On Words, Labels, and the Quiet Discipline of Poetry
When something unsettles us, the reflex is to define it.
This is particularly visible in the early stages of therapy. A person sits down and feels pressure to articulate precisely what is happening inside of them or to diagnose the behavior of someone else. It is common to hear statements such as, “My ex is a narcissist,” or “My mother is definitely a narcissist.” When I ask whether that person has been formally evaluated, the answer is usually no, followed by, “But I can tell.”
The need to label is understandable. A label creates the illusion of clarity. It narrows uncertainty. It organizes emotional chaos into a single, decisive word.
The difficulty is that labels are often constructed from partial information, cultural shorthand, or personal bias. Even when they are not entirely wrong, they can prematurely close inquiry. They flatten complexity. They can prevent us from examining the more nuanced reality of what actually occurred and how it shaped us.
In my Unfinished Felt Occurrence framework, impact is allowed to exist without complete narrative certainty. The work is not to force explanation but to create containment. Sometimes the most stabilizing statement is not a diagnosis, but a boundary: “There is something here I do not fully understand” and naming uncertainty draws a perimeter around it without pretending to solve it.
I was thinking about this after last week’s newsletter (The Hidden Lantern Letters, sign up in the menu, it’s my free newsletter) on love.
A reader wrote to me and pointed out something culturally important: media, culture, and even well-meaning people frequently confuse love with attachment. The word “love” is applied with certainty, but what is actually generating distress is often attachment. Attachment carries fear of loss, fear of abandonment, fear of identity disruption.
Love, in its more mature form, does not require that same constriction.
Again, the impulse is to define. “This is love.” “That is narcissism.” “This is trauma.” Yet sometimes what we are encountering is more complex than the label allows. The struggle may not be love itself. It may be attachment. The pain may not be proof of pathology. It may be evidence of adaptation.
My relationship with poetry mirrors this shift.
As a child, I was drawn to poetry instinctively. As an adolescent, I dismissed it because it felt imprecise. I wanted linear argument and definitive meaning. It wasn’t “cool” enough.
It was not until adulthood that I understood its discipline.
Poetry does not eliminate ambiguity. It contains it.
Like standing before a painting, one can attempt to decode the artist’s intention, or one can allow the image to interact with one’s own interior world. In that exchange, insight arises not as a conclusion, but as coherence.
Poetry permits meaning without closure It resists the demand to reduce complex emotional reality to a single term. It allows language to function not as a weapon of certainty, but as a structure that holds what remains unfinished.
When we loosen our grip on definitive labels, something subtle shifts. We become less invested in being correct and more interested in being organized. The question mark may remain. The self, however, is steadier.
And that, in many cases, is enough.