Has labels been helpful in your recovery?

[Water-Lily]

Labels like "Borderline Personality Abuse" or "physical abuse". Specific labels meant to describe a particular behavior, trauma, or mental illness. I find that they can be very helpful in facing the truth of the matter and starting a healing of processing. But I also feels it depends on who the label comes from and how it's delivered. I have had the habit of self diagnosing myself. I have also had other people, from a kind place, giving me their perspective on what I experienced. I have found this to be heavily traumatic and am now mixed on how I able my traumas/experiences. My therapist tells me to not over obsess on my trauma (I know I do) and be mindful of advice I receive and who I trust. I often fear I am maybe in denial and what other people have said are "right" and my anxiety or refusal to acknowledge their view point is "wrong"

 

[Angi]

I would hate to have a label put on me as a person. The self-placed labels, on the other hand, help me with finding literature that might help me. As long as they remain inside me and other people are not familiar with them, I feel I can drop a label when it is no longer helpful, I like that.

How would you "over obsess" on your trauma? This sounds like a mean thing to tell you... At least for me it works the other way round, my trauma comes to find me, no need to go looking, and I would most happily let it stay away if it chose to. How about you, do you draw it closer when you have any other option?

Right and wrong... Can all sides be right? Maybe the other side observes something about you that is true, and you are not currently ready to take it in, which is also true? Or am I totally missing the point and you are talking about something else?

 

[noaccount]

Labeling people as "borderline," etc, is harmful because 1 - it is often something doctors label people with complex PTSD, and then other people turn around and use the same term to describe their abusers, thus continuing a vicious cycle where survivors are told that their trauma makes them "damaged" or "just as bad as" those who oppressed them, 2 - doctors apply the term to women and marginalized people for highly political, highly misogynist reasons -
- and, 3 - it creates the misconception that abuse is mostly about people making "deviant" choices, or being defective in "deviant" ways. The truth is, abuse is largely a continuation of normative power-imbalances in our culture - of parents over children, of husbands over their wives, we can see the pattern amplified by how much worse abuse is in families with police in them (400% more domestic abuse in police families than in the general public.) And the decision to batter one's family members is about controlling, authoritarian core values and ethics, not "having a mental illness."

 

[Nolan96]

I've never gotten a label really. Nobody's ever bothered to informally arm-chair diagnose me, either because they don't care or they just think I'm too screwed up to match anything simple enough that they're familiar with it. And I don't currently have access to formal mental healthcare.

I've always sort of desired a neat and crisp label but I know there's a good chance I'd reject it if i got one.

 

[noaccount]

Judith Herman's "Trauma And Recovery" is a good places to read more about how psychology and the medical establishment turned their backs on trauma survivors and how "personality disorder" labels are used as ways to silence and discredit people.

 

[Looooser]

Labels are a good starting place I think. But it's more complicated than that. Everyone is different so every diagnosis is different so a label just makes a good place to start trying to heal. I felt so lost and understood before I was diagnosed. People usually have multiple diagnosis or they change over time which just makes it that much more complicated.

 

[Sherri]

Personally I wouldnt like to be called a label or be labelled. Not even my doc does that.