How Labels Help and Harm Us
For many years now I have been encouraging all of my members to look beyond their diagnoses and labels. Why? Because you are not your tinnitus, your menopause, your autism, your OCD, your migraine or your meniere’s etc… You are a whole human being and part of your experience may be explained and understood by a label or diagnosis, but certainly not ALL of it. You and your wellbeing, are so much more. People who become their diagnoses can become limited and stuck in their neural pathways too.
Their symptoms fire repeatedly and their lifestyle habits remain on repeat.
They are stuck in a harmful trap of over-identifying with a diagnostic label.
Yet, ignoring labels and diagnoses can be equally harmful.
Labels can bring a lot of support and reassurance to help us understand parts of our experience.
For example, you may learn which phase of “perimenopause” or “menopause” that you are in.
Yet, it is important to not be consumed by this identity.
So we are learning how to explore a diagnosis or label, to help us understand our body and stage of life — without being consumed by it.
It is a balancing act which is why I say: Hold all labels lightly.
For example, I recently experienced a flush of ‘depletion’ type body signals and many people casually said: “You’re in menopause, get used to it!” However, I am 41, and I am not there yet. Imagine what could happen to my life, if I believed them and I became a menopausal woman.
What if I started acting like a menopausal woman is stereotyped to be?
Imagine if I started complaining and blaming my body, my hormones, getting into a funk of body symptom patterns and just accepting it. There is danger in this.
Never let others give you a label without questioning it deeply.
I was also given the label “autistic”, but upon reflection and further research, this label really does not fit me. At first, I started to behave differently, as though I was trying to blend into the diagnosis.
Why? Language is powerful and it truly does shape us. But I noticed that this autism label did not in any way support, nourish or nurture me. I felt caged, limited, weaker and misunderstood.
I have a voracious social hunger (not the typical limited social battery), I do not experience the need for stimming or repetitive body movements (which is how autists discharge excess neural energy), and I don’t experience the difficulties of burnout that other autists report.
However I am highly sensitive and in that regard, part of the autism label is useful for me to learn about. So take and leave what works for you. Don’t become the label, because you are so much more than this.
This is what my research taught me about menopause.
Menopause typically occurs 40 years after a girl has her first bleed.
This means if your menarche is at age 12, your menopause is likely around age 52.
Perimenopause occurs roughly 6 years prior to menopause, so for this example, perimenopause is expected to begin around age 46. For me, I have a few more years yet to prepare for this stage of life.
These labels can be useful in navigating changes to bodily sensations, sleeping patterns, emotional regulation, ancestral “lineage” wounds and dietary needs. These are real physiological challenges. Each woman undergoes serious neural rewiring during menopause—she becomes more emotionally stable and eventually arrives at clear thinking within herself—if she makes it through the brain-fog and confusion of perimenopause.
In other words, the label can be useful to prepare for these changes and to be ready for them.
To understand that this time of life may call for more rest, solitude, emotional processing, slow cooked meals, tender conversations, soulful creativity and intimate connections. Hormones do not muck around and menopause is a huge rite of passage. Many of the “symptoms” or signs of perimenopause and menopause can include: migraine, headache, fatigue, exhaustion, tinnitus, dizziness, vertigo, pain, aches, emotional volatility and panic.
Sound familiar? In Sensing Ground, we talk about how to gracefully move through these life cycle stages and honour our changing needs. We don’t become perimenopausal, we become the next version of ourselves: stronger and wiser.
It is unhelpful to identify with the label perimenopausal or menopausal, then to isolate oneself into a community of other woman who also identify this way. It can lead to groupthink and a natural human tendency to ‘blame and complain’ together. There is stagnation rather than evolution. This keeps us stuck in our pain rather than learning, growing and evolving through the immense wisdom that is flushing through the body. These are tremendous opportunities to cleanse ourselves of the ancestral stories that do not belong to us. To empty our body of the “I am not enough” and “I am not worthy” ideas that riddle us all. Symptoms can be viewed as useful clues. These clues are telling us the beliefs and stories that we have absorbed over decades, and these stories are ready to go.
This is a time of excretion.
Out with the old ideas and beliefs, in with the new.
You consciously create your inner lanscape to build an interior life that is perfectly matched to suit you.
You wake up every day with the ability to access calm, confident clarity.
You learn to ride the waves of confusion gracefully.
You rid yourself of self-doubt and debilitating confusion. You rebuild your sanity and strength through paying quiet attention to your bodily sensations. This powerful rite of passage can be totally missed if a woman stays over-identified with the label, rather than looking beyond it and into her own wisdom. Every diagnosis is an opportunity to dive more deeply into your own wisdom. It is not a pathology to be fixed. It is an opportunity to learn the wisdom of your body.
Regardless of the diagnosis you receive, there is wisdom for you behind it.
Who are you becoming? How is this experience strengthening you? How are you learning to stand more steady and grounded in yourself? Once a woman completes her menopause rite of passage (rather than medicating or avoiding herself), she has superior emotional regulation skills because she has lived through the extreme oscillation of perimenopause and the wild ride of her hormones.
She has learned HOW to steady herself while living inside of a storm. But she can’t learn these skills if her bodily sensations are numbed, ignored, avoided, medicated or denied.
“I am all good, let’s get on with it”…. These are the words we whisper to ourselves when we deny our own sensitivity. The menopausal woman who knows herself deeply can say: “I need to pause, I need to slow down, in fact, I need to allow my soft tears to fall.” She cries rivers and enjoys the tenderness of it. She is true to herself. She understands her own rhythm and she can live in harmony with her own cadence. There is no push.
Why? Because she has journeyed through her darkness, entered her own mystery and overcome her symptoms with wisdom.
She knows herself and she is not her label or her diagnosis. She is not her vestibular migraine. She is not her menopause. She is not her tinnitus. These have been parts of her life experience and she has learned how to grow beyond them.
She becomes the woman that the world around her needs.
She is what I call Sensing Ground, moment to moment.
Some of it is patience.
Some of it is self-trust.
Some of it is learning the radical skills of genuine loving kindness and loving attention.
She has mastered the art of directing loving attention inwards towards all of her who she truly is.
This woman is not perimenopausal, menopausal or autistic.
She is herself, beyond all the labels.
And men, you have your own version of this too.
You are not your symptoms or labels either. A man who knows himself, is a natural magnetic leader who is good at listening and fostering the strengths of others. He lives to allow the voices of others to thrive, he creates safe spaces for the woman around him to become leaders.
He does not use his power ‘over’ others, he stands beside others and allows them to find their own power within themselves.
He becomes a sanctuary for life, not a force of destruction.
He is what I call Sensing Ground, moment to moment.
So, I invite you to hold all of your labels lightly. They are a small part of your full humanity. You are so much stronger than all of these pathologies. The question is: What is your body teaching you? Do you have the skills to listen and learn from your inner wisdom?
Or are you caught in a loop of avoiding yourself?
Join Rock Steady or Sensing Ground to begin your own journey within.
Become the master of your own interior world. Wake up with clarity. Live with loving kindness and loving attention. Break free from the old patterns that are feeding your symptoms. Comment to learn which program is best for you.
Rock Steady is designed for people with persistent symptoms.
Sensing Ground is designed for graduates of Rock Steady or for people who identify as highly sensitive (HSP), neurodivergent or spiritually/existentially challenged.
In both of my programs we meet in a circle multiple times a month to speak and listen from our hearts, as we navigate far beyond the labels.
I urge you to discover who you really are.
