Should you believe words? What kind of tricks do our words play on our minds and hearts?
"Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even today. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings." --Sigmund Freud
Your mind is designed to keep you alive and protect you from danger. You must categorize your experiences of the world in terms of good (approach) and bad (avoid) to know how to interact with your environment. Once we developed language, however, this relational magic got extended. Now we could apply the feelings and labels of good or bad to neutral objects, and to each other.
Language enables us to make associations based on our lived experience in human bodies. We can arbitrarily relate objects, and our feelings and thoughts about them, to other objects, feelings and thoughts. I can think you are a “good” or “bad” person. You and I can be looking at the same stray cat on the street. One of us sees the cat as snuggly and in need of care, the other sees a pesky little creature that is a nuisance. Further, if I see the cat as a poor creature needing care, I might decide that YOU are abhorrent because you don’t respond to the cat in the way that matches my values.
The rub is that we must treat our thoughts as real in order to understand them, and we must either believe or disbelieve them in order to take appropriate action. If I said, there is a spider on your foot (made you look!), you have to first take my words literally, then when you don’t see a spider, disbelieve those words. If I said I saw a giraffe driving a red Honda, you first have to create the image associated with what you know of giraffes (long neck, rather large) with a red Honda car (usually smaller, red) before you can tell me I’m hallucinating. And, you can make that claim based on your life experience (seeing giraffes at the zoo and on TV, riding in Honda cars). What about stories you can’t verify based on your actual life experience?
Words, of course, are just sounds to which we have assigned symbolic meaning. A specific dog (English)/perro (Spanish)/inu (Japanese)is the same animal, but we humans have assigned different sounds to signify or symbolize this category of animal. Dogs come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, yet we are able to categorize them all as the same type of creature. These features of language - categorizing, evaluating, predicting - are what make it useful to us. We must not only categorize but also evaluate our world in terms of its usefulness to us. What happens when we extend those features beyond our direct experience? When we treat our categories and thoughts as real? The mind is amazingly good at justifying our associations and categories. Conscious thought is energetically expensive for us big brained creatures, and we’ll avoid it if we can. Once we think we’ve figured something out, we’re less likely to exert the effort to re-evaluate.
There’s a tricky side effect of this ability to relate our ideas, feelings, and experiences to both objects and other experiences. When life presents us with a difficult or painful experience, it’s natural to want to suppress that experience. Unfortunately, the very feature of language that makes it useful in guiding interactions with our environment - it’s ability to relate anything to anything - causes trouble when we try to apply what works with objects to our thoughts and feelings. We can control objects in the world. You could pick up that stray cat as long as you’re prepared to suffer a few scratches, and take it home. This very strategy of control backfires when we try to control thoughts and feelings. Because we have to think of the very experience we are trying to suppress in order to avoid it, we are reinforcing the very experience we want to suppress. While we may suppress a thought or feeling for a short period, when we relax our active suppression, the thought will return, stronger than before. Try to avoid thinking of a giraffe driving a red Honda for the next five minutes. How did you do? What happened when you stopped trying to suppress that thought? So the practice of suppressing actually strengthens what we are trying to avoid.
What do you do about this “feature” that has these gotcha side effects? That’s where Acceptance and Commitment Therapy comes in. The act of accepting our thoughts and feelings isn’t easy, and we will need to learn to look at our thoughts and feelings and see them as such rather than looking through the experience of them. I recently came across the book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Steven Hayes, one of the originators of ACT. It provides a detailed step-by-step process to allow you to find an observing self that isn’t constantly dragged down the road of your incessantly thought producing mind. While I am always looking for tools and concepts that will help my clients, I appreciated the clarity and workbook structure of this book. It made me wonder if our nation and our world would be so harshly split along ideological lines if we learned to look at our ideas, to see our categories as arbitrary ways of sorting and separating ourselves, rather that being captured by the tribal language that divides us.
As the saying goes, the problem isn't the problem. The solution to the problem is the problem.
[This blog post was written by a human.]
