Labelling

I’m lazy.

I’m no good.

I’m a terrible excuse for a human being.

It took the better part of my twenties to unlearn my predilection to label myself and others. It’s a destructive habit that calls forth the baser demons of our nature, yet it is entirely natural to do. We humans love to label things, even things that we can barely glimpse:

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”

This iconic Superman comic tagline illustrates my point. We make assumptions based on past evidence and experience about what is witnessed in the future. Our brains takes intuitive leaps so we can more easily label and categorize the world around us. Otherwise, we’d spend so much cognitive effort making sense of our environment that we’d barely be able to do anything.

See a speeding object soaring through the air? Only natural to think of a bird. Wait, that bird has some serious contrails… must be a plane! Nope, planes don’t have red capes — definitely Superman!

Of all the cognitive distortions, I find Labelling to be the most common type of thought I’ll have in a given day because it is so easy to do. What Cognitive Behavioral Therapy gave me along with tools to manage my distorted thoughts was a heightened awareness of when I think a certain way. I don’t catch every time I label myself or someone else based on a split-second perception, but I feel I catch at least 50% of them. When you spend most evenings categorizing thoughts and challenging them, you get good at identifying when a distorted mental lens is in place. If you’re curious about how to do your own thought records, here is a picture of my process:

I have dozens of pages of thought records. Usually three per page, and it’s helpful to review how I used to think. Partly because it’s fascinating to see how far I’ve come in developing my thinking, but mainly because thoughts don’t empower us most of the time. Labelling makes it difficult for a person to distance themselves from their situation or what someone called them.

The consequences of labelling made be more reserved. I thought: I am depressed, not: I have depression. This is why I refer to myself as a depressive. It’s still a label, yet it has a slightly more positive tone that I find soothing. I don’t wish to be labeled as a depressed person by myself or anyone else, but I’ve had conversations where people refer to me as “the guy who talks about suicide” or “the guy who suffers from depression.” Fifteen years of CBT has made it impossible to be impacted by these external labels.

Well, maybe not impossible, just remarkably difficult. When you add my officiating experience, I’m generally unfazed by what anyone calls me. The trick has been learning to become unfazed with what I can say to myself, which has been much harder. This is why I combine various Western and Eastern philosophies that recommend a reasonable degree of indifference to that which cannot be controlled. I cannot control when someone labels me as a terrible official when I work a lacrosse game, and I cannot control when my mind will zero in on a distorted thought that debases my humanity. 

What I can do is raise my level of awareness of those labels, and use them as an opportunity to redirect my attention to labels that will help build me into the person I aim to be.