Language. We can’t do much without it. If I asked you right now how many emotions you could name, what you would say? Research has found that on average people can only name 3 emotions. Brene Brown recently wrote a book called Atlas of the Heart that identifies 87! As I’ve grown as a therapist, I have realized it is one of the most important things to explore with my clients. What we tell ourselves, how we process our experiences and how we narrate our stories, is a game changer in how we feel and how healthy we are.
Something your therapist may never tell you, but I will, is that our clients often are teaching us important lessons too. Several years ago I was working with a 14 year old client. She was working through trying to figure out how she felt about her sexuality. She had friends who identified as asexual and bisexual and pansexual and she was processing where she felt she fit in most. Back in my day (I’m not THAT old, but our society has evolved a lot), we didn’t regularly use labels to explain sexuality and as someone who doesn’t always believe a diagnosis can be helpful, I asked her why she needed to label it so badly. She looked at me without hesitation and said “so I won’t have to feel so alone”. I was stunned into silence. Mind Blown. It made complete sense to me in that moment and forever changed my thoughts about labels.
Language changes everything. My daughter does competitive cheer. She’s in her 8th season and is a force to be reckoned with. When she was little she came to me before her first competition with tears in her eyes. “Mommy I’m scared”. This was surprising to me, because she had been performing in dance for a few years and was quite a natural on stage. So I asked her how she knew she was scared. She told me about the butterflies in her tummy and how she did not want to mess up the routine she had been practicing for months. My response was “hmmm are you sure you’re nervous and not excited?” We talked about how she had felt a lot of the same things before she gets on a roller coaster and she has never been nervous of that. We also talked about how being nervous and being excited can feel very similar in our bodies but how we experience whatever we are going into will be based on how we label those things. I took dance at her age and rode roller coasters too and labeled my feelings during both experiences as being nervous and it’s safe to say being on stage in front of people and riding roller coaster still rank at the top of my list of not so favorite things. So instead of sticking with nervous, she decided to coin the term “nervous-cited”, both nervous and excited, giving herself permission to experience both and has used it ever since.
One more story to highlight this. Over the past 2 years I have been struggling with some medical problems; chronic fatigue, muscle aches, headaches and inflammation to name a few. I went to multiple doctors and felt like I had been poked and prodded nonstop with no one really being able to pinpoint what it was. Everything was coming back “normal”, and I began feeling really defeated and if I had to label myself at the time- broken. I went down the rabbit hole of gaslighting myself into believing I might just be making it all up. I had a wonderful friend and some supportive family members who believed me and saw how awful I felt. They never stopped encouraging me to keep going and advocating for myself and with that encouragement I met a doctor who heard me and said, “I’m pretty sure I know what it is” and a week ago I had a diagnostic laparoscopic procedure which identified his guess of endometriosis. Even going into the procedure, I remember asking what if this isn’t it and I am just actually crazy. What a relief it was coming out of it to have a label, a word, a belonging. It gave me permission to rewrite my story from being some crazy person making up symptoms and not being able to deal with normal life things, to being a warrior fighting endometriosis. I was validated.
If things feel heavy, if you don’t love the perspective in which you are seeing or experiencing the world around you, if you are carrying stories or traumas around with you and having a hard time letting go, if you can’t connect with the people in your life in a deeper and more intimate way, if you don’t feel like you belong, I urge you to find some ways to build your language. A good friend, books, podcasts, therapy, journaling… these are all great ways to start accessing a deeper understanding of your narrative and expanding that to create more space for something healthier, deeper and freeing. Desmond Tutu says “Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes”. You have the power within yourself to create a new story.
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