The problem with labels

Everybody has an internal narrative. An internal narrative is the story we tell ourselves as we go through our day to day. It’s important for functioning, communication and frankly just existing!

The beauty of our internal narrative is that we get to decide the story being told. I might find that I have a cold when I wake up in the morning and feel upset thinking to myself “why me? why can’t I catch a break!” Whereas you might wake up with a cold and have the narrative “wow, at least it’s just a cold!”.

The thing is, many of us have developed labels that we use to dictate our narrative. For examples, let’s say you were to let go from your job - the simple narrative is exactly that; you got fired from your job. Whereas it would be easy for you to buy into a label that you put on the situation i.e “I am a failure because I lost my job. What does it mean to be a failure? How do we define that?

Everyday we apply labels whether it be to ourselves, a situation or an experience. In therapy we talk about being mindful of the labels that we use when dictating our narrative. It’s not uncommon for people with depression to use self-deprecating labels, or people with anxiety to put all or nothing labels on a potential outcome. In therapy, we talk about challenging these labels.

You mess up and say the wrong thing to your parter? Does that mean you’re an idiot?

You made a mistake an accidentally made a mean comment to a friend are you really a bad person?

All of this is to say that there’s obviously nothing wrong with being mindful of mistakes we’ve made or areas of improvement to strive for - but in the name of healthy thinking patterns, be careful of labels!