On The Peril of Naming Our Problems

I am having a problem with naming my problems.
Urusula Le Guin is famous for the concept and power of naming in her series The EarthSea Triology.  In the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, the hero Ged releases something from another dimension.  What he finds through the course of the book is that by naming something, you come to have power over it - and can control it.

Sounds delightful, does it not?  Find you problems, name your problems, and suddenly you have the power to know what they are - after all, if I define something as anger or depression or failure I know it, and by knowing it I have knowledge of what it is and perhaps how to deal with.

But there is a subtle risk therein, a risk that I had never considered until this week when Bogha Frois brought it up to me:  "You have to be careful when if you find a problem you immediately name it"  she said.  "By naming and defining it, you may deprive yourself of the ability to deal with it because by defining it you suddenly put it into a box.  If you put it in a box too quickly you become comfortable with it because you think you know what it is - and thus short-circuit the process of truly delving into it."

She is right, of course.  By defining something we often tend to cut short the process of discovery.  "Hey"  we say, "this is depression.  I know depression.  I know the five stages of depression" - when the thing is not fully depression at all.  Depression may be the symptom, not the cause - but suddenly we "know" what the problem is and thus we feel no need to go deeper.

I wonder if in some ways this is a coping mechanism for us, a way for us to avoid truly digging into our problems.  Most people would prefer to feel good rather than bad; by naming something and thinking we understand it we reduce the level of pain and anxiety caused by feelings we cannot name flowing into our existence.

But the danger is real, as Bogha Frois pointed out.  There is real self discovery that must occur before resolution, a real wrestling in the soul that we all too easily try to turn away from in our quest to make ourselves feel better.  We name the problems we think we have - but in naming them, perhaps instead of bringing them under control we instead cause them to hide their true natures, and thus their real names.