Don’t become so fixated on labelling yours, or the behaviour of others, that you lose sight of the human struggle behind that behaviour.
Labels make it easier for us to deal with stuff.
The moment we give it a name, we can manage our expectations around it.
This is fine when it comes to abstract stuff and tasks or problems that we deal with as part of a regular day.
But it becomes detrimental when we start labelling behaviour and then responding to that label, rather than recognising the legitimacy of the human experience behind that label.
Popular labels include depression, bipolar, narcissism, and egotists, to name only a few.
It’s one thing describing what we’re observing as our experience of someone’s behaviour, but the moment we reduce the human to that label, we become part of the struggle that they’re already grappling with.
We must learn to connect with the human struggle long before we label it as an illness or a deficiency.
For example, we don’t suffer from depression, but we do have good reason to feel depressed because we’ve lost hope in something important working out the way we need it to.
And so it is with all other so-called mental illnesses.
We lose compassion and empathy, and thus disconnect from our own humanness, when we define the entirety of a being by a single label of unacceptable or unpleasant behaviour.
Reclaim your humanness, so that you may be able to honour the humanness of those around you.
Start by avoiding self-diagnosis of the emotional state of others.
#mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthrecovery #lifecoaching #zaidismail #compassion #trust #empathy #theegosystem #ownyourlife
Dehumanising the human
