Beyond Diagnosis: Why Psychologist Will Baez Thinks Our Deepest Crisis Is Identity

By George Cassidy Payne, M.A., M.T.S.

For nearly three decades, Dr. Will Baez has lived where few people choose to spend their lives.

He has counseled men who abused their wives, accompanied people living with schizophrenia, and worked alongside those struggling with addiction, severe depression and suicidal despair. His career has taken him through psychiatric hospitals, churches, universities and seminaries, each institution offering its own vocabulary for making sense of human suffering.

Psychology speaks of cognition and behavior. Religion speaks of sin and redemption. Medicine looks for symptoms. Philosophy searches for meaning.

Baez has inhabited all of those worlds. But today, he believes most of them begin in the wrong place.

“The main question is the question I am asking them. The Socratic question. Who are you? What are you about?” says Baez.

It is a question that sounds almost childlike until one realizes how rarely it is asked.

Not what do you do? Not what diagnosis do you carry? Not what political party do you belong to? Not even what you believe.

Who are you?

For Baez, that distinction has become the organizing principle of his life’s work. Long before developing what he calls the Divine Identity Method, he spent years witnessing people whose lives had been fractured by mental illness, trauma and addiction. Again and again, he watched clinicians work to change thoughts and behaviors while something deeper remained untouched.

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

It is a conclusion born less from theory than from experience.

His professional life has rarely unfolded in comfortable settings. Since 2014, much of his work has taken place in institutions caring for people experiencing profound psychological distress. Before that came ministry, addiction work and years immersed in academic psychology. The settings changed, but the human questions remained remarkably consistent.

People arrived carrying unbearable grief, psychosis, fractured relationships and lifelong trauma. Many had lost the ability to distinguish where their illness ended and their sense of self began.

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

Yet Baez insists these experiences also taught him something hopeful. Not everyone who seeks healing is trying to escape illness. Increasingly, he finds himself drawn to people who are already functioning well but feel an inexplicable restlessness, as though success has answered every practical question while leaving the most important one untouched.

That conviction was shaped by an unusually wide spiritual education, one that eventually carried him far beyond the boundaries of traditional Christianity.

Long before returning to seminary, Baez immersed himself in Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism and Islam. He did not abandon Christianity in the process. If anything, those traditions eventually deepened his understanding of it.

He laughs when describing the journey.

“Jesus took me on a magical mystery tour of the other religions.”

The phrase is playful, but the insight behind it is serious. Baez believes the world’s great religious traditions often point toward a common source beneath their different languages. He borrows a phrase from the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who spoke of people becoming “twice rooted.” Baez suggests that modern seekers may be “thrice rooted,” discovering an underground river that nourishes many traditions at once.

His openness to multiple traditions also grew out of a deeply personal experience during seminary.

“Your theology is put out there. Going to seminary is like going to the desert,” he says.

Although he identifies as Puerto Rican, he found himself studying during the late 1990s in an environment where conversations about race often revolved around a Black-and-white framework. There were spaces for Black studies and women’s studies, but he struggled to understand where someone like him belonged.

He remembers participating in anti-racism training within the Methodist Church and confronting not only prejudice from others but something subtler.

“The stigma is not just out there,” he recalled. “You start doing it to yourself.”

If identity can be distorted, Baez believes it can also be recovered.

His model describes human development almost like a series of interconnected layers. Environment comes first. Safety matters. People living with severe trauma or psychosis cannot begin contemplating life’s deepest questions until the immediate crisis has stabilized.

Only then can someone begin working with thoughts and behaviors, develop forgotten capacities, examine long-held beliefs and, finally, arrive at the deepest level: identity itself.

“When there is a cascade, an awakening of identity, the alignment of higher self, actualization of energy, it cascades down,” he says.

That progression explains why his work looks different depending on the person sitting across from him.

Someone experiencing schizophrenia may first need stability, medication and practical support before exploring existential questions. Someone who has already built a successful life may instead be confronting what Carl Jung called the task of the second half of life: discovering who they are beneath every role they have performed.

For Baez, these are not separate journeys. They are different stages along the same path.

The distinction becomes especially clear when he speaks about himself. Over the years, he has accumulated an impressive list of identities: psychologist, professor, husband, father, pastor, teacher.

Yet none of those titles, he insists, answers the question that matters most.

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

It is a question he returns to repeatedly, not because he believes people should reject their professions or responsibilities, but because those roles are never the deepest source of a human life.

“As a Christian,” he said, “the primary source is child of God, disciple of Jesus.”

That conviction would eventually become the foundation of a therapeutic approach that attempts something uncommon in modern psychology: treating identity not as the final destination of healing, but as its deepest starting point.

Baez often describes therapy as climbing a ladder.

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

Most people, he says, want to begin at the top. They want clarity, peace and purpose. They want to know why they are here and who they are meant to become.

But if the foundation is unstable, the climb rarely lasts.

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

People can become trapped inside abusive relationships. Others become consumed by addiction or overwhelmed by psychosis. Over time, their sense of self can narrow until they begin confusing what has happened to them with who they are.

Someone may say, “I am schizophrenic.”

Another might say, “I have schizophrenia.”

To many people, the distinction may sound semantic. To Baez, it represents something much more consequential: the difference between being fused with an illness and recognizing that an illness, however devastating, is not the whole person.

Later in our conversation, he returned to the idea, arguing that language quietly shapes identity.

“I have depression,” he said, creates a fundamentally different relationship to suffering than, “I am depression.”

His work attempts to create enough distance for people to remember that distinction. The process often begins with something surprisingly ordinary.

A chair.

Before introducing meditation or deeper psychological work, Baez pays attention to details many people overlook. Is the room too cold? Too bright? Does the chair feel secure?

“Everything is known through our bodies, that is the only place we know,” he says.

He wants the body to recognize safety before asking the mind to explore vulnerability.

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

Only then does deeper work begin.

Over time, carefully guided meditation becomes less about relaxation than receptivity. Suggestions are introduced gradually, helping clients rediscover forgotten strengths before moving toward the deeper question of identity.

For people living independently, that exploration may happen relatively quickly. For someone emerging from psychosis or years of trauma, it can take months. The pace is deliberate. Baez has witnessed what can happen when spiritual practices move faster than psychological development.

Meditation, he cautions, is not automatically healing.

He has encountered people who pursued intense contemplative practices before establishing emotional stability. Others experienced what some traditions call spiritual emergencies, powerful psychological states they were not prepared to integrate.

“You have to integrate it,” he said simply.

That emphasis on integration runs through nearly everything he teaches.

Modern culture, he believes, often mistakes information for transformation. People collect books, attend retreats, change churches and adopt new belief systems, hoping the next philosophy will finally quiet their restlessness. Yet they remain dissatisfied.

Baez sees the pattern repeatedly.

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

The obstacle, he believes, is not usually intellectual. It is surrender.

Drawing from Buddhist imagery, he describes spiritual growth as standing before a river. You reach the water and long to cross it. Sometimes you glimpse the other side, only to find yourself back where you started. Eventually, after enough preparation and enough letting go, something changes.

“You cross the river,” he said. “Then the only way to go back is to want to go back.”

It is not self-improvement. It is not positive thinking. It is not the accumulation of spiritual experiences. It is becoming sufficiently honest to release identities that no longer fit.

“You no longer have to ask the question. You are fully present in the world, you are completely incarnated. You have opened up,” he says.

That is a very different vision of spirituality from the one often marketed as another form of self-improvement, a way to become calmer, happier or more productive.

For Baez, transformation requires something harder. It asks people to surrender cherished identities, confront grief rather than avoid it and allow old versions of themselves to die.

“You have to suffer to get through suffering,” he said.

That perspective has made him cautious about contemporary spirituality. Meditation can become an escape. Religious language can become another mask. People can use lofty spiritual ideas to numb emotional pain rather than move through it. Baez notices it in flattened emotional language, diminished curiosity and an inability to name what is truly hurting.

“You have to die on the cross, you have to have enough ego to surrender it,” he says.

The same perspective helps explain why silence occupies such an important place in his work.

Many therapists fear quiet.

Baez does not.

When facilitating outpatient groups, he often lets silence linger until people begin speaking from somewhere deeper than their rehearsed narratives. Presence, he believes, can communicate more than advice.

The same stillness, however, would be impossible inside an acute psychiatric unit.

“Inpatient work with schizophrenics,” he said, “they cannot tolerate the quiet. I have to be very active.”

The therapist’s task, then, is not to impose a method but to meet people where they are.

“I don’t see myself as a guru,” he said. “I see myself as holding space for an individual. I have enough capacity to hold them.”

The phrase “holding space” has become fashionable in therapeutic circles. For Baez, it is something far more demanding. It requires a quality of attention so complete that, for a few moments, another person feels entirely seen.

A group of doctoral interns noticed exactly that.

After spending months observing his work, they offered him feedback that surprised him more than any compliment about his technique or expertise.

“What stands out most about you,” they told him, “is your presence.”

For Baez, that may be the highest praise a therapist can receive.

Late in our conversation, psychology gave way to something older. Not religion in the conventional sense, and not doctrine. Presence.

For more than an hour, Baez had spoken about trauma, schizophrenia, meditation, developmental psychology and the architecture of identity. He moved easily among Carl Jung, Martin Buber, Milton Erickson, Ken Wilber, Buddhist philosophy and Christian mysticism, drawing from traditions without appearing captive to any one of them.

Then the conversation slowed.

He began talking about Moses.

In the biblical story, Moses asks God for a name. Most discussions of the passage focus on its theological meaning. Baez hears something more existential: a statement about presence, identity and the possibility of becoming fully aligned with oneself.

“I am who I am,” he said, lingering over each word. “I’m very comfortable being that. I am fully present.”

Then he went further.

“Who is God? I think you get to the point where that question becomes irrelevant because you have aligned with what God is. There is such an alignment with God, that there is a flow of energy that liberates the energy in you.”

For Baez, the phrase is not simply a divine declaration but an invitation to become fully alive.

“The language just is. The words emerge from being. I think, therefore I am. From a different perspective. I am, and I think.”

That helps explain why he has grown increasingly skeptical of a culture obsessed with labels.

Throughout our conversation, he returned almost instinctively to the power of language. We describe ourselves through occupations, diagnoses and accomplishments until, slowly, those descriptions can harden into identities.

I am a therapist.

I am a failure.

I am an addict.

I am depressed.

The words seem harmless.

Baez believes they quietly shape the boundaries of the self.

Healing begins, he says, when people become willing to ask more difficult questions.

Not, “How do I become patient?”

But, “What am I avoiding?”

Not, “How do I feel better?”

But, “What part of me refuses to be seen?”

By the end of our conversation, I asked him whether he believes people ever fully arrive. After all these years, after thousands of clients and decades spent studying psychology and spirituality, has he finally come home to himself?

His answer was less a conclusion than an image.

He spoke about watching children grow. An infant first responds to light. Slowly, a personality emerges. Like a flower, roots spread beneath the soil long before anyone sees blossoms above ground. The visible life depends upon an invisible foundation that has been growing all along.

Baez sees identity that way. Not something invented, but something uncovered.

There is mystery in this work. Experience matters. Tradition matters. Scripture matters. So does what Baez calls a “felt sense.” Yet none of them can substitute for embodiment.

“If I want people to experience peace of mind, say I am a preacher and I want to pass on a state of mind that I want people to be in, if I am not in a state of mind, I cannot pass that on.”

It is a striking observation in an age saturated with experts. Credentials matter. Knowledge matters. But neither can substitute for presence.

“At the end of the day, what we are doing is showing up. We are fulfilling a responsibility. We are being present,” he says.

As our conversation drew to a close, I found myself returning to the question that seems to sit beneath nearly everything Baez has spent his life studying.

Not What do you do?

Not What do you believe?

Not What has happened to you?

Just three simple words:

Who are you?

For Will Baez, the answer is not found by accumulating more identities. It emerges through the slow work of becoming present enough to recognize the person beneath them.

Perhaps that is the quiet challenge at the heart of his work: before we can fully heal, we have to remember that our diagnoses, our histories, our professions and even our suffering are not the entirety of who we are.

They are things we have experienced.

They are things we have carried.

But they are not the whole of us.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience in crisis intervention, suicide prevention, philosophy, and community engagement, George Cassidy Payne brings a deeply human perspective to stories about psychology, religion, social justice, and the people working to heal fractured communities. He is particularly interested in conversations that challenge conventional thinking and illuminate the complexities of identity, resilience, and belonging.