Maybe Labels Don't Matter

But Belonging Does

Sometimes when I write I’m aware of a particular voice in my head - an imagined audience of psychologists and psychotherapists who might read my words with a more analytical eye.

It’s not an imagined audience, actually. It’s based on things I’ve been told directly (in relation to my own diagnosis, as well as in relation to diagnoses in general), things I’ve read on psychology communities, critiques of ‘social media diagnoses’, respected clinicians who question the growth in diagnoses and the pathologising of ‘normal’ behaviour. A very famous psychotherapist who declared on stage that kids have more ADHD now because ‘in her day’ those kids would have been running around in fields. A famous psychologist who has been fairly scathing about the widening of criteria for autism diagnosis.

I’ve been that psychologist, I probably still am that psychologist, who can’t help but read something with a critical stance. It’s what we’re taught. To question, to consider other options, to bring in frameworks to aid understanding. So that when I attribute something to autism, someone might also think ‘oh that sounds more like a trauma response to me’, or ‘that’s avoidance, she should be doing x, y and z not a, b and c’ or… I don’t know. Anything really. I know some people reading will be doing that, which is your entitlement. I also know it’s something I do to myself, all the time.

I’ve written before about how my unmasking/autism exploration has brought with it a new cynicism about psychological models. That was a fairly unsettling experience - both realising just how often I slotted things into a model in my mind (often very unconsciously) and then finding myself model-less. I can only compare it to leaving behind a religion, letting go of the rituals and beliefs that brought some comfort and certainty to life. Some of psychology is more like a cult than a religion, too, but I was always a bit more of an agnostic congregant.

Photo by Helena Hertz on Unsplash

One of the things I’ve noticed now is just how often we - as psychologists, but also many other professionals in different ways - might remove people’s own agency in fitting things into a model that can’t and doesn’t encompass their entirety. It’s happened to me as I’ve been in this more exploratory place, not wanting to be tied down with any neat explanation or theory. I notice myself going down a rabbit hole which brings new understanding to my own experience or my knowledge of autism - twice exceptionality was my most recent one - but I find myself stopping before I reach any firm conclusions. People will say things to me that are some version of ‘ x is because of y’ and I feel my brain running fast in the opposite direction. I even do it to myself all the time! In my last blog, for example, I wrote about how sometimes it takes me a few days to process something because of alexithymia. But maybe it’s not alexithymia, maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it doesn’t matter. And now I feel my mind go ‘oh Emma that’s interesting, that’s making me think about PDA’ to which I respond ‘oh, do fuck off’. Maybe it is, I don’t know and I don’t need to know.

I think there’s lots of reasons for that. I don’t want to feel wedded to anything, so that I can keep an open mind as to what comes next. I’ve lost trust in the validity of many approaches, and how they too often represent a societal norm or aspiration (thanks to not only my knowledge of neurodivergence but also anti-racism work and the work of others in decolonising psychology). I’ve heard too much about the harm caused by current systems and approaches.

And why do people need to frame something in a different way, particularly one that might contradict my own experience or understanding? Well sometimes, they might be right and have something useful to add. Sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes (often) it reveals the continued stigma about autism and brings with it an implicit assumption that I’d be… I don’t know, relieved? if there was a different explanation. People are sometimes (often) surprised that it hasn’t been something to grieve for me. I have grieved not knowing sooner, I have grieved some of the things that come with it, but I have not grieved being autistic.

I guess I’m talking about labelling - about how we might want to hold on to some labels, and might not feel so attached to others. How labels change. How when other people label us it might feel like an imposition, but when we label ourselves it can be a badge of honour. A recurring question I’ve heard since discussing my own autistic identification is ‘what does it matter? Why do labels matter?’ And they don’t matter. But what can matter, so much, is the relief that there is a name for experiences that might feel completely disconnected from each other. And the sense of belonging that can come with that label. Entry into a club that you didn’t know you needed, even if its members exist only as companions in your mind.