: “If it hurts, then it’s wrong. And if it’s wrong, it needs medication.”
But is it really?
Human pain has been hijacked by the logic of diagnosis.
This is what Spanish psychologist Marino Pérez Álvarez denounces: “The problems are not inside the person. It’s the person who is inside a context where everything got complicated.” The phrase is a radical invitation to collective responsibility. It’s not the brain that is broken. It’s the world that makes subjectivities sick with toxic relationships, oppressive environments, and exhausting systems. Therefore, confusing suffering with disorder is a mistake — and a risk.
Imagine someone who lost their job after years of dedication. They feel sadness, insecurity, fear of the future. The diagnosis? “Major depressive disorder.” The treatment? Psychopharmaceuticals.
What’s left out? The humiliation. The loss of identity. The feeling of uselessness that no medication can erase — when we medicalize pain, we silence its message.
Just as fever is not the disease but a symptom of something that needs to be faced, suffering often signals a call for change — not a biochemical failure. The fact is that turning suffering into pathology is a form of dehumanization.
Nietzsche already said: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
But in a culture that fears pain and idolizes emotional performance, the why dissolves into the immediacy of the solution.
The result: we treat the symptom, but do not transform the meaning.

A common example I encounter: A shy young person avoids public speaking. They get labeled with “social phobia.” But what’s behind it? An educational system that punishes mistakes, parents demanding perfection, and a market that rewards only the “extroverted.” The problem is not shyness — it’s the cycle of shame, avoidance, and isolation. True therapy is not silencing the emotion, but helping them act with it. Not despite the fear, but with it. Does this make sense to you?
According to studies published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, over 80% of anxiety diagnoses do not consider contextual factors like unemployment, debt, or domestic violence. This statistic reveals a central point: often, it’s not the individual who is sick — it’s the system that makes them sick. Instead of labeling, we should ask:
• Is this pain a sign of collapse or transformation?
• Does it need diagnosis or listening?
• Pills or meaning?

It is urgent to rescue the value of pain as part of the human experience. Not to glorify suffering — but to free it from the tyranny of diagnosis. As Viktor Frankl said: “Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning.”

ESCAPING PAIN DOES NOT HEAL. ONLY PRESENCE TRANSFORMS.

I hope that by now you understand that not all pain is pathological — some are pedagogical. Now, let’s go further: what we do with pain says more about our mental health than the pain itself.

The Culture of Emotional Anesthesia
We live in an era where feeling has become a burden. Pain, once considered part of the human crossing, today is seen as a personal failure.
With this comes a silent phenomenon: experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance is the constant effort to avoid unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or memories — even if it compromises important choices and deep values.
Classic examples?
• Someone who avoids relationships for fear of rejection.
• Another who lives to please, afraid of exclusion.
• Or one who says, “I don’t want to suffer anymore,” and therefore closes their heart — to pain, but also to love.

Research in Third Wave Therapies, like ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) or Cognitive Behavioral Development processes, shows that the more we avoid suffering, the more it dominates us.
It is not emotional masochism, but understanding that, deep down, fleeing pain is fleeing life; it is emptying the soul.

The Paradox of Avoidance
What promised protection becomes a prison. And here modern pathology is born: it’s not pain that makes us sick, but the compulsive attempt to control it, hide it, or silence it. As Jung said: “What you resist persists. What you accept transforms.”

Pain That Is Not Lived Becomes a Symptom
When we deny sadness, it returns as apathy. When we silence anger, it turns into self-aggression. When we suppress fear, it infiltrates all decisions.
The psychologization of life, in this sense, not only pathologizes suffering: it colonizes the meaning of experience, convincing us that being well means always being happy, productive, and emotionally regulated.
But is that human?
Nietzsche challenges us again: “One must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” The problem is not chaos — it’s not knowing how to dance with it.

Psychological Flexibility
Yes! Flexibility regarding our internal processes is the antidote to emotional anesthesia. True mental health is not about eliminating suffering, but cultivating the ability to be present with what is, without losing sight of what matters. Flexibility is the art of saying:
“Even with fear, I proceed. Even with pain, I act. Even in uncertainty, I choose.”

It is the ability to move toward one’s own values, with or without discomfort.
For example, a professional feels anxiety every time she needs to speak up in meetings. For years, she avoided it. She lost space, self-esteem, and opportunities.
Instead of trying to eliminate the anxiety, she learns to recognize its presence, breathe with it, and act despite it. The result? More authenticity, more connection, more power. Yes! It’s true the pain didn’t go away. But it stopped being an obstacle and became a companion. Never forget that:
• Diagnosing is important — pathologizing, no.
• Treating is necessary — invalidating, never.
• Suffering is not a sign of weakness — it can be, in fact, the most honest path back to oneself.

LISTEN TO TRANSFORM: WHEN PAIN FINDS A PLACE, IT STOPS SCREAMING.

I want to return now to the beginning of this article and ask: How to rehumanize suffering in a world that teaches us to silence the soul?
The answer begins with something ancestral: listening. Yes! It may sound absurd to many ears, but the truth is that when we learn to dialogue with ourselves, we learn a listening that does not label. Listening that validates. Listening that supports.
In a time when everyone has an opinion, few truly listen.
And when they do listen, it is to diagnose, correct, or compare. But what pain often asks for is not a solution — it is shelter. It needs to be heard as the language of the body, as the expression of the invisible, as the gesture of someone trying to exist with dignity even in the face of anguish.
An adult who falls silent may be repeating a childhood of not having been heard.
A professional who “explodes over nothing” may be exhausted from holding everything together.
A leader who controls obsessively may be terrified of their own fragility.
It is not about justifying everything by trauma — but about opening space to understand what this symptom is trying to say.
The body speaks. The soul repeats. Culture distorts. And the market blinds and addicts!
Untreated pain becomes symptom.
The unheard symptom turns into a label.
And the label, once crystallized, becomes a psychic identity. Thus, phrases are born like:
✓ “I’m just anxious.”
✓ “I have ADHD, so I can’t focus.”
✓ “I have chronic burnout, I can’t handle work.”

Beware: These statements may contain some elements of truth, but they can also conceal another:
… suffering was never heard as legitimate, only as a defect to be eliminated.

Environments That Welcome Are Environments That Heal
Mental health is not only an individual process. It is also environmental and relational.
Places that demand constant performance, punish vulnerability, value speed and ignore listening… make functional people sick.
Healthy environments, on the other hand, operate on a different logic:
• Failure is an opportunity to learn, not humiliation.
• Emotion is understood as data, not weakness.
• Care is not the exception but part of the culture.

People do not “get sick out of nowhere” — they get sick in systems that make them sick.

To Humanize Is To Restore Dignity To Pain
“It is not pain that dehumanizes us. It is the silence of pain in the structures we create.” – Marcello de Souza

As the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, little popular in the mainstream, aptly said, “The positivity of performance nullifies the listening to pain.”
We live in an era where suffering is treated as a performance failure — not as a legitimate part of the human experience.
Emmanuel Levinas, the thinker of alterity, warned us that ethics is born in the face of the other — especially when that face carries suffering.
“I am responsible for them without expecting reciprocity; even for their own responsibility I am responsible.”
But perhaps the one who helps us most here is María Zambrano, a Spanish philosopher who dared to say:
“Pain is what first makes us aware that we are alive. And only when someone listens to us with true presence does that pain find dignity.”
Humanizing, therefore, is restoring to pain its legitimate place in the narrative of existence. And this begins with language. It begins when we exchange “What’s wrong with you?” for more humane questions:
• “What is crossing through you today?”
• “What is heavy for you to carry?”
• “How can I walk with you, even without understanding everything?”

This is not just a change of words.
It is a change of world.
As Viktor Frankl said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

And now, what to do with all this?
If you lead, remember: leading is not about controlling someone else’s pain, but creating space for it to be felt and respected. True leadership is born in deep listening — the one that welcomes without rush, judgment, or haste to “fix.” It is an invitation to shared vulnerability, where strength emerges from presence.
If you care for someone, abandon the urge for a “quick fix.” What heals is not the medicine or immediate solution, but holding. Holding another’s hand, being available even when there are no answers, validating feeling — that is caring with soul.
If you suffer, know an essential truth: your pain is not a sign of failure or weakness. It is a journey. As Carl Jung taught, “Healing comes when what is inside finds its way outside.” Your pain is a portal — to a deep reconnection with your integral, imperfect, and real humanity.
And perhaps this journey is giving you back what modern life tries to hide:
the capacity to be human — in all its complexity, contradiction, and beauty.
Embracing this is more than a challenge; it is a call to live fully.
The psychologization of life has distanced us from the soul.
It is time to bring it back.

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I also invite you to read the text by psychologist Eparquio Delgado, entitled “Points to Distinguish a Psychological Problem,” available at:
https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/07/17/eps/1563359384_733539.html
This insightful article deeply complements our reflection on understanding and humanizing suffering, helping to clarify how to differentiate between a legitimate psychological issue and a natural human response to life’s challenges. Truly inspiring for our integrative approach.