Why Being Complicated Might Be the Point

We love a clean story about ourselves. Hero or villain. Healed or broken. Together or falling apart. The categories feel like solid ground—especially when everything else is uncertain.

Yahia Ghaleb, an MSc Clinical Psychology student at the University of Birmingham Dubai, spent his TEDx talk making the case that this instinct—however understandable—is costing us something. Not just accuracy, but the possibility of a richer, more honest relationship with who we actually are.

The talk is built around a deceptively simple framework. Ghaleb proposes that humanity exists across three dimensions: white (connection, empathy, love), black (control, exploitation, destruction), and gray—the space where integration happens. Not the elimination of the dark, not the performance of endless light, but the recognition that both coexist in most of us most of the time.

"The gray," he says, "is where we recognize that light and darkness can coexist without allowing either to completely define us."

It's a framework that will feel immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever caught themselves thinking I'm a terrible person after one bad afternoon, or I've finally got it together after one good week. We swing. Most of us know this. What Ghaleb is asking is whether we've actually built our lives to account for it.

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The frameworks underneath the metaphor

What makes Ghaleb's talk more than inspirational wallpaper is the psychological scaffolding he brings to it. He's not just asking you to "embrace complexity"—he's pointing to specific, research-backed frameworks for what that actually looks like in practice.

The clearest example is his use of the DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) concept of the three states of mind: emotional mind, rational mind, and wise mind. The emotional mind is where you feel deeply—and where, when unbalanced, anxiety or grief can take the wheel before you've had a chance to understand what you're actually experiencing. The rational mind gives structure, analytical clarity, the ability to solve problems—but pushed too far, it becomes detachment, managing life instead of living it.

The wise mind is neither and both. It's the integration—the place where you can feel without being swallowed and think without going cold. Ghaleb is honest that this is where most people struggle: "We swing between extremes. We either feel too much or shut down completely."

For readers unfamiliar with DBT, this isn't abstract philosophy—it's a clinical framework originally developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan, and it's been studied extensively, particularly in populations dealing with emotional dysregulation. The wise mind concept has practical applications that extend well beyond any clinical setting. Ghaleb's contribution is bringing it into a conversation about everyday identity.

He also invokes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which pushes against the deeply ingrained idea that psychological health means the absence of difficult thoughts and feelings. ACT's counter-proposal: you don't have to eliminate pain to live meaningfully. You make space for it. You notice it without fusing with it. "Thoughts will come, memories will come, and emotions will come," Ghaleb says. "They're not reflections of who you are. They're things that we carry."

This distinction—between being your thoughts and having your thoughts—sounds simple and lands hard when you've spent years treating every anxious spiral as autobiographical truth.

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The labeling problem

The section of the talk I keep turning over is the one about Ian Hacking's concept of "looping effects." Hacking, a philosopher and sociologist, developed this idea to describe how diagnostic and social labels don't just describe people—they reshape them. The more a label is reinforced and internalized, the more people begin to live through it, organize their behavior around it, and eventually call it identity.

Ghaleb applies this directly to the self-help and mental health landscape: "Eventually, those labels stop describing us, and they start to shape us."

This is where I find myself genuinely curious rather than certain. The critique of labels is well-founded and important. Diagnostic categories can calcify into identities. "I'm an anxious person" can become a narrative that forecloses possibility rather than one that opens understanding. The looping effect is real.

But labels also do genuine work. For many people, a diagnosis—of ADHD, depression, autism—is the moment their suffering finally has a name, and naming it is what allows them to stop blaming themselves for struggling. The label can be liberation before it becomes a cage. Ghaleb isn't arguing against diagnosis; he's arguing against fusion with any single story about yourself. That's a more precise target, and it's worth holding the distinction carefully.

The tension is real: we need enough structure to understand ourselves, and enough flexibility not to be imprisoned by that structure. Ghaleb is pushing toward flexibility. The question his talk doesn't fully resolve—because it probably can't, in this format or any—is where the line sits between helpful self-concept and reductive self-definition.

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The question underneath the question

Ghaleb closes with a reframe that's so clean it almost sounds like a slogan, but I don't think it is. He suggests swapping "What's wrong with me?" for "What matters to me now?"

On the surface, that's just cognitive restructuring—a classic CBT move, redirect the self-critical spiral. But there's something more interesting underneath it. "What's wrong with me?" is a diagnostic question. It assumes a fixed self with identifiable defects. "What matters to me now?" is an agentive question. It assumes a self that's still in motion, still capable of orientation.

That shift—from diagnosis to direction—is the real core of the talk. And it's consistent with the existential and humanistic psychology Ghaleb is most drawn to: the tradition that emphasizes meaning-making as an active, ongoing project rather than something you either have or don't.

"Meaning is not simply assigned or discovered," he says. "It's created."

Which is either profoundly liberating or slightly terrifying, depending on where you're standing when you hear it.

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There's a version of this talk that could easily slide into the familiar self-help groove: you are not your labels, embrace your complexity, you are enough. Ghaleb mostly avoids that slide. The psychological frameworks he cites are real, the questions he's raising are ones clinical researchers and philosophers take seriously, and his framing of healing as integration rather than perfection is more honest than most of what circulates in wellness spaces.

What he's describing isn't a destination. It's more like a practice of staying honest about the gap between the story you've been telling about yourself and the fuller, messier, more interesting truth underneath it.

Whether that practice is available equally to everyone—across different material conditions, different access to mental health support, different cultural pressures around emotional expression—is a question the talk doesn't have time to sit with. But it's worth sitting with anyway.

The courage to be complicated, it turns out, is partly just the courage to keep asking.

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Ellis Redmond is Buzzrag's Personal Development & Productivity Correspondent.