“Words have the power to both destroy and heal”
– Gautama Buddha
“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
– Mother Teresa
“Language is the landscape of thought.”
– George Carlin
Without language, as we all know, most of how we live would not be possible. Language allows us to think, as Mr. Carlin implies in the above quote, and gives us an awareness of all the things that make up the unique qualities of human life, including time, space, all dimensions of self-awareness and the entirety of culture and history. It gives us the power to systematize: What is a dog today will be a dog tomorrow and it will never be a cat! “This is what I want,” “This is my understanding,” and “This is what I believe” all require language to occur to us as thoughts and to be expressed.
In addition to allowing and nurturing human experience, language has great power. The more careful we are with it, the better the outcome, and the opposite is just as true. How we speak to ourselves has profound influence over how we live, how we feel – about ourselves and in general, what we do, how our relationships arise and develop, and even who we are. We tend to ignore it, if we are even conscious of it, but self-talk is like having someone in your head with whom you’re having an ongoing conversation. That conversation has a great deal of importance in how we experience life and sometimes we’re not getting along with that inner voice so well.
The character of the one in our heads who speaks to us may be dysfunctional and self-defeating but we have been the co-creators of that voice, consciously and unconsciously, along with our conditioning. And it’s a critical point, that we are both conscious and unconscious of the ongoing logistics behind how we talk to ourselves, because it implies, correctly, that the more conscious we are of it, the more healthy and affirming it becomes.
Mindfulness teacher Eckhart Tollé has reported that he had a spiritual awakening when, in a moment of deep, near-suicidal despair, an intense awareness suddenly emerged of two selves in his head – basically a subject and an object. He realized that he experienced an ongoing voice in his head that spoke to a receptive aspect of himself that took it all in and sometimes responded to it – two separate parts of himself that were in constant touch with each other with the communication going pretty much in one direction; we tend to talk to ourselves much more than we respond to what we say. There is how we speak to ourselves and there is what we think and feel about it. The conversation shapes who we are.
The voice comes from earlier important voices in our lives and has been reinforced by newer ones with which the earlier voices bear some similarity. For instance, let’s say I learned to be self-critical from my mother. It would make sense that the early conditioning with my mother shaped how I later related to women. The more critical the original voice, the more likely it is that due to the familiarity of that voice, I am comfortable with and thus drawn to other critical women, and each experience adds to the substance of the inner voice. So, my early feelings in response to my mother show up in my self-talk about other women who carry that critical quality for me.
When I am doing what I just described, it is projection. I am seeing elements of my mother in any woman who reproduces my response to being criticized. It is useful to recognize such projections and see them as such. When we see we’re projecting, we can bring awareness to what we are doing and withdraw the projections with the help of our understanding.
Sadly, we often learn through early experience to be harsh with ourselves. I have often encountered patients who have this tendency and defend it by saying something like, “If I don’t really ride myself, I’ll just succumb to laziness and not get anything done.” Reality is just the opposite. When we are kind to ourselves, we are stronger, and thus more capable of working hard and accomplishing difficult things.
Even the very words we use are important. If I acknowledge I’ve made a mistake and chalk it up to being human, I may say something to myself that reflects that understanding. If I turn against myself when I fall short and call myself disparaging names, I feel the same pain I felt when I was much younger and was spoken to with that harsh tone. We are well served to be very conscious of the words we use to describe ourselves. When self-talk is kind and patient, it helps us through hard moments and fortifies us for what is to come. When it is cruel and/or unreasonable, it is as if we are carrying the difficult parent with us into each challenging situation and discouraging ourselves simply for being human. Let’s try to be more mindful of the language we use when speaking to ourselves, understanding that self-love makes us strong; it doesn’t encourage laziness. In these difficult times, we need all the friends we can get!
