Letting Go of Identity Labels: A Healing Practice

What is an “identity label?” It’s a phrase that stands to characterize a component of ourselves and our shared experiences with others. Such phrases are vital elements of communication, however they’re additionally restricted. The phrase isn’t the expertise itself however, somewhat, is shorthand to precise that have.

For my psychological well-being, I’ve discovered it necessary to domesticate a way of who I’m previous the boundaries of language and, in phrases of identification particularly, to see myself as extra complicated than any single phrase or phrase can seize. While it may be therapeutic to embody an identification label to really feel that sense of belonging, it will also be constricting.

When I all the time introduce myself with an inventory of phrases pertaining to gender, race, potential, and so forth, I begin to really feel pigeonholed, as if I’m not giving others an opportunity to see me as a person however as an inventory of preconceived notions. Letting go of identification labels, then, is a follow that helps me perceive when you will need to title identification and when it’s extra useful for these features of who I’m in society to go unsaid. By witnessing my attachment to my labels, I can deepen my relationship to them and to the individuals who share them.

This follow additionally helps me in difficult tokenization, whether or not it’s my tokenization or my potential to tokenize others. Do I would like each story about my identification to heart on being nonbinary, biracial, or disabled in a number of methods? No, as a result of this could dilute folks’s understanding of who I’m. It can even flip me into an instance of how all bipolar individuals are, for instance, when that’s not all the time finest for me or for different bipolar people. Knowing concerning the issues with tokenization, I attempt to watch out about how I communicate on my experiences of identification in case I’m performing as a false professional, believing that my expertise represents and captures the totality of everybody in that group’s expertise.

It could be liberating to easily communicate as me and never as a member of one of my communities, and this follow of letting go of identification labels—quickly and with clear intentions—provides me perception into when to embody my individuality and when to function a group consultant.

Step 1: Acknowledge limitations

Are there features of your lived expertise that don’t neatly match inside the bounds of what an identification label communicates? What different phrases, pictures, or sounds assist you to convey this expertise? What produce other folks with this identification shared that you don’t relate to?

By witnessing the restrictions of identification as a phrase, you may start to glimpse your private definition of it, evaluate that to the broader definition, and maybe see the way it works for you and to your group—and the way it doesn’t. This exhibits up for me in being a South Asian yoga trainer. It could be extremely necessary to call my racial identification in an area that’s cultural, however after I all the time put that identification first in my yoga follow, it limits my expertise.

Step 2: Cultivate the sense of being past labeling

My yoga follow is a superb house to let go of the messaging—phrases, pictures, something that proves your sense of self to others—and be taught to easily be.

Do you’ve cultural practices the place you may witness the distinction between shifting in it as a [insert identity label here] and letting go of that label? For instance, when I’m working towards yoga, I don’t all the time must suppose of myself primarily as South Asian. There are moments after I can simply transfer my physique intuitively or meditate while not having to outline who I’m in society.

This potential to be who I’m past the labeling applies to diagnostic labels too. When I’m cleansing, do I have to be outlined as an individual with OCD who’s cleansing? Can I simply placed on some music and get the job carried out with out contemplating my nervousness stage, or noticing what number of instances I wash my fingers and questioning if it’s clinically thought of an excessive amount of? Yes, I’m comfortable to share that I can!

Step 3: Return to your relationship with an identification label

Once you launch the label, or broaden your perspective of it, then you may come again with a renewed understanding of why it issues to you. Is there a way of spaciousness, impermanence, and surprise?

Perhaps you may uncover new layers of that means that didn’t happen to you earlier than difficult the attachment to your identification label. Yes, the phrases for gender, race, sexuality, potential, temper, and so on., are necessary, but additionally they can not outline all the pieces about who you’re. Words for psychological well being, specifically, exist to pinpoint considerations and map an individualized therapeutic plan—to not predict who you’ll develop into sooner or later.

Conclusion

Being in your expertise, with out attaching to a message, doesn’t negate the expertise. I discover silence to be an area that honors complexities there are not any phrases for. This can even open up connection to others who relate with the expertise with out essentially regarding the identification label—and that features individuals who got here earlier than us, within the instances earlier than these social constructs like race, gender, sexuality, faith, and behavioral diagnostics existed. Personally, I really feel extra peace and calm by connecting to those folks and remembering that I exist as who I’m as a result of they existed as who they have been.