Connor Beaton argues that using psychological labels (e.g., "narcissist", "gaslighter", attachment-style labels) objectifies people and shuts down conversation by placing the labeler in a seat of moral and psychological superiority. He also critiques a cultural trend—particularly on the political left—of weaponizing victimhood and therapeutic terminology to gain power, status, and moral righteousness rather than pursue understanding or healing.
Chapters
When you pathologize someone, when you use these labels and these terms to describe another human being, you objectify them. So you literally turn them into an object and you say, you are an anxious avoidant, you are an avoidant, you know, attachment style. You are a narcissist, you are a gaslighter. You are. That's your trauma speaking, or whatever it is. So you turn them into an object. And then simultaneously, while that's happening, you are taking the seat of superiority, right? So if I'm interacting with somebody online and they disagree with me, and my response to that is to say, well, you're just a narcissist, it's basically just shutting down the conversation, right? It's like what's happening in political conversation when people are saying, oh, you're, well, you're just a racist. It's like, where do you go from there? How do you have a conversation with somebody, right? If. If you're trying to have an interaction with somebody and they're like, oh, you're just a narcissist, there's not much more that you can do in that conversation because that individual has taken such a seat of superiority morally, psychologically, ethically, socially, and they've used a psychological term to demean you in such a way, but that there's not much room for true connection, conversation or understanding to ex exist within that relationship, right? Within that moment of relationship. Next is that using these terms, as I was saying before, is often a means of gaining power and superiority with regards to how you relate to the other person or people. And this is very unfortunate. Within our culture, there is a very shadowy yet monstrous version of victimhood that is emerging in our culture. And part of the victim archetype is to actually use victimization to gain power and superiority over the perceived oppressor. Now, I'm not saying again that people haven't been victimized in our culture. Really hurt, oppressed. I'm not saying any of those things. I'm saying that it is a very common and a very known thing. We all know this. We've all seen people who are playing the victim, right, who are claiming that they've been victimized by their girlfriend, by their boyfriend, by their husband, by their wife, by a parent, by a co worker or a boss, et cetera. They are claiming to have been victimized when really they are internally insecure, they feel inferior, they feel weak, or they were victimized in the past and they haven't healed that, right? They were sexually abused, they experienced trauma, they were abandoned, they were neglected, and they actually haven't healed that initial experience, that adverse experience. And it continues to show up because that's what trauma does, right? It creates an inflection point where a part of us is really wounded, and then that trauma will continue to show up as patterning within our lives. And so the big one is that we've all seen people that do this, and I'm just gonna come back to the victimhood piece, is that when we feel powerless is when we have the strongest urge and tendency to want to do whatever is necessary in order to regain some type of power. And in our modern culture, on all sides of the political spectrum and with many people right now, but specifically within the left, and this isn't an attack, it's just a factual commentary. Specifically within the left, there is a growing predilection towards using psychological terminology in order to avoid feeling powerless and to feign being the victim and to gain a sense of moral, ethical, social superiority by using this therapeutic terminology. Because if I'm. Again, if I'm in conversation with you and I disagree with you, rather than trying to find any kind of understanding, I can feel better about myself by simply saying, well, you're just a narcissist, or there's clearly something wrong with you, you need therapy and you won't go do it. However I approach that, that use of the terminology of the psychological superiority is going to create the feeling and the sensation that I'm just right and you're just wrong. And so I get to feel righteous in that moment. And for the other person, of course, what do they get to experience? They get to experience being put in a position of powerlessness, they get to be put in a position of helplessness, and nothing gets solved or resolved.
