Some time ago, I was talking to a friend with whom I had not spoken for several months. We were catching up, exchanging conversational snapshots. She asked about each of my kids and I gave the thumbnail version of their successes. When she asked a more specific question about one of my sons, I shared a few of his recent challenges. As I spoke, I felt the distance between us widen. It was not the geographical gap as much as it was an emotional divide. I felt a shift in our connection as she retreated to separate herself from my experience with a child who acts aggressively.

She couldn’t take it in. “He’s so broken,” was her response.

Ascribing brokenness was her way of detaching.

She could not relate to the experience. It was uncomfortable. She needed distance and so she pushed my son (and me) into the margins of otherness. It was not the first time that someone close to me had used a label, derogatory or otherwise, to separate themselves from our experience.

Labels are all too familiar to families of children who have endured developmental trauma. Our children often have multiple diagnoses to account for the behavior by which they unwittingly express the effects of their earliest experiences. Though necessary for a variety of reasons, diagnostic labels follow our children downstream where they may extend beyond the descriptive and determinative and into the pejorative.

Labeling is a necessary shortcut in the process of meaning-making, but labels are restrictive. They remove the texture and fullness of experience. They eliminate nuance and insert presumption. Some labels invite subtext which is nothing more than name-calling. They are routinely used in classrooms, on playgrounds, in neighborhoods, grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, and city streets. Indeed, we use them in our homes and within our inner circles as we struggle to come to terms with enormity or vent the frustrations of day-to-day.

Whether we are leading with them, hiding behind them, or using them to distance ourselves from what we cannot comprehend, labels are a means of othering.

Othering is detachment through objectification. At its worst it is a form of relational assault. It emphasizes power and control, prays on self-esteem, reinforces differences, and ignores our common humanity.

The propensity to view people in terms of us and them is a powerful human trait. Fear of difference is underwritten by our neurobiology. From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to recognize others was critical to tribal affiliation. We needed to belong to a well-functioning group in order to survive. If we did not belong, we perished. Othering and belonging are two sides of the same coin. Othering is a response to perceived threat. Belonging is where we are safe.

None of us is free of the ability to marginalize someone who we do not understand. Fear is the common thread – fear of differences we cannot fathom, fear of sameness too daunting to let into awareness. My friend was unable to stay with me in the experience of my son’s aggressive behavior. It was not her intention to hurt my feelings or to trivialize my child. She did not have context within which to process what I was telling her.

Ironically, my son perceives the world around him as other. He does not trust because he cannot find the felt sense of safety and security that would let him be at ease. His unremitting fight is for survival. Developmental trauma does not equate to brokenness, it is a relational injury. It is a rupture in the experience of you and me that confuses trust and alters the ways in which we make sense of connection. It is a physiological response to lived experience which begs for understanding, empathy, and compassion. It retreats slowly and haltingly within the sanctuary of relationship.

Belonging is where we feel safe.

In order to fully support our children, we need the care and nurture of our own well-functioning groups. As parents of children with complex needs, we have a unique opportunity (which sometimes feels like an impossible burden) to invite people in – to share our experiences and extend our communities of understanding. Not everyone will respond, but some hearts will open. Evolution has also delivered the capacity to reason through our fear.

Labels are often in conflict with truth, inclusion, and fairness. Understanding yields empathy which enables compassion. In compassion we acknowledge our essential interconnectedness – there is no other.

There are no broken children. There are circumstances – maltreatment, neglect, abuse – which alter brain development, experiences which shape the way we experience, pain that acts as our defender. Pain is universal. There are days that try our better angels and nights that know the probing of our resolve. This is not unique. It is the human condition.

Brokenness is a fiction of intolerance.

Those who will be able to join with us will share in the texture and fullness of our experience. Others will continue to need the distancing of labels.

For them: My children are expressions of light. They are a doer, a dreamer, a lover, a fighter, and a fiercely independent sprite – compassionate, philosophical, playful, focused, and determined. They are an advocate, an artist, a performer, an athlete, and a gamer. Like musical notes they rise and fall and sometimes they sound in dissonant harmony. They question, they doubt, they hurt, they hide, and they resist. My children are multidimensional, infinite, feeling, curious, and loving. They are, as we all are, an expression of their biology, their experience, their environment, their discovery, and their unique connection with truth.