Ann: Some of my friends are into special diets to eliminate artificial ingredients, or preservatives, or whatever. They’re trying to cut down on all the crap, and that means reading the labels.
Hugh: I got caught up in a traffic jam at the supermarket, because people were standing in the aisles studying the contents on every box. And I get it — it’s good for us to know what’s in the food that’s sold to us.
Ann: Labels work when they’re on packages. But when they’re on people…not so much. By the way, I liked the workshop that you and Barbara Silverman led a few weeks ago at the “Creating Your Mental Health” series at UX – (the All Stars Project’s free school for adults). Many of the 50 or so people there were poor – most were African American and Latino. And this kind of diversity made the conversation really interesting. After you asked people to talk about their experience with being labeled, many shared their history of being told they were some “thing:” “uncoordinated,” “slow learner,” “class clown,” “loudmouth,” “a perfect gentleman,” etc.
Hugh: Labeling is such a common activity that we often don’t even notice that it’s going on or the effect it’s having. And that includes when we’re labeling ourselves, as so many of us do. Several people at the workshop talked about having mixed feelings about labels. They can be reassuring. If you’re feeling alone and invisible, as most of us do at some time in our lives – and some of us do much of the time – a label can make you feel that at least like you’re being seen, even if it’s in a negative light.
But a more lasting effect of labels is that they’re used to define, and limit, who we are and – more importantly – who we can become. Like the label on a can of tomato sauce or a jar of peanut butter, the labels we give to people are assumed to be true-for-life. They “capture” us, and we find it very difficult to get away from them. Labels are made to stick.
Ann: Being stuck with a label can be very painful and destructive, even when we’re the ones labeling ourselves. If you believe that you are what your label says you are, then you’re unlikely to try new things, take risks, to do anything that you think “just isn’t you.” Even seemingly good labels can hold us back. I thought what you and Barbara did by sharing labels people gave you as kids was really helpful in creating an environment where other people could open up their history with labelling and their feelings about it.
Hugh: Thanks. We hoped that doing this would help create an environment for people to share. Labels really do stick for life and keep us stuck! So often people come to see me for help — they’re dissatisfied – with their marriages, with their relationships with their kids or their parents, with their careers or their weight or their social lives – but they’re unwilling to do anything different to change things, because, they say, that’s not who they are. And they’re right! It isn’t. Which is why I suggest that it might be a good idea to do it.
I’m thinking about one of my clients, a 65-year-old man, who came into group one night a few weeks ago and asked for help. He started by saying: “I’m a loner. I’ve been one all my life. It stops me from talking to people, so it’s hard for me to make new friends.”
The group asked him questions to learn more about what he was saying. The group was being very caring of him—but I wanted to open up and explore how come he was labeling himself. So I asked him a different kind of question: I said,” How do you know you’re a loner?” He told us his mother had always insisted that he was, and the label had stuck with him. Various members of the group, along with me, expressed our surprise. “You’re not a loner here,” we told him. “You’re very active in the group, you don’t hesitate to tell us your opinion or to ask for help from us or to give it. Not to mention that you’ve chosen to be in group therapy! Doesn’t seem like the sort of things a loner would do.”
At first, he had a hard time hearing this. His old label seemed to carry more weight than what we – a group of people who work closely with him and know him well – were saying was our experience of him. I asked him what he made of the gap between the received “truth” of who he is and the lived experience of the people in the room – including him? That led to a conversation about how pretty much everyone in the group has to struggle with reconciling the stories they’ve learned to tell about themselves – a label is a kind of story – and their lives as they choose to live them now.
Ann: It all sounds a little grim, don’t you think? Why do we – including you and me – have to take labels so seriously? We don’t! We can play with them. Remember that training workshop you led with mental health practitioners a couple of years ago when you organized an improvisational exercise called “block party” in which everyone went around wearing actual labels – “bully,” “big baby,” “flirt” – a particular role that they had to perform with whoever they met? After a few minutes they’d switch labels with each other – the “loudmouth” was suddenly “shy,” and “Miss wide-eyed innocent” became “the boss lady.” Everyone thought it was a hoot, and kind of eye-opening too. We don’t have to be defined by what our labels say we are. We can practice looking at them as what they are — not eternal truths, but ordinary, people-made products that got produced at a particular time and in a particular place in our lives. We can play with them. But we don’t need them.
Hugh: Yes, indeed. Better to live undefined, with plenty of room to grow.