Human Labels: the challenge starts

I don't think labelling behaviours is the most useful way to understand bebhaviour. I also don't want to spend too much time clashing against the walls of the profession that I've been in for a lot of years. So later I will just list reasons why I think labelling behaviours is not such a great idea and I'll expand on points in the list as I go along. Basically we need to ask two questions about the practice of labelling behaviours:

• is the plan that we just keep coming up with label after label, until every variation of human behaviour is named?

• who does labelling work for? I'm asking that because I hear a lot of parents who are relived that they've finally got a diagnosis for their children but nothing has really changed. The behaviour still happens, and professionals have completed their work.

What I'm going to describe in this blog is an alternative way to understand people, ordinary everyday people. As a psychologist, I was never trained to use a model that I let me understand ordinary behaviour. That seems extraordinary, now.

I learnt more about behavior from studying English language than psychology.

Language creates realities; it doesn't describe it. That was a profound moment that sent tsunamis through my head.

A person can be 'read' by the words that they use. That translates into practical psychology by letting us hear how a person is making their reality. Understanding their reality is a whole lot more use than designating them into categories that psychology has created for them ( actually only for the selected people that psychology is interested in).

It took a long time to find agential realism, to understand it enough to use it and then to be able to communicate what it means to psychology, education and people-supporting professions.

Having said that. the moment I read a paper by Dr Karen Barad, 'How Matter Comes to Matter', I knew immediately that psychology could be practised in a completely different way. Exciting, frustrating, mind-blowing in the reality flips that the profession faces.

I'm very aware that there are words here that don't seem to have much momentum, so I;m going to end this post now but follow up with a list, and then an example of what a different psychology is.

Thanks.