BEWARE: WHEN YOU THINK WITH WORDS

How much of your thinking is done in and with words? Can you think without words, that is, apart from words? While linguists have not given us a precise percentages about this, we know that most thinking is done with, in, and through words. I would guess it is somewhere between 90 and 95 percent.

When you think, you think almost exclusively in words. While you can entertain thoughts in any of the sensory-systems (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory), such thoughts are usually simple and direct. Perhaps someones asks, “Do you remember the dog that you played with as a child?” and you, for a moment, see that dog in the theater of your mind. You may even be able to hold on to that image, perhaps see it as a movie rather than a snapshot. Now if you wanted to, you could play around with the image. “Can you make his hair orange?” But that’s about it when it comes to thinking without words.

Yet with words and language you can do so much more. Once you have a reference that you represent, then you can create all sorts of categories, concepts, and understandings. You can classify the dog by breed, as animate and living, as intelligent, etc. As a meta-representation system, language allows you to think deeply, expansively, and thoroughly. With words you create the uniquely human world of conceptual abstractions—and that’s where all of us mostly live.

You think in words and with words. You use words as vehicles to transfer thinking and as a code to encase a thought. Language, as a set of symbols, both enables thinking as well as constrains thinking. Some words constrain your ability to think certain things. And without language, there are all kinds of things that you can’t even think as in “entertaining an idea.” That’s why when a given language lacks certain words, people will have all sorts of problems thinking certain things. Postman (1976) wrote, “A distinction that cannot be made in language, cannot be made conceptually.” (p. 242).

Now one of the most amazing things about words is that they are not real. For many people, that is an absolutely shocking statement. They still think that words are real. And when you make that mistake, you will then probably also think that “words can hurt you.” They will then talk about “verbal abuse.” They will talk about some words as in “bad words,” and “evil words.” But that’s a fundamental mistake. Words are not real. “Dog” is a word, but it doesn’t bark or bite you. “Cat” is a word, but it cannot scratch you. Words are symbols that stand for some reference other than themselves. And because words are vehicles for thinking, they do not contain meaning. You and I use words as symbols to communicate to each other our ideas. Yet

meaning is in persons—in you and me. We are the meaning-makers. We use words to construct meanings.

That’s also why there are words and phrases that do us a great disservice. That’s because they promote and enable dysfunctional thinking. And with words, to wrongly use a word is to encode an idea that —in that context— is not only wrong, but can be hurtful and problematic. How does this work? It works as you take a word or phrase and use it to send a message to your mind-and- body. What your body does with the word then depends on whether you just think it or whether you believe it.

If you just think, then you will do no semantic damage to yourself. It remains just a thought and nothing more. It is something that you entertain and play with in your mind. But if you believe it, then you send a command to your nervous systems to actualize it. You are communicating to your body, “Try to make it real.” “Try to activate whatever you can from within to translate that word to the outside world.”

This is the structure of the placebo and the nocebo processes. Believe a voodoo curse on yourself and your body will make it real. Believe a doctor’s prediction about your situation, and for wow and woe, your body will orient itself in that direction. Believing makes it so in your body. Believing does not make it so in the outside world, only within your nervous systems—which it sets up as a self-fulfilling and self-organizing prophecy.

Words can be transformative, life-giving, and/or pathological in your mind-body system. So be careful as you think with words—as you read words. Reading often operates as a self- programming process. So as you avoid the bad stuff, focus on reading only the good stuff.