As my mind wanders the darkened halls of memory, I find myself looking in on a much younger me raptly listening to the vocal modulations of one Teri Nunn of the New Wave German band BERLIN, popular in the mid-1980s. I see this fresh out of puberty 18-year-old young man entranced by this blonde vixen on the music video, unable to tear his gaze away, but not really wanting to either. For a moment I hear the song being played in my mind which is ‘No More Words’ that speaks to a person’s ability to say one thing while doing the complete opposite, the song says that this inconsistency happens more in protestations of love than at any other time. Stepping back further in my memories I come across the nursery rhyme that was supposed to make children feel better about being the focal point of bullying activity, although back then we did not call it that, then it was a shrug and a statement like ‘kids will be kids’. The rhyme I speak of is “Sticks and Stones may Break my Bones, but Names will Never Hurt Me”…Balderdash! Names, words, and looks with both, name-calling, or associated verbiage (words) do hurt and can have debilitating effects on our childhood (and adulthood) fragile psyches just as sticks and stone can and do, do damage our bones and hurt us.
Any one of us can recall something said (perhaps years past) that still stings and hurts. If words had no power then such recollections would not have anything (good or bad) associated with their memory. If it still hurts, then why does it hurt just as bad as when the event first occurred? As poignant as if it happened mere moments ago, because there are specific psychosocial reason, spiritual reasons, and even biological reasons, for these memories to retain their original strength. You will find more of my thoughts on this topic in my book Head for Leading / Heart for Loving: Leveraging Compassion, Influence and Relationships to Obtain your Organizational Goals. For the purposes of this blog post, I want to point out to you five potential reasons why the sting is still so fresh in our minds and hearts. My hope is that you will realize that not only do words have the ability to hurt you, but also the words you use can potentially hurt, in lasting ways, the person to whom you are speaking. As is my normal approach I will also provide a potential solution, in each of the five topics, for you so as you will not perpetrate the same hurt done to you onto another.
“your words are freezing my reality”.
The well know psychoanalyst Dr. Timothy Leary stated once in a lecture on the intricacies of language
