Language is fascinating. It is enough to hear one word to bring up a complex experience within us. When I say ‘beach’ it creates inner pictures of the beach. There might be a yearning or a sense of joy or other emotions. Maybe you remember being at the beach. Your body might relax a tiny bit or you sigh with a deep breath. Words can remind us of a whole world of experiences and make them become a present reality for a moment. We can use that in a powerful way in guided imagery when we make sure to use a lot of words that create calm, soothing and peaceful experiences.
We will also constantly run into trouble, because words can remind us of trauma. It is not necessary to see a trigger. Often it is enough that someone mentions it and suddenly the inner experience changes. The word pulls the memory into the present. Because triggers can be all kinds of things from everyday life and we don’t control what other people say it will be impossible to avoid.
We can learn to reduce the power of words over our experience. The most powerful tool is this sentence: It was just a word.
When we get triggered by a word we can tell ourselves that it was just a word that someone said. It isn’t happening, it was just a word. That is a form of reality check that helps us to step out of the inner experience and back into the room we are in, with the person who said something. It is just a word they said. Words will never hurt me.
With practice, this thought and reality check can become automatic. We hear the word, notice that it triggered and brought up this whole set of inner experiences and then we tell ourselves that it was just a word. Just something someone said. The more we get used to this, the faster we will be able to calm ourselves. We abandon the meaning the word has and focus on the abstract phenomenon of language itself. There was a word. Now the sound has vanished and it is gone.
A different way to rob triggering words of their meaning is a bit counterintuitive and can be used when the effect of the trigger lingers or keeps bothering us. We repeat the word. Over and over. It might take some courage because it really is uncomfortable. When we repeat words over and over they tend to lose their meaning and become reduced to their sounds. You can try this for yourself. Stop reading and take a minute and say the word ‘sugar’ over and over.
It doesn’t take long before our mind notices how we move our mouth and what sounds we hear without making any meaning of it anymore. It can take a little longer when we use this for triggering words but they too can get reduced to mouth movement and sound that has no meaning left. There can be a surprisingly strong feeling of control over the word when we can say it out loud and make it do what we want, which will only increase our sense of control over the situation.
I think that it is important to be careful with words in therapy. We make our lives a lot harder when we use triggering words all the time. The best trauma Ts know this and have a whole repertoire of softer word choices. Understatements, abstraction, synonyms, carefully describing their way around a triggering word, all these should be used. Ts who think that ‘exposure’ is a good idea will just keep their clients in a constant state of stress responses (this is really not how desensitization works, even if they think so). They feel unsafe to us because they speak unsafely. It will impact the therapeutic relationship. We need safe spaces where words are not used to make our life harder.
And at the same time, we need to learn how to manage words because the world outside the therapy room will not be so kind. There won’t be CN’s everywhere we need them. It is important to understand how words work, how they bring things into the present. And that they are only words. Just something someone said. Nothing will hurt us. Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar.
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