The sound of labels makes me ill

I think it would be great if all of the thousands of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok (and whatever else there is) psychology videos were to disappear in a flash, electrocuted in a painful instant. Millions of children’s, teenagers’ and adults’ heads would no longer be toilets of wisdom, giant billboards of diagnostic labels shoved into their brains like Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head. Fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t be saying their father is a Narcissist with an Avoidant Attachment Style. Teenagers wouldn’t be told by their parents that their grandfather cheated on their grandmother and that’s why . . . . Twelve-year-old girls wouldn’t call their mother Borderline Personality (when, factually, both of them would be). The entire world minus five people wouldn’t have the middle name “Trauma.” Therapy clients wouldn’t prefer Rod McKuen-like couplets of profundity in melodramatic typefaces to the powerful work of therapy.

We would also remove many psycho-nouns and adjectives from the public domain. We’d make them private feelings that only the individual would discover in himself. “Abandonment,” “depressed,” “people-pleaser,” “codependent,” “gaslighting.”

People are deeper than, other than, the labels, but as soon as they buy one or two, they become them. They will evermore have trouble feeling the feeling underneath, far underneath to their buried history of meaning.

Imagine that even therapists didn’t have the labels, like John Lennon’s Imagined world without religion. Clients would still be describing – vaguely and poignantly and accurately – their distress, pain, emptiness, lack of a sense of identity, soul sickness, chronic hurt-frustrated-angry wrongness. And with their clients describing injury and hurt, therapists wouldn’t be focusing on their thinking, trying to change their thinking – the sick domain of Cognitive Therapy. They would help the client go to where they were wounded and pour their pain out.

Therapy without labels would enable so much more healing, it would be a phenomenon.

I’m thinking of “trauma.” Trauma is rape and being in war and watching your buddy’s head blown off. But even more, because the consequences can be so much deeper and longer, trauma is being a child of divorce, feeling unloved, being regularly left with a babysitter, being bullied and having no one at home who knows how to listen. I’m thinking of “abandonment.” My clients’ mothers and fathers left when they were two years old, seven years old, twelve years old, left and never returned. But abandonment is also telling your parent that you’re sad and hearing “you’ll feel better.” Or in my case, telling my father that and seeing him flinch. It’s saying the teacher was unfair and being told “I’m sure she was just having a bad day.”

Please join me in wishing all these labels, brain candy and brain poison, gone.