Our Teens are not Labels
Labeling, diagnosing, and pre-scribing anyone undermines their experience of themselves and the relationship between us. For adolescents, labeling can be especially harmful because their identity is so much in flux. Adolescents are deeply involved in the transformative processes that bring them into adulthood.
Labels or even simple descriptors do damage when they’re assigned to complex beings, like adolescents. In the Norwegian fairy tale of a beautiful girl and her ugly twin sister, the “ugly” one known as Tatterhood asks, “What are the questions that open the heart?” [There is far more to this story than this particular message, and I encourage you to go further for more treasure.]
As adolescent service providers we are tasked with the precious and, for me, the sacred task of companioning these young people through a challenging time under the best of circumstances. An effective service provider will, at the very least, establish a collaborative relationship with the teenager. A masterful service provider knows how to navigate the relationship so that the young person opens their heart to what it is we offer them.
Labels tend to pathologize
Often, as adolescent service providers, we see the young people with whom we work through lenses that pathologize their actions, behaviors, and adolescent traits. Here are a few that might sound familiar:
Class clown
Surly or moody teenager
Angry
Addict
Delinquent
Too sensitive
Mean girl/boy
Bully or victim
This doesn’t include the labels that show up in therapy, like OCD, conduct disordered, borderline-y, depressive, etc.
While it is easy to shorthand a description of someone—i.e., my ADHD client, that class clown in my 3rd period history class—there’s far more going on than a simple way of communicating. We begin to experience the young person this way, react to them, and relate to them through the lenses of the label. This is true even of positive labels, such as the smart one, the musical one, the gifted one. In essence, we begin to one-dimensionalize and limit our understanding of the whole child. Often labels lead to pathologizing. When behaviors, traits, aspects, parts get pathologized, then the primary aim of the service provider is to fix, to eradicate, and/or medicate the adolescent, resulting in ongoing invalidation.
Some suggestions to avoid labeling
Wait to read the files
When I was teaching, I would not read any of my incoming students’ files until I met them face-to-face and came to know them better. Only then would I open the files—and there, all laid out, were the histories of the labels given to the students over the course of their years in school.
For the same reason, I do a minimal intake assessment when I meet with new clients in my therapy practice. I want to wander a bit with my client. I want both of us to get to know each other more organically. This is a vital relationship we are co-creating, and we must lay a strong foundation for the possibility of difficult and transformative work ahead.
Learn their names quickly
When I was student teaching my supervising teacher gave me a piece of wisdom that I continued to use through my entire teaching career: “If you want to be an effective leader in the classroom, you learn your students’ names as soon as possible and use them often.” Names are powerful things, and, when spoken with respect, they invoke respect in return.
Refer to the students by name
I have attended too many school staff meetings both as an educator and a therapist where I overhear staff talk about students using the labels, rather than their names. We call this “talking behind their back.” Respect for our teens at all times is the aim, whether they are present or not.
Be compassionately curious
This is the answer to Tatterhood’s question. We ask questions that let the adolescent know we want to know who they are, that we’re authentically interested, that we seek to understand them—not so we can fix them or make them behave.
We ask questions to open their hearts and ours! Instead of labeling the child “class clown,” we ask them and ourselves questions. Instead of the diagnosis of depression and then the prescription for the anti-depressant, we ask questions.
What or who is here?
What parts of the child are speaking and what are they saying?
What is it that this behavior or state of being is telling us about the teenager’s reality at the moment?
What is needed?
What is too much or too little?
Where and how do they need my support right now?
The adolescent service provider, as a Shiftless Wanderer, actively seeks depth, complexity, and expansiveness. We look for opportunities to be curious and discover. If you work with adolescents and have a relationship with your Inner Adolescent, this may resonate with you as well.
The researchers Douglass and Moustakas articulate the process of letting go of labels and entering what can be an uncomfortable but essential way of relationship-building:
“Vague and formless wanderings are characteristic in the beginning [of getting to know someone or some thing], but a growing sense of meaning and direction emerges as the perceptions and understandings of the [adolescent service provider] grow. . . . A feeling of lostness and letting go pervades, a kind of being wide open in surrender to the thing itself, a recognition that one must relinquish control and be tumbled about with the newness and drama of a searching focus.”
(Douglass & Moustakas, Heuristic Inquiry: The Internal Search to Know, 1985)
Letting go of the one-dimensional labels and diagnoses, we enter relationships with this potent, exploratory, shiftless wandering way of the archetypal Adolescent. We enter a different kind of relationship with the kids to whom we are in service. This is the kind of relationship our adolescents need, especially in these days and times. We are no longer in service to an agenda, a treatment plan, an assessment score, conformity, and/or status quo—which labels often support and concretize.
The questions that open the heart
When we ask questions that open the heart, we open our eyes, our vision, so we truly behold the essence of the person in front of us. Our adolescents are marvels to behold when we have eyes that can truly behold them—beyond labels and diagnoses right to the heart of their humanity. And ours.
Photo by: abdul gapur dayak