Words Matter

What you say, inside your head and externally to others can impact your mental state, not just now, but more permanently. The language we use to paint our feelings and describe our circumstances, can either calm our nervous systems or activate it, with serious implications on what gets imprinted in our bodies and memories.

Think about the last time you were upset by something someone said to you at work, or how about the last time you failed at something. How do you describe the situation? How did you describe your feelings.

The digital age has brought psychological terminology into a much more accessible realm, which has it's wonderful benefits, but also some challenges.

The good news is ... the way we talk about experiences can reactivate and reshape our memories, explicit and implicit. The bad news is ... the way we talk about experiences can create, or reactivate and worsen, traumatic memory. Our brain is a prediction organism, and shapes our expectations. Words we use can frame, distort or activate our nervous systems leading to expectations of further harm. It is a survival mechanism which is good, but as Kahneman (2011) outlines in his book, "Thinking Fast and Slow," our instinctive activations, embedded with previously decided heuristic knowledge (via repetition or emotional intensity), may be wrong. In therapeutic terms, our expectations and beliefs are coherent, but may no longer serve us, in our current reality. In fact, using particular words repeatedly can amplify neural reactivity.

Overuse of words like, 'trauma', 'triggered', 'narcissist' or the full bastardization of words such as 'ego,' can lead us to:

• dilute the meanings of words or even change them completely

• disempower individuals by framing their ordinary feelings as pathology

• semantic bleaching - misinterpretation of personal experiences

• lose the nuance of our feelings and this lack of discernment becomes a blunt force

• trauma-linked attention bias which erodes regulation capability and capacity

• patterns of thinking that embeds itself through repetition.

Using emotionally evocative language can activate our trauma response, deepen existing trauma, and embed a pathological way of thinking until it becomes embodied.

How many times do you hear people say, "That was traumatizing" or "I felt triggered". As words enter the everyday lexicon of the population, it can lead to amplification of feelings, which diminishes and hinders our resilience, reduces clarity of self-understanding and understanding of others and escalates distress.

Research found the words: Trigger Warning raised anticipatory anxiety and neither decreased distress nor increased learning. Negative suggestions from medical staff can lead to Nocebo Effects. And heavy media exposure can propagate population level distress, in some cases (Boston marathon, 2013) producing acute distress exceeding directly exposed individuals.

So how can we use language to help us both describe our feelings and situations, while keeping regulated and grounded, and avoiding overaction and misinterpretation?

Affect Labelling (describing Feelings)

Naming our feelings can create help us understand the sensory experiences. Language is a mechanism that can create some space from feelings which may make us very uncomfortable (somatic and cognitive) . Our aim is not to be rid of, but to transform feelings into manageable signals rather than overwhelming sensations.

Three key factors help:

• emotional accuracy = sharpens self awareness which has protective factors

• emotional granularity = discernment of intensity = appropriate responses

• contextual grounding = builds presence = internal 'space' for reality updates (learning)

Dr. Gloria Willcox (1982) created the FEELINGS WHEEL to help build emotional literacy so a person can better express, generate and change feelings.

Adapted from Gloria Willcox's Feeling Wheel (1982)

So instead of having inflated (catastrophizing) or ambiguous labels, our aim is to become more precise.

Instead of saying, 'I was triggered' we might name the emotion or sensation,

• I was upset (A Course in Miracles: Lesson 5 - I am never upset for the reason I think)

• I felt hurt by what she was implying (or what we think was implied ... so then check is that projection or reality)

• I was angry at being left out.

• That set my heart racing

• I feel incredibly tight across my chest at hearing that.

  
  

Instead of saying 'That was traumatic', I might say:

• That felt really uncomfortable

• I felt overwhelmed by that experience (and so I need to work out how to settle my system).

• That was a feeling I was not comfortable feeling. (I'll review what that meant to me later).

Healing is about a corrective learning experience. We want to enable our system to update to the current reality, and to nurture our internal systems by increasing our emotional vocabulary, by becoming more emotionally precise, so our systems have a wider range of descriptors to access to name our experience.

However, our Divine self understands that sometimes, it takes time to comprehend. We feel a physical reaction, but our feelings are 'aporetic'. We can't quite name them yet. This body-mind connection can be strengthened, but for truly traumatic memories, they are stored in a way that, as van de Kolk says ... 'Our body keeps the score.'

Our words matter. They are symbolic descriptors that impact our internal world. Our memories (not just what we remember but how) shape our expectations and our nervous system. Use words wisely. Their nuance can regulate us, strengthen resilience and steer us to more appropriate actions, through building our self-awareness and actions, actions that repeated over time become our sense of self.

Go well.