Let me give you X reasons why you probably don’t want to use labels in your relationships.
1. The Golden Rule. If you believe that what you send out comes back to you again, and that treating others how you would like to be treated is the best course, then labels probably don’t fit in that.
Would you like someone to call you depressed? Or a narcissist? Or a psychopath? If not, don’t label others.
2. They aren’t useful.
Even if you think you have correctly identified someone: “He’s codependent!” “She’s a narcissist!” “He’s an addict!”, has that helped you?
Now what? Have you solved your problem? Theirs? Nope
The ego self thinks you are now protected, “He is X. X is bad. I avoid X. Now I am safe” is the logic.
But, when your next partner acts the same way, you will quickly see how the label didn’t provide any protection or true understanding of yourself or the other or shift any behaviors.
3. They aren’t accurate or descriptive, even when they are ‘good’.
“She’s beautiful!” “He’s intelligent!” “She’s talented!” “They are loving!”
Even positive labels are simply judgements of external behaviors or characteristics, which you prefer or you don’t. Using these labels doesn’t often tell the person you are ‘praising’ what behaviors are valuable to you or wider society, nor how to apply them.
A focus on behavior does however.
“I loved watching your dance!”
4. They mean something different for everyone.
5. They describe a small portion of who one is. They are reductionist.
6. They usually involve us taking a ‘superior’ or ‘judging’ role.
7. They provide us with a sense of understanding about ‘the whole person’ we don’t have.
8. They often increase guilt, shame, and the problems that caused the label in the first place. “Criminal”
9. They take the mystery out of life.
10. They harm connection and mask our own vulnerability.
I have been losing a few friends lately. Of course, this happens. But *how* it happened in this case left me feeling not so good.
I had written some things which might be interpreted as critical of certain *ahem* societal structures or systems, and one friend in particular interpreted these to be attacks on him personally.
Not so.
In fact, in this article I want to show you briefly how you are kept from getting your needs met by labels and identification.
As long as I can convince you it’s ‘your’ army or ‘your’ political party or ‘your’ country or ‘your’ religion or ‘your’ anything–as long as you believe that you are this abstract concept, then you will 1) react emotionally to perceived attacks 2) defend this thing powerfully.
As Derrick Jensen says, “My friend asked: how long do you think we are going to be in Iraq?”
Derrick replied, “I didn’t know this was Iraq!”
His friend said, “No, our troops, silly.”
Derrick said, “I have troops??!! How cool!”
It’s not your army anymore than it is your bank. Sure, you might indirectly pay for it, but if its commander orders a soldier to launch a Hellfire missile at your car, you will quickly see just how un-your-army this is.
But this isn’t about the military.
This is about identification.
So, I was sitting in the bus today and the thought came to me, “Wait, you are angry with me because of my opinion?” Really?
There are some people that identify so much with sports teams that they wouldn’t speak to you again if you said the wrong words about their favorite.
And sports is just the first step of being taught the separation/competition/authority mentality that we later apply to the state, religion, etc.
So, who are you?
You, of course, aren’t any of the groups with which you identify. You are…you!
A separate being and yet part of the whole.
But to really know that, you need to stop and experience that. Which is what meditation is about.
We use Perfect Relating to help us see which labels we apply to ourselves and others which keep us from intensely connecting to and enjoying others as we could.
Join us!