Beyond Diagnosis: Helping Clients Discover an Identity Beyond Their Symptoms

For nearly three decades, psychologist Will Baez has worked with people whose lives have been profoundly disrupted by mental illness, trauma, addiction and despair. His professional experience has taken him through psychiatric hospitals, churches, universities and seminaries, giving him an unusually broad view of how different disciplines understand human suffering.

Psychology speaks about cognition and behavior. Medicine focuses on symptoms and treatment. Religion considers sin, redemption and spiritual life. Philosophy asks questions about meaning.

Baez has worked within all of those frameworks. Yet after years of clinical experience, he believes counselors may sometimes need to begin somewhere more fundamental.

“Who are you?” he asks clients. “What are you about?”

The question may sound simple. In clinical practice, however, it can become surprisingly complex.

Clients often arrive with identities that have been shaped by diagnoses, trauma histories, family roles, professional expectations or social labels. Someone may say, “I am schizophrenic,” rather than “I have schizophrenia.” Someone else may define themselves primarily through depression, addiction or a history of abuse.

Baez does not minimize the reality of those experiences. Instead, he argues that counselors can help clients distinguish between what they experience and who they are.

“The disturbance that they have is at the level of identity,” he says. “They are not connected to their sources, they may be confused about their source.”

Identity and the clinical relationship

Baez’s approach, which he describes as the Divine Identity Method, developed through years of working with people experiencing significant psychological distress. Since 2014, much of his clinical work has involved individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, severe mood disorders and other forms of serious mental illness. His earlier experiences included ministry, addiction work and academic psychology.

Those settings taught him that identity work cannot be separated from stabilization.

He describes human development as a series of interconnected levels. Environment comes first: People need safety and security before they can meaningfully examine deeper psychological questions. From there, therapeutic work can move toward thoughts and behaviors, capabilities and beliefs, eventually reaching identity.

“You work from the environment first so they feel safe and secure,” Baez explains. “Then you work from thoughts and behaviors. Then capabilities. Then beliefs. You’re stabilizing them for identity work.”

For counselors, the sequence is significant. A person experiencing acute psychosis, for example, may have little capacity for abstract existential exploration. Medication management, crisis intervention, environmental stability and practical support may need to come first.

A client who is psychologically stable but experiencing profound midlife dissatisfaction may require something very different.

Baez sees these not as competing approaches but as different points on a developmental continuum.

“You can only move one level at a time,” he says.

That perspective offers an important clinical caution: Identity exploration should not become another intervention imposed prematurely on a client who first needs safety.

The person is more than the diagnosis

One of Baez’s most accessible observations concerns language.

Consider the difference between saying, “I am depression,” and “I have depression.” Or between “I am schizophrenic” and “I have schizophrenia.”

The distinction is more than grammatical.

Baez argues that language can reinforce the tendency to fuse a diagnosis with one’s sense of self. “I am” statements can become psychological boundaries, particularly when they are repeated over years.

“You can choose,” he says. “I have depression. I have schizophrenia.”

This does not mean that changing language changes the disorder. Nor does it suggest that people should distance themselves from legitimate disabilities or psychiatric conditions. Rather, it can create a small but meaningful distinction between the person and the condition.

That distinction is consistent with a broader therapeutic goal: helping clients develop identities that contain their experiences without being entirely defined by them.

Trauma can have a similar effect. People may begin to experience what happened to them as a complete explanation of who they are. Addiction, abuse, psychosis and chronic depression can narrow a person’s sense of possibility.

The counselor’s task may be partly to help widen that horizon again.

Start with the body

Interestingly, Baez’s identity-focused work begins not with abstract questions but with something much more immediate: the physical environment.

Before asking clients to meditate or engage in deeper psychological exploration, he pays attention to whether they feel physically secure.

Is the room comfortable? Is it too bright? Is the chair stable?

“I want them to feel the weight of the chair,” he says. “That the chair is secure and the room is comfortable.”

For Baez, this reflects a basic principle: “Everything is known through our bodies, that is the only place we know.”

Whatever theoretical framework a counselor uses, the observation has practical implications. Before inviting clients into vulnerable territory, clinicians must attend to the conditions that make vulnerability possible.

Safety is not merely an administrative concern. It is part of the therapeutic relationship.

Presence before technique

Baez also places unusual emphasis on the counselor’s presence.

He does not describe himself as a guru or someone who possesses answers that clients lack. “I see myself as holding space for an individual,” he says. “I have enough capacity to hold them.”

That phrase may sound familiar in contemporary counseling, but Baez gives it a demanding meaning. Presence requires sustained attention to another human being without immediately trying to fix, categorize or redirect the person.

Doctoral interns observing his work eventually told him that the quality that stood out most was his presence.

For counselors, this raises an enduring question: What does the client experience when sitting across from us?

Do they feel evaluated? Managed? Diagnosed?

Or do they experience themselves as a person whose story matters?

Baez believes silence can be an important part of that experience. In outpatient groups, he sometimes allows silence to continue until participants move beyond familiar narratives and begin speaking from a deeper place. At the same time, he recognizes that silence is not appropriate for every client or every setting.

In acute psychiatric settings, for example, he has found that people experiencing schizophrenia may not tolerate prolonged quiet. “I have to be very active,” he says.

The larger lesson is that therapeutic presence cannot be reduced to a single technique. The counselor must meet the client where the client actually is.

Spirituality requires integration

Baez’s understanding of identity is inseparable from spirituality. His own spiritual education has included Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism and Islam. Rather than viewing those traditions as mutually exclusive, he describes them as different paths that have informed his understanding of human development.

For counselors working with spiritually oriented clients, his experience raises an important issue: Spirituality can be a source of meaning and resilience, but it can also become a way of avoiding psychological pain.

Baez cautions against using meditation or spiritual practices as shortcuts around unresolved emotional material. He has encountered people who pursued intense contemplative practices without sufficient psychological stability and subsequently struggled to integrate what emerged.

“You have to integrate it,” he says.

That distinction is particularly relevant in counseling. A client’s spiritual framework should not automatically be treated as either pathology or cure. Instead, counselors can remain curious about what a spiritual practice is doing in the client’s life.

Is it helping the person tolerate difficult emotions?

Is it deepening connection and meaning?

Or is it functioning as an escape from grief, anger, trauma or interpersonal responsibility?

Baez describes the latter possibility as a form of spiritual avoidance. Changing religions, collecting spiritual experiences or adopting new beliefs may not resolve a deeper identity conflict.

“They have changed their beliefs,” he says. “They’ve changed their religion. They ask, ‘Why am I not reaching this place?’”

For him, transformation requires something more difficult than acquiring another set of ideas.

It requires surrender.

The counselor as companion

Baez’s emphasis on identity ultimately leads back to the therapeutic relationship.

He describes counseling as a gradual developmental process in which clients discover capacities and possibilities that may have been obscured by trauma, illness or limiting identities. For some, the work may involve surviving an acute psychiatric crisis. For others, it may involve confronting the emptiness that appears after conventional measures of success have been achieved.

“We are swimming in a sea of possibility,” Baez says. “We have multiple sources for developing who we are. But they may not have discovered themselves.”

That observation may be particularly relevant to counselors because clients do not always enter therapy with an obvious crisis. Sometimes they arrive with a vague sense that something is missing.

The work then becomes less about eliminating symptoms and more about helping the client explore meaning, values, relationships and a developing sense of self.

Baez’s own professional identities provide an example. He has been a psychologist, professor, husband, father, pastor and teacher. Yet he asks the same question of himself that he asks clients.

“I have been all those roles,” he says. “Who am I beyond that?”

His answer is rooted in his Christian faith, but the broader therapeutic question can be explored across many worldviews: What remains when the roles, diagnoses and expectations are temporarily set aside?

Presence as a form of healing

Near the end of our conversation, Baez returned to the biblical story of Moses and the phrase “I am who I am.” For him, the passage points toward a state of presence in which a person becomes increasingly aligned with what he understands as his deepest spiritual identity.

Whether a counselor shares that theology is less important than understanding what the idea means to the client.

Counseling is, after all, not simply about helping people feel better. It can also involve helping them develop a more expansive answer to the question of who they are.

That answer cannot be manufactured by the counselor. It cannot be imposed through a diagnosis, technique or spiritual doctrine.

It has to emerge through the client’s own experience.

Baez believes that process depends heavily on the counselor’s capacity to embody what they hope clients will discover.

“If I am not in a state of mind, I cannot pass that on,” he says.

In an era of increasingly sophisticated treatments, assessments and interventions, the observation is both simple and demanding.

Counselors bring knowledge, training and clinical skill into the room. But they also bring themselves.

The question, then, may not only be Who is the client?

It may also be: Who are we when we sit with them?

For Baez, healing begins when the person can see beyond the diagnosis, the trauma and the accumulated roles that have defined a life. Identity is not necessarily something we invent. It may be something we gradually uncover.

And perhaps the counselor’s most important contribution is creating enough safety, presence and curiosity for that discovery to begin.

Who are you?