It be unseemly, but everyone has been guilty at some point of counter-diagnosis. Whether reflecting or deflecting an argument or perceived argument against oneself onto one’s counterpart in a relationship, or whether the target is the system or the world or a group of people. Skillfully, or unskillfully, some even make careers in this vein.
At MA we hold that the impulse toward counterdiagnosis is understandable for those who have been traumatically misdiagnosed, but is not our goal.
In alignment with the principles of NVC, at MA our belief is that the impulse toward diagnosing human beings altogether on account of their humanness is one that often creates disastrous phenomena of self-fulfilling prophecy, in addition to only rarely being at all helpful.
In living our best lives and in supporting other MA members toward the same goal, we become living proof of our principles.
The heartless, harming and possibly infinite battles of diagnosis and counterdiagnosis become distant memories that we may still learn from, but do not repeat.
It is not that we allow just anyone to enter our lives or inner circles, or that we absolve ourselves from the emotional work of discerning character and who the people we are in relationship with actually are. Rather, we refrain from weaponizing dislike or distaste through clinical language or a mindset that in order to be dismissive or cruel one may involve oneself in a mental game in which the other is fundamentally “sick” (and therefore oneself is clean, pure, sane, right, or otherwise perfect). Instead we tolerate and even celebrate one another’s differences.
In releasing patterns of misdiagnosis and counter-diagnosis, we are made free. In the spaciousness of this freedom, the true light of understanding ourselves when we are sick and our needs for health come to us.
Misdiagnosed Anonymous 