How are we influenced by the words others say to us? | Mental Health

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Avatar for pavanjr
1 year ago

From the moment a human being is born, he or she becomes the subject of language, thanks to the words given to him by his parents and his family. Learn to name things and people. Also, little by little, to himself. Learn words that will shape the world around them, teach them how to react, how to control their emotions, how to get what they want, and define themselves; in short, they give them the tools to position themselves in the marketplace. The influence of the first five years is decisive.

This repertoire of words will be the one with which you will go out into the world. They will leave a mark. Moreover, he incorporates them, repeats them and sometimes even shows them off.

Labels become flesh, they become empowering beliefs, but often they also become restrictive. An exercise that can be easily done is to pay attention to the phrases we use in our daily lives and reflect on them. Even the ones we don't say in public, to everyone; the ones we say in front of the mirror. It is believed that they are just that: "catch phrases", but by repeating them so much, they set the way we do things.

Language and its role in the way we see ourselves

We often hear: "Carlos is very nice", "Maria is very docile", "Alberto is just like his father", "Ana is very stubborn". Some of these phrases can sometimes be almost flattering, and others the opposite. What all of them do is to establish a stereotype, to mark a character, a role; are setting a sphere of movement, boundaries.

Words have enormous power and yet the subject is not fully aware of it. They have an impact on him and will make him build his reality from them (from the subjectivity with which he endows them). Because words are loaded with a peculiar meaning: the meaning that each human being attributes to them. Each word has a weight, a scent, a color, a temperature, a quality, an emotion. That is why "being happy" is not the same for some as it is for others.

The good thing is that this can be modified; we can work to broaden the connotation of words or give them multiple meanings, according to the time, the place, the conversation.

Going beyond labels

Assumption of roles (the nice one, the docile one, the stubborn one, the one who is equal to the father/mother), can extend into adulthood and impede satisfactory development in some areas and relationships. Following that saying so closely is a way of anchoring oneself in a past that probably no longer works (because it is outdated). In many cases, the permanence in these roles is due to a misunderstood loyalty, a loyalty to the person who said that phrase. To be what was expected of this subject.

There is an (unconscious) tendency to remain faithful to what was, waiting for someone's recognition. The question the patient should ask himself is whether this is necessary for him, whether it is useful in his current life. It is a matter of thinking about who you are acting for and what you are looking for with this action..

Children's content will be known in the analysis. It will be in this space where the unconscious vestige of these set phrases will be investigated, how they are working, how they position the subject, etc. As the time of the unconscious is different from chronological time, there may be situations in which we psychically relive our childhood, and one of those phrases conditions the present. It is necessary to work to transform this, to construct new phrases that inhabit the present and to deactivate, transmute these phrases.

From these infantile constructions may arise psychic impediments, ways (that do not prosper) to solve some problems, scenes that are repeated without (seemingly) finding an explanation, limitations, fears, contradictions, etc. All this gives us clues. When we have not been able to put words to them, when we have not been able to transform these desires, they will turn into obsessions, into pathology.

In everything there is jouissance, even in the symptom. The symptom comes to show that which has not been able to unfold in a healthier way, that has not been put into words. It is a way of telling the patient's story without the patient realizing it, because the unconscious only needs/wants to manifest itself, wants to concretize what has been repressed, and when it does not achieve it by the linear route (because it would be extremely unpleasant to the conscience), it does so in disguise, scrambled, distorted.

Psychoanalysis is a very useful listening tool to detect what are these limiting phrases and beliefs, which is permeable to listen to that which is repeated in the subject, indicating to him what he does not even perceive from the consciousness

Through interpretation, new chains of signifiers will be constructed that will deactivate old/current beliefs, by endowing them with other perspectives, understanding them in a richer and broader way, appreciating how this phenomenon can be thought of, learning to tolerate that this is part of the past and that what is important is what is to come.

In the analytic process, the patient will do the work of constructing the new words. These are transformed, changed, allowing others - more appropriate, more in line with the subject and its time - to reconstruct it.

Love, Johnny.

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