Labels and Identity and Curiosity: A Mediator's Reflection

An invitation landed in my inbox recently. "Are you looking for an opportunity to break bread with other progressives?"

My first reaction wasn't curiosity. It was something closer to a flinch. I have a high need for autonomy, and labels have always terrified me. Not the words themselves, but what comes with them: the fear of being mis-seen. Of having someone look at me and see the label instead of me. Of being reduced to a word I never fully agreed to.

But once the flinch passed, the curiosity showed up. And I really wanted to understand. What does the word actually mean? In mediation, when someone says, "I just want respect," I always ask what respect looks like to them, because the word means something different to every person who uses it. So, I found myself doing the same thing with this invitation. What is a progressive? What would it say about me if I called myself one? And do I have to claim the identity to sit at the table?

That last question is the one that stayed with me. Because I suspect it's part of what's gone wrong in how we talk to each other.

A Mediator's Reflection on Labels and Identity: Listening Stops

In my work as a mediator, I sometimes watch the moment that two people stop hearing each other. It rarely happens because someone said something outrageous. It usually happens when one person mentally files the other into a category. "Oh, she's one of those." "He's the kind of person who." Once that filing happens, everything said afterward gets read through the category instead of the words. A reasonable point sounds suspicious. A shared concern sounds like a trick. Common ground becomes invisible because both people have already decided they're on different teams.

Labels do this faster than almost anything else. They compress a whole person into a silhouette, and silhouettes are easy to argue with precisely because they aren't real. A silhouette is flat. There's no depth, no complexity, no face looking back at you. Just a shape you can fill with whatever you've already decided is true about them.

The Price of a Label

There's a cost to labels, and it cuts two ways.

The first is inward. Once you accept a label, and it becomes part of your identity, there's a quiet pull to take on the whole package that comes with it. If the label says you believe A and B, you start feeling pressure to also believe C, D, and E, not because you've examined them, but because they arrived in the same box. Researchers call this identity-protective reasoning, and it's one of the most well-documented patterns in how humans form opinions. Once we pick a team, staying on the team starts to matter more than staying curious. Sound like something we're seeing?

But the second direction is worse, and it's the one we talk about less. The moment you accept a label, other people fill in the rest of your beliefs for you based on what they think that word means. You say "progressive" and suddenly someone across the room has decided you hold twenty positions you've never actually taken. You're now responsible for defending ideas you've never endorsed, answering for people you've never met, and standing trial for a caricature that was assembled without your input. You didn't choose those positions. You didn't even know they were part of the package.

But the label gave someone else permission to write your story for you.

I've watched this happen at mediation tables more times than I can count. Someone says one word about who they are, or which side they're on, and the other party's face changes. Not because of anything that person actually said or believes, but because of everything the listener has already decided that word contains. The conversation that follows is no longer between two people. It's between one person and the other person's assumptions.

Refusing the label is a way of refusing both packages, the one you might unconsciously adopt and the one that gets assigned to you. It means doing the harder work of examining each question on its own merits, without the comfort of knowing in advance what you're supposed to think. I'd rather carry that discomfort than let a single word decide things for me or let someone else decide what I think based on a word I never fully agreed to.

And what about the word, "progressive"?

Honestly, the word is genuinely slippery right now. Even among people who call themselves progressive, there isn't one agreed-upon meaning. For some it means universal healthcare and a stronger safety net. For others it's more about social justice, identity, and cultural change. For others it's about democratic reform, getting money out of politics, and checking corporate power. Some people use it as a softer substitute for "liberal" because that word fell out of fashion. Others see it as distinctly to the left of liberal.

Yet, here's something interesting. "Progressive" hasn't always carried the same meaning, and it still doesn't. The original Progressive Movement in America had deep roots in the Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican when he broke up monopolies and created the national parks. Robert La Follette built a whole progressive Republican tradition in Wisconsin around clean government and checking corporate power. For decades, "progressive Republican" wasn't a contradiction at all.

Ask five people today what the word means and you'll likely get five different answers. That history, and that present-day confusion, matter because they show how much a label can drift over time, and how two people using the same word can mean entirely different things. If we can't even agree on what the word contains, we certainly can't use it as a shortcut for knowing each other.

And here's what struck me as I sat with the definitions and the history of the word: The label makes us think we're miles apart when, underneath the word, there may be more common ground than anyone expected. But we'll never find it if the label tells us not to look.

Why curiosity matters more than categories

One of the biggest reasons I resist labels is simple: I don't fit. Not neatly, anyway. I hold some views that would place me squarely with one group and other views that would get me uninvited from their dinner party. Most people I know are the same way. The assumption that everyone under the same label believes the same things is one of the most damaging shortcuts we take. We don't all believe the same things. And that's exactly where curiosity becomes essential.

When I resist a label, I'm not staying neutral out of timidity. I hold strong views. I've thought hard about them. What I'm protecting is the space for curiosity and empathy, both mine and the other person's. Because the moment either of us accepts a category, the questions stop. We think we already know what the other person believes, so we stop bothering to ask. And when we stop asking, we lose any chance of empathy, because you cannot truly feel for someone's experience if you've never been willing to understand it.

In my work and in my life, curiosity is one of the most useful tools I carry into difficult conversations. And I don't mean curiosity as a vague feeling of openness. I mean specific, practical things that change the shape of a conversation.

It means wanting to understand from the other person's perspective, not just hear their position while I prepare my rebuttal. "Help me understand how you got there" opens a door that "well, here's why you're wrong" slams shut.

It means clarifying instead of assuming. When someone uses a loaded word, I want to ask what they mean by it rather than filling in my own definition and reacting to something they never actually said.

And it means owning my own assumptions out loud. One of the most powerful phrases I use, in mediation and in life, is "the story I tell myself about this is..." followed by what I think I'm hearing or believing. And then I ask: "What are your thoughts on that?" That one move changes everything. It takes what would have been an accusation or a judgment and turns it into an invitation. It says, I know I might be wrong about what you think. Tell me.

When people feel that kind of curiosity directed at them, something shifts. Defenses come down. Not because they've been persuaded, but because they've been seen. And being seen is almost always what people actually need before they're willing to see someone else in return. That's where empathy lives, not in agreeing with someone, but in the willingness to understand what the world looks like from where they're standing.

It doesn't always work. I won't pretend otherwise. But I've never seen a conversation get worse because someone asked a genuine question out of wanting to truly understand.

About that dinner

Honestly? Part of me was curious. I'd love to sit down with people who care about the things I care about and talk openly about what matters. But there was something else underneath the curiosity, something closer to dread. The unspoken expectation that to sit at that table, I'd need to show up as a certain kind of person. Believe the right things. Use the right language. Stay inside the lines.

When a label is just floating around in conversation, it's abstract. You can engage with it intellectually, push back on it, play with it. But the moment someone asks you to walk through a door marked with that label, to sit at a table defined by it, the stakes change completely. Now it's not a word you're analyzing. It's an identity you're being asked to put on in front of other people. And that's when every association, assumption, and stigma attached to that word lands on you personally.

The resistance isn't just about intellectual honesty. It's about the very real stigma that labels carry, and the awareness that accepting one in public changes how people see you in every other room you walk into. "Progressive" carries stigma in certain rooms. "Conservative" carries stigma in others. You're not just thinking about what the word means to you. You're thinking about what it signals to everyone else, what it will cost you, what conversations it will close, which people in your life will hear that word and stop listening. That's stigma doing its work.

That's terrifying to me. Not because I'm afraid of commitment, but because I've watched what happens when belonging requires conformity. So many spaces now, on every side, come with an unwritten rulebook: here's what we believe, and if you're in the club, you believe it too. The moment a group demands that kind of loyalty, curiosity becomes a liability. Asking questions starts to feel like betrayal. There's often not room to learn new things and to change your mind. And the people who don't fit neatly, which is most of us, learn to either perform or stay quiet.

I don't want to perform. And I want more courage than to stay quiet.

The right to be uncategorizable

At the end of the day, what I'm really asking for is something I believe every person deserves: the autonomy to define ourselves on our own terms. Every human being is a unique, unrepeatable combination of experiences, values, convictions, contradictions, and hard-won wisdom. No single word can hold all of that. No label was ever designed to.

When we insist on sorting each other into categories, we lose the very thing that makes real connection possible: the recognition that the person in front of us is someone we haven't fully understood yet, and that understanding them is worth the effort of asking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." I'd add that letting someone else be fully themselves, without rushing to categorize them, might be the greatest gift we can offer in return.

And yet. Even as I make the case for autonomy, for the right to stand outside the labels and define myself on my own terms, I can feel the pull of the other side. Because here's the paradox: we are built to belong. The need to be part of something, to be claimed by a group and to claim it back, is one of the deepest drives we carry. Autonomy and affiliation aren't opposites so much as they are two forces that live in constant tension inside every one of us.

That tension, what it costs us, what it asks of us, and why people will sometimes abandon their own convictions just to keep their seat at the table, is worth its own conversation.

We are human, after all. Every single one of us is trying to figure it out, and every moment is one we've never been in before. Sometimes we'll get it right. Sometimes it's a swing and a miss. What I know for sure is that we could all use a little more grace, for ourselves and for each other.

In the meantime, try the question that started all of this for me.

What do you actually mean by that word?

Next time, I'll explore the other side of this tension: the deep human need to belong, and why that need is so powerful that people will sometimes abandon their own convictions just to keep their seat at the table.