Words, words, words
Second only to the people in it, language is the love of my life. It’s my fickle, beloved, yet exasperating pet. When it’s working as planned, and I hear my meaning received with a near audible “click”, I am satisfied as in no other moment. Between myself and another person these glottal flotsam and jetsam suddenly mean something more than just “words, words, words.”
Therapy, of course, works primarily through its words. The meaning of the medium is reflected in the field of cognitive linguistics by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as “linguistic relativity.” The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that language guides a culture’s experience. Some well-known examples of this include:
The multitude of words in the Eskimo-Aleut and Scandinavian Sami language for different types of snow and ice conditions.
Perception of colors. For instance, many languages do not distinguish between blue and green.
Common understanding of time, mediated by the types of verb tense that are available. While many languages have tenses for past, present, and future, some languages specify “recent past” over “long ago past.”
These are some bludgeon-you-over-the-head examples, but language exerts subtle influence constantly, including in clinical treatment.
An individual’s use of language not only guides their experience of self and world, but also their ability to attain benefit from therapy. At its most extreme, the profound absence of words for self-experience is defined clinically as alexithymia. Alexithymia is the profound absence not of willingness to self-assess, but of the actual vocabulary and ability to apply it to one’s internal state. This might sound like:
“How are you today?”
“Ok, I guess.”
“You look like something’s going on.”
“I don’t know. Just ok.”
It’s a foreign phenomenon to me, that one does not have a running ticker tape commentary on the subject of ‘how I am.’ If you asked me “how do you feel?” at this moment I could list off half a dozen emotions and a litany of speculations as to their causes. You’d get bored before I finished.
Alexithymia is linked to poor mental health and low satisfaction in social relationships. Fortunately, it can be treated as its own clinical issue, so that individuals can learn how to better assess and express their emotional state. In the above conversation, I would work with this client on improving their emotional vocabulary and challenge them to apply it first retroactively, and then in the moment.
Verbal acuity confers advantage in connecting with self as well as others. Emotional vocabulary supports the process of changing behavior. When you know the words for different emotional states it increases the likelihood that you’ll recognize them with some degree of specificity. This gives you an increased ability to replicate or intervene in the conditions that led there.
Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap out rhythms for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity.” True indeed. But if that is the best we can do for the time being, I for one like dancing with these bears! In fact, you could say that part of my work is teaching the bears some new steps.
References and Notes
Shakespeare famously has Hamlet decry Polonius’ platitudes with, “Words, words, words!” While not his most creative line by a long shot, it’s a delightful denouncement spoken with obvious and relatable frustration. “Words, Words, Words” is also the name of a charming and totally bonkers one-act play by David Ives in which three sentient chimpanzees are condemned to type forever until they happen to produce the play Hamlet. This is a riff on the philosophical thought experiment known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey typing randomly would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. This is supposed to say something about the nature of infinity and randomness, or something.
Cameron, K., Ogrodnicuk, J., Hadjipavlou, G. (2014.) Changes in alexithymia following psychological intervention: A Review. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 22(3) p. 162-178.
Dubey, A. and Pandey, R. (2013). Mental health problems in alexithymia: Role of positive and negative emotional experiences. SIS Journal of Projective Psychology & Mental Health, 20(2) p. 128-136.
Panayiotou, G., Leonidou, C., Constantinou, E., Michaelides, M. (2018). Self-awareness in alexithymia and associations with social anxiety. Current Psychology, May 2018 edition, p. 1-10.
Spitzer, C., Siebel-Jurges, U., Barnow, S., Grabe, H.J., Freyberger, H.J., (2005). Alexithymia and interpersonal problems. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 74, p. 240-246.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense