Following on from my prior article, the same conversation can be had about being highly sensitive, gifted, introverted, empathic, traumatised, neurodivergent, avoidantly attached, anxiously attached, or any of the many other frameworks we now use to understand ourselves. I find some of these frameworks enormously useful and utilise them in my practice to help people unshame their experience and gain self acceptance that we can then use to empower growth.
Recognising high sensitivity (HSP), for example, can help someone finally understand why they become depleted in environments another person seems to tolerate perfectly well. Recognising giftedness can help explain intensity, complexity, boredom or a lifelong sense of being slightly out of step. Understanding attachment patterns can illuminate ways we learned to protect ourselves in relationships. Great. Now we know something useful. And then what?
Looking Deeper
This is where I think positive psychology and depth psychology both offer something richer than simply collecting identities. Positive psychology asks about strengths, character, meaning, resilience, relationships, agency and the conditions under which a particular person flourishes. It recognises individual differences without requiring those differences to become fixed identities. Depth psychology takes us further underneath the surface, asking what we have learned, what we protect, what remains outside awareness, what patterns we repeatedly enact, and what parts of ourselves are asking to be integrated. Neither requires us to reduce a whole person to “I am this.”
And increasingly, social media seems to be doing exactly that. I am this. "I have X". "I have Y". "Here are the ten things I do because I am X." "Here are the seven things people with Y cannot tolerate". There can be enormous validation in recognising ourselves in something, particularly if we have spent years feeling misunderstood. But recognition is supposed to give us more information with which to live our lives, not become the final destination.
Validation isn't supposed to mean everything someone believes about themselves is true and should remain unchanged. A form of therapy I appreciate, DBT (dialectical behaviour therapy) deliberately holds acceptance and change simultaneously. I can validate that your response makes sense given your biology, learning history and circumstances while also helping you develop a different response where that would improve your life. Repeatedly affirming limitations or labels without an accompanying message of agency, skill development and change can sometimes reinforce the very beliefs and behaviours keeping someone stuck.
Social media also rewards over-validation because validation makes good content and good consumers. “Here are ten reasons you do this because of X” feels reassuring and highly shareable. Good therapy is more nuanced: “Of course this makes sense given who you are and what shaped you, AND is it helping you now?” Real psychological growth asks us to examine beliefs, patterns, avoidance and our own responsibility for change in our daily lives. That can be uncomfortable, and discomfort simply doesn't sell like endless validation and spoon fed insight dressed up as growth.
Okay. You have discovered that you are highly sensitive for example. And then what? What environments help you flourish? What sensory needs do you need to respect? Where have you been overriding yourself? Where might sensitivity also be one of your strengths? Where do you need boundaries, and where could you build greater capacity? What belongs to your innate temperament and what belongs to fear, past experience or an old protective pattern? We don't need to answer every one of those questions perfectly. Staying curious is the point of a life well lived
All labels have strength and shadow
The same applies to ADHD, giftedness, attachment styles, trauma and almost every other framework we use. If you had never been given the label, the work of knowing yourself would still exist. You would still need to notice what drains you and what nourishes you, what environments bring out the best in you, what overwhelms you, what you need from other people, what strengths you want to develop, what patterns repeatedly get you into trouble, and what helps you feel most fully yourself.
Which makes me wonder about a useful thought experiment I would like to invite you to join in here to ask yourself: what if you had no labels at all? Could you still validate your own experience? Could “this is genuinely difficult for me” be enough, without needing a category to prove why? Could “I function much better when I have time alone after socialising” simply be important information about you? Could you honour a need without first establishing that a diagnosis, personality type or nervous-system label entitles you to have it?
There is another side to that freedom, though. Without the label as the final explanation, we also have to remain responsible for what is under our influence. Not responsible for having struggled of course - that just deserves compassion, and certainly not able to control everything that happens in our minds or bodies, but responsible for discovering what we can do with the human being we have been given.
If, for example, “I have a terrible perimenopause because of trauma” or “because of ADHD” or "because of anxiety" becomes your only truth, and the label takes the place of your influence, where is your agency to do what really can support you through this very real stage of life? Building muscle, supporting your changing body with good nutrition, working with stress in both mind and body, and caring for yourself in ways that support a system that may have experienced years of chronic stress physiology.
Yes, always unshame your challenges by understanding that what happened to you has influenced you. And then use that understanding to empower your wellbeing in new ways. I simply refuse to treat the incredibly resilient people I work with like fragile teapots. Many have survived unimaginable challenges. Don't they deserve to be shown that thriving is possible after them, rather than remaining fixed in an identity of “I have CPTSD”?
I say this as someone with profound developmental trauma that continues to influence my life, body and relationships. But I refuse to let that history become my identity. It is part of me, a scar that has also become soil for enormous compassion, growth and wisdom, but it is not all of me. There is so much health, vitality, agency, and possibility within me, and discovering that is part of how I recovered.
If I had focused solely on what was “wrong” with me, repeatedly seeking validation that my challenges were fixed parts of who I am, I don't believe I would have done the humbling, everyday work it took to rebuild strength in my mind (new beliefs, new ways of responding to myself and daily life) and body (fueling and treating my body well to heal, to build make strength) after chronic “incurable” illness and trauma. Understanding why I struggled mattered enormously. But ultimately, it needed to help me discover how to live, grow and flourish. There is a special kind of stable self esteem that no one can ever take away from you, that comes from learning how to care for yourself like this a day at a time. And, yes support is needed in this hyper individualistic culture, and, no one can do it for you.
Learned Helplessness Is A Normal Human Response, And, It Cannot Stay In The Driving Seat
That can be uncomfortable because learned helplessness is a very real psychological phenomenon. When we repeatedly experience ourselves as unable to influence outcomes (because once upon a time we truly could not), we can gradually stop noticing our own influence even when some becomes available. A label can occasionally fit beautifully into that pattern: “Aha! THAT is why I am like this.” The relief may be genuine, but if we stop there, explanation can become resignation. It is why in Befriend we teach radical acceptance instead, which is 'I can accept how I got here, and, I do not approve of it so I am going to take the one next step that is under my influence, that serves me well from here'
Personal growth (not endless shame based optimisation - true growth into our unique authentic selves) asks something more difficult and much more hopeful. Yes, this is me. This is my temperament, my history, my sensitivity, my biology, my particular collection of strengths and vulnerabilities. Now, how do I work with it? What do I accept? What do I honour? What do I accommodate? What do I practise? What do I heal? What do I need to stop forcing? What might I be capable of developing? What do I need to be honest about that is an ingrained pattern that disempowers me that I can actually change from radical acceptance instead of saying 'this is just me'?
The goal is never to become a normative human being. In fact the people iWork with are unlikely to ever flourish and fit into societal norms (hence why I love who I work with!). The invitation; and remember, invitations can be accepted or left face down, it is your choice- we always have that choice, is to become more deeply and authentically yourself, with enough self-knowledge to know what helps that true self flourish and enough agency to keep growing where growth is possible. Perhaps labels are most useful when we can hold them lightly. “This helps me understand something about myself,” rather than, “This tells me who I am.”
Because whether the label is ADHD, HSP, cancer, auto immune disease, gifted, traumatised, introverted or anything else, eventually I come back to the same question. Okay. And then what?
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