I’ve been thinking a lot about the propensity to label others INSTEAD of doing our own healing work. When someone has been abused, victimized, hurt, made wrong, broken… there is a tendency to point fingers at the “other” who did the wrong.
I’ve heard women say horrible things about the men that have hurt them, calling them all manners of horrible names. I’ve witnessed many of them learning about all the wrongness of humanity, learning what the labels mean… narcissist, sociopath, psychopath… then they have taken these limiting labels and placed them upon the people who have hurt them. Somehow, there is a thinking that… if I label that person a “narcissist,” it makes everything I couldn’t understand make sense.
However, what I’ve seen more often than not is that once that label is placed upon that other person’s head, the person who needs to heal the most stops looking at themselves and makes all the “wrongness” about the other person and then, what also happens, is that other person is placed in a box labeled “narcissist” -or whatever label the victim chooses – and that box becomes something very near to impossible for that person to leave.
Healing begins when we are willing to stop looking for and at the darkness in another person and uncover the darkness in ourselves, liberate it, and transmute it to the light. Healing begins when we stop looking at the person who hurt us and blaming them for doing so and getting back into our own lane and getting radically accountable for the fact that we were there in the first place. Healing begins when we refuse to label another as strongly as we want to not be labeled.
Labels serve to divide us. That is their sole purpose. It is “us” vs “them” when we live with labels. And when we choose to focus on the darkness in any person, place, or situation, that is what we feed.
And, just as this video says, when we cannot see anything but darkness, it is THEN that we need to call forth our own light.
