Emotional tags, “Childless Cat Ladies” restrictive tendencies push boundaries

Many people live with emotional tags, and they seem to have conditioned their lives to these tags. Quite often, members of society and communities describe and identify people with such tags and labels that tend to amplify their circumstances and background.

What are emotional tags?

Emotional tags are labels that erroneously define a person’s or people’s identity with physical, emotional, health and social conditions by labelling. Emotional tags cling to people’s minds and their lives; and their victims inadvertently accept and reflect these tags in their daily lives. Emotional tags can do damage to people’s self-esteem, aspiration, social life, and cause obstruction in people’s acceleration tracks. Tags can be visible (physical, environmental), invisible (psychological, emotional or social) or both. Whether physical or emotional tags, they all have the same impact and same mission: to negatively affect, demean and destroy their targets or victims. Generally, tags come or are projected into one’s life, and perch somewhere very sensitive and conspicuous on skin, body, heart, emotion, consciousness, subconscious, relationship, marriage, business and home.

What do tags do to one’s personality? 

Tags cause obstructions, deformity, pain, emotional drain, rejection, low-self-esteem, anxiety, depression, financial drain, confusion, unexpected conformity, diminishing returns and more. These can be true of both physical tags and emotional tags. However, while change of diet, use of vitamins or surgery can work wonders in removing physical tags, it is not so when it comes to tackling or removing emotional tags.

Typical and common examples of words highlighting emotional tags are: “childless, impotent, barren, unmarried, handicap, lazy, failure, incompetent, poor, ugly, arrogant, unapproachable, unfriendly, unscrupulous, gold-digger, wanna-be, opportunist”, and the list goes on. Confronting tags in this category can be very difficult as some individuals, who are labelled and are affected greatly by these kinds of tough tags, tend to believe that those unkind words/tough tags define whom they are; so they begin to allow this unruly visitor to rule them by messing up their minds, placing limitations on their lives and making confronting tags difficult.

Some kinds of tags can come in at the peak of one’s career, when one is about making waves, when one has decided to be in charge of his/her life, or when one is at his/her best, displaying the wonders of his/her talents and acquired experiences. This is when taunters, taggers and detractors who are somewhat jealous or envious, may decide to strike, or when they see that they can no longer mess with one’s head. So, all those may be schemes to test if there is still room for them to come into one’s life to continue toying with him/her.  If people do not take drastic measures when they notice the first tag, they will occupy their entire space, life and run them down!

The tragic part of tags and taggers is that tags have a tendency to run and ruin the lives of both the tagger and the tagged. Here are typical examples of how taggers can face fierce reprisals of tagging or labelling others. Republican candidate, JD Vance, currently Donald Trump’s running mate in United States Presidential Elections made this taunting remark in 2021, calling out some Democrats by addressing them thus: “We are effectively running this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of “Childless Cat Ladies” who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and they want to make the country miserable too. If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Budaj, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children…” JD Vance’s insensitive remarks pushed boundaries.

It found expression recently in Nigeria, again on the political scene. One of Edo State’s ex-governors lashed out at the wife of the serving governor in Edo state, tagging her “childless”, a riposte to a (provocative) remark from the first lady of Edo State which also points to tagging and labelling. As hurtful as the “childless” tag may be, so also is the label of “unmarried” or any other. In all these cases, these kinds of comments are unsavoury in public space and flagrant disregard for personal choices and individual circumstances.

As JD Vance’s 2021 taunting remarks “childless cat ladies” found him out at this point of his career through opposition research; one never can tell when a careless statement or innuendo will resurface to haunt him or her. 

Where do tags come from?

Tags often come into our lives from us, society, friends and family.  They find their way in when we take our health issues lightly, do not prioritise our rest, sleep, diet and vitamins, we do not believe in ourselves, do not pay closer attention to our environment; when we are people pleasers, when we take all comments as harmless, when we allow people to run our lives and make important decisions for us. Some tags spread from people to people with a mission to tarnish the image of a person, and they can linger for years if not followed up systematically and persistently.

How can confronting tags be effective?

Confronting tags can be effective by applying intentionality to our resolve in tackling tags labelled on us. We must deal with them decisively without pity; be systematic, consistent and tactical.

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