Naming Things

the benefits and pitfalls as I see them

Labels. Ugh. This word has taken on quite a negative connotation. Yet, our lives are full of labels. Person, place, thing, or… It’s just the practice of naming things, yet we tend to think of labels as restrictive while also seeking to label everything. We must—or how would we communicate?!

Image from uniquelyaligned.com

In fact, I have a little bit of an obsession around the idea of naming things. So many times I’ve experienced a nebulous sense of something, and then I’ll come across a description that names the thing (or I make up a name for it myself.) Once labeled, I gain so much power over it! I can now think about it and manipulate it in my mind. I can map it onto other named things. It’s engaging and satisfying! (Jessie’s and my conversation for the abstract intense explains why I love this so much.)

If the thing (the nebulous sense; the experience) is painful, naming it often gives me a way to resolve it. Like “learned helplessness” whose discovery I describe in this article. Once I added this concept to my mental library of named things, I could recognize it easily and know the solution was to change my environment so that I was no longer experiencing this intolerable state. Like when I left my teaching career (if interested you can learn more of this story here) or my last job where my employer and I had philosophical differences and I knew our visions were irreconcilable. (I consider myself very fortunate to have the privilege to leave a job where I can’t effect change. I know this isn’t the case for everyone. Others may not feel they can address the learned helplessness they experience at a job they’re not suited for.) 

I’d say this is a powerful benefit of naming or labeling things, especially abstract ideas that describe human experiences. Unfortunately, our culture has perverted this a bit, imo. It would seem our range of normal has shrunk considerably as more and more people struggle to adapt to what is, in my perspective, an unhealthy society. According to depth psychologist, Amy Sousa, in my interview with her here, this is at the core of her work. This field recognizes that chronic stress and other physical symptoms are often signals from your body trying to communicate that you’re inhabiting a world that is not suited to you. Rather than address the environment, our current culturally- accepted protocol is to label you as disordered, provide supports—often in the form of medication–to lessen your symptoms, and plug you back into the unsuitable environment. 

I would say this is what our trans-identified children are doing. Children are wired to uptake the culture, whatever it is. Ours is one of suppressing our distress, valuing oppression, and seeking solutions outside ourselves rather than explore too deeply the root cause. To do so would mean to recognize so much of what we’re doing isn’t working well to support healthy human development.

This is one reason I loved coaching Strengthsfinder 2.0 which, as a recovering school teacher, I used to refer to as “labels for good.” Rather than pathologizing our tendencies, it identified them as potential strengths; we could rename them and then learn to work with them productively. Instead of “troublemaker”, the Strengsthfinder tool would label this tendency, “activator” and teach you to redirect your provocative nature in a constructive rather than destructive way. Someone with “consistency” may be encouraged to work in a systems-oriented field rather than with people where treating everyone exactly the same could lead to harm (because we each have unique strengths and needs.) 

I recognize my daughter has inherited my obsession with naming things; however, she’s drawn to the current cultural approach that is less about empowering personal growth and more about becoming permanently dependent on outside support. She’d scour the internet (much like her mother) to identify and name this discomfort she was experiencing, but with a focus on pathology, diagnosing herself into powerlessness. What to do? Tell her she’s doing it wrong? Is she? I’d say she’s doing her best to adapt to her world, which we’re wired to do. I’ve decided the best I can do is model for her how to use naming in what I believe to be a healthier and more productive way–to give me power and agency over my own experience. 

In the new content series I’m adding to The StoicMom Project, helpful concepts along the way, we’ll be diving into some human experiences that have been labeled. We’ll practice how to use the concepts (another way to say “the once nebulous things we’ve now named”) to change the way our brain is wired–the best way, imho, to take charge of and change the experience we’re having. 

When I’m working with clients, I get excited when they’re explaining one of these nebulous experiences to me and I have a name for it; I exercise patience and listen carefully before offering the name. It’s not 100% but so often I can hear the “aha!” and I get a “Yes! That’s it!” Then we can play around with the newly labeled thing and come up with strategies to overcome whatever challenge this experience is creating. 

Earlier this week, I was in session with one of my clients who is a brilliant woman with an active mind and a talent for describing such experiences. She was telling me what it’s like to be very aware of moments in conversation with her daughter that cause her emotional state to escalate, but feeling at a loss for how to stop it or do anything differently. I could normalize her experience by placing it on the continuum of competence, and by naming this moment and equipping her with a needs list (a whole chart of human needs that we’ve identified and labeled,) we could devise a strategy for her to de-escalate herself.

Now she could recognize that moment and be able to identify her daughter’s needs, allowing her to soften toward her daughter’s experience and model self-regulation and curiosity. Will it take practice? Might she miss the opportunity the first few times it presents itself? Yes and yes!! And she knows this is normal because humans have mapped this continuum of competence and we’ve named the phase she’s in; this encourages her to keep practicing because she knows how this works and that if she keeps at it, there’s mastery (or in this model, ‘unconscious competence’) in her future. 

I’m hoping you see the benefits of “labels for good”, of naming things so you can have the power to recognize and consciously decide what you’ll do with the thing. This is how you take charge of your (formerly nebulous) experiences.  This is why I’m launching my new paid series, helpful concepts along the way. You can watch the intro episode here and learn how you can get access to this new premium content. 

If you’re a subscriber, you can also reference yesterday’s email titled, “Paid Subscriber or Founding Member?” which compares the two ways to access this new content! I plan to publish more information about my new Founding Member tier in the next day or two, so if you’re still debating which tier is the best fit for you, I hope to help you to that decision shortly!