Is it true that "sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never
hurt you"?
I
doubt it. As a hypnotherapist, I see people every week whose sense of self
has been damaged by words spoken to them and what they have allowed those
words to mean in their life.
Words can hurt. They do hurt, and sadly we often let them become permanent
sources of pain.
We all know the kind of words I am talking about. The cutting remarks said
in anger. The putdowns. The ridicule. The unfair comparisons.
While all hurtful language is potentially damaging, when it comes from
parents and other caregivers it is doubly so. Here is an encounter that I
chanced upon last week in a supermarket checkout line. See if it doesn’t
sound familiar.
An eight or nine year old boy is demanding a bag of candy. His exasperated
mother seems at her wit’s end. She has probably been having a bad day and
this is her "last straw." She grabs the kid by the collar, shakes him a
little and raises a voice made shrill by frustration. She says something
like, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A big boy like you acting like a
baby. You are a spoiled brat. That’s what you are. Why do you have to have
everything you see? You just can’t behave yourself when I take you out, can
you? I don’t know what I am going to do with you."
She blurted it all out so quickly that it was hard to keep track of
everything she said.
Clearly, she was angry with her child and wanted him to know it. But imagine
what all this sounded like to the boy. His own mother has just told him that
he "should be ashamed of himself," that he "acts like a baby," "is a spoiled
brat," and "has to have everything he sees." On top of it all, he’s such a
hopeless case that his mother doesn’t know what she is going to do with him.
I
don’t mean to imply the boy’s mother was a generally abusive parent. Only at
that moment, her outburst was abusive and was creating the exact conditions
she thought she was trying to correct. Her son stopped asking for the candy.
He became silent and pouted. I believe he also took onto himself something
of the attributes his mother had just used to define him and lost some of
his precious self-esteem.
Negative parental and caregiver programming through thinly veiled verbal
abuse has put a damper on the human spirit since the beginning of language.
Hurtful language is like a plague that gets passed down from generation to
generation. It is so much a part of the fabric of life that most of us don’t
even notice it. Of course, parents lose their temper from time to time. They
don’t really mean it. We are all only human, right?
Perhaps. But it is very difficult for a child to distinguish what is meant
when an angry parent, teacher or even sibling is expressing their anger
through degrading language.
Humans are storytellers, thinkers, and conceptualizers. Our medium is
language. We begin constructing a story about life and our relationship to
it almost from the moment we are born. In a sense, each of us not only has a
story but also is a story. We are the main character. The hero. Heroine.
Things happen to us. We take actions. We witness events and outcomes. We
draw conclusions. And we weave it all into an on-going, always consistent
narrative.
At the core of our story is our sense of self. Are we smart or stupid? Lazy
or hardworking? Handsome or homely? A winner or a loser? Part of an elite or
a persecuted minority? A good person or a bad person?
To understand the impact of abusive language on children, it is important to
remember that they hear language differently from adults. They take things
said more literally than adults and tend to believe without question. How
else could we convince them that a man in a red suit with reindeers and a
bag of presents comes down their chimney every December 25th? Or that a
bunny rabbit brings them candy? Children haven’t yet developed the critical
faculty that allows adults to evaluate new information, rejecting or
accepting it based on our past experience. Children are listening and
watching in order to form their picture of who they are and how life is. And
they generally believe what they are told.
When we are children, our parents and other grownups are automatically the
authorities on this new world we born into. Surely they know what they are
talking about. It is only natural that we design our stories about ourselves
around the definitions they give us of our strengths and weaknesses. And
this is whether or not those definitions are in our own best interests.
In the best of all possible worlds, all parents would carefully monitor
their language. We would be supportive and nurturing 24- hours a day 7 days
a week. But ours is not an ideal world. Ours is a world where parents are
overworked, overstressed and taught to downplay the importance of language.
As a result, many of us pass down the same kind of negative linguistic style
that our parents used to raise us, especially when we lose our tempers even
a little. We tell our children that they are lazy when we want them to learn
that hard work brings rewards. We tell them they are irresponsible when we
want them to take on responsibilities. We tell them they are selfish when we
wish them to be generous.
Ironically, becoming our parents’ negative projection is a form of "honoring
our parents." A good child listens to what his or her parent tells them and
accepts it as truth, often literally.
When the grownup in our life says, "you are stupid," we think we are stupid.
When they ask why we "can’t do anything right," we accept our incompetence
as a given. When we are told that we are a "bad boy" or "bad girl" naturally
we assume this is true. We might try to be good. But we know in our hearts
that we are bad. After all, mother or father knows best, don’t they?
One of my main jobs as a hypnotherapist is to help people reprogram
themselves with positive language and imagery. This should also be a goal of
good parenting.
My clients typically come to me with some situation that they would like to
change. Frequently it is an impulse control problem. Maybe food. Maybe
compulsive spending. Maybe cigarette addiction. At the core of it is often a
negative self-image created partially by parental programming.
I
use hypnosis to bypass the conscious mind and get the childlike mind we call
the subconscious to discard the old beliefs and adopt a new view of
themselves as good, worthy, strong, effective and able to make important
changes.
But wouldn’t it be better if we learned these positive ways of thinking as
children?
If you believe that the child is the father of the man and the mother of the
woman, I'd like to invite you to take on a challenge. I would like you to
make it a practice to be as careful in what you say to your children as a
hypnotherapist is with his or her hypnotic suggestions. This doesn’t require
any special training. All that is needed is to adopt this version of the
golden rule when dealing with kids. Speak unto others as you would have them
speak onto you. Starting with the ones you love the most, use language to
build, not limit, your children’s spirit and sense of self. Incidentally,
you will find that speaking the way you would like to be spoken to works
quite nicely with other grownups too.
Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can build the human spirit.
Children are actually very adept at being
hypnotized. This is why what we say to them and let them watch on tv is so
important. I am happy to work with children as young as 10 years of age.
Scheduling Instructions
To schedule
your first hypnosis appointment or arrange a free 15-20 minute consultation to
see whether hypnosis is right for you, click the link below: New Hypnosis Client Intake Form
