Life & Therapy

The other day, my daughter told me that she doesn’t like two of the kids in her class because one of them asks why too much, and the other cries. She then labeled the two children as “The Why-er” and “The Crier.” I restrained myself from laughing at the irony of this, since she probably asks “Why?” about six hundred times a day, and she has plenty of tantrums herself. I mustered up my best serious voice and tried to talk to her in toddlerese about seeing people beyond the one or two actions that we don’t like. I caught myself about to say things like, “It isn’t very nice to call people names just because you don’t like something they did.” But then I realized that I would be telling her she is not being nice, and she would hear that as me calling her a name because I didn’t like what she did.  Also, doing something to be “nice” just doesn’t get to the heart of things.  I dislike “nice” as a motivator for this reason.

So I tried to break it down further. I told her that everybody does things we dislike, but those same people also do things that we like. If we decide that somebody is bad because we don’t like something they did, then we won’t be able to see the fun things they do, the things we like.  Then when we are with this person, we can’t have fun because we’re waiting for them to do what we don’t like.  Also, if someone IS what we don’t like, then they can’t change, and we are stuck feeling yucky with this person who won’t stop doing what we don’t like.

I don’t know whether she absorbed any of this, but it did get me thinking about how, as adults, we can act just like toddlers in this very way; labeling people based on actions that we dislike. Once we label someone, it is very difficult to see beyond that label. Our experience becomes limited by the label we give, and all future interactions are seen through the filter of the label, furthering our intolerance of that person and heightening our feelings of annoyance.  In addition to this, we unconsciously disallow ourselves from doing anything that would cause us to be like “that person,” since we’re behaving as if actions make an identity.

As an alternative to labeling, I am trying to teach my daughter to say things such as, “I don’t like it when you ask me so many why questions,” rather than, “I don’t like you because you are a Why-er.”  This is a good thing to try as an adult, as well.  We can notice when we label our friends, family, co-workers as if their actions make them permanently and hopelessly a certain kind of person.  The partner who didn’t hear what we said because they were distracted isn’t necessarily a bad listener.  What if we say, “I don’t like it when you can’t hear me because you are distracted,” rather than, “You are a bad listener”?   The odds of this person changing their behavior will increase dramatically if we can name the behavior rather than label the person, and this opens our world up to enjoyable, satisfying possibilities.  Take away the labels and you’ll find movement in all of your relationships.