Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 9 preview..
Chapter Nine: Mind your language!
So we have already taken a brief look at some of the language that you think and speak when we explored your ‘inner voice’ or the way in which you talk to yourself (Chapter 2 ‘Cognition’), as well as in the previous chapter on thinking styles (Chapter 8). Now that you really understand your primary limiting beliefs and different unhelpful thinking styles we are going to explore language further throughout this chapter. This is because the language we use is so important!
Our language is a window, through which we can easily recognise our thoughts and beliefs. The language that we speak, and the language that we use in our thoughts are an expression of what we think, feel and believe. Right now, I am writing this in a Microsoft Word document. I’m making very simple changes to this document by hitting different keys two or three times a second. By typing away, I am changing the look of the page, but I am not seeing the other effects my key hitting is having. The actual hidden ‘computer language code’ that I am changing looks nothing like the very clean, clear white page that my typing appears on. I am changing the underlying code through this Word document. You are going to change your underlying code, your thoughts and beliefs, through your language. When I say ‘language’, I’m not just talking about the words and statements that you actually speak, but also the ones that you think (your inner voice).
Just in the same way that our ‘body reacts upon our mind, and our mind reacts upon our body’, our ‘thoughts and beliefs affect our language, and our language affects our thoughts and beliefs’.
So the language that we use in our heads and out loud not only reveals exactly what we think and believe about something, but it validates those thoughts and beliefs as well. If you have a headache and say to your partner ‘I’ve got an awful headache’, you are validating your headache, making it harder for you to get over it and crack on with your life in the meantime.
This is why, at the beginning of this book, I said I was going to minimise the use of the common terms people use to describe your symptom, and instead generally refer to it as ‘your fear’, ‘your symptom’, or ‘your issue’. Every time you or I describe your symptom as a PHOBIA, we are actually validating your fear, making it seem bigger, and making it harder for you to get over it. Even referring to it by the lesser dramatic term of ‘fear’, is still validating it…
Even if you are feeling ‘like shit’, never say it!
Perhaps the most amazing study I came across whilst researching this book is about nuns and their dirty habits. Well, bad habits rather than dirty ones. I could go on to describe it as an un-convent-ional study, but that would be a childish joke to make, especially as the study was about life and death…
On the 22nd of September 1930, the Mother Superior of the ‘North American Sisters’, who were from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sent a letter to her fellow nuns requesting that they all write an autobiographical essay. Sixty years later, 678 of those nuns, who had been born before 1917, agreed that their earlier autobiography could form part of a modern research study, and 180 of these essays were selected for inclusion. The following comes from the research by Danner et al. (2001).
At an average age of 22, each nun was asked to:
…write a short sketch of [her] life. This account should not contain more than two to three hundred words and should be written on a single sheet of paper . . . include place of birth, parentage, interesting and edifying events of childhood, schools attended, influences that led to the convent, religious life, and outstanding events.
In the later study, each of these 180 essays was coded for certain expressions of emotion, in a very simple fashion. Basically each text was analysed for the positive emotions of accomplishment, amusement, contentment, gratitude, happiness, hope, interest, love, and relief; the negative emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, disinterest, fear, sadness, and shame; and the neutral emotion of surprise.
Effectively, each nun’s paper was scored on the amount of positive, negative and neutral emotional content. Here are two examples from the study:
Sister 1 (low positive emotion): I was born on September 26, 1909, the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys…. My candidate year was spent in the Motherhouse, teaching Chemistry and Second Year Latin at Notre Dame Institute. With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.
Sister 2 (high positive emotion): God started my life off well by bestowing upon me a grace of inestimable value…. The past year which I have spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame College has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.
(I just want to point out, that it would be easy to assume that young women entering the Catholic Church during this period in America might not have been very well educated, and that their decision to take holy orders may have been made partly because there weren’t many other options open to them. This would be a mistake, as these were bright, intelligent women. By the time the nun study was initiated (in 1991) 91% of the Nuns had earned, at the very least, a University Degree.)
When all the information had been gathered and placed into a table, it was split into four sections, depending on how many positive emotional statements were in each. The bottom section contained the least positivity, and the top section contained the most positivity.
When all the ‘scoring’ was complete, the tables were finalised and the data correlated, the amazing and frightening evidence was clear to see.
Around about 50% of nuns in the lowest (not very positive) section had died, and only 20% of nuns in the ‘most positive’ section. If you have a positive outlook on life, and feel positive emotions about life, you are – according to this study – two and a half times more likely to survive to your nineties!
I’m not trying to suggest that just by thinking and feeling positively about your life that you will live into your nineties like the nuns did, but it’s a start! It’s not just that the nuns thought and felt positively, it was more about the fact that they thought and felt positively about EVERYTHING… about their health, about their happiness, about their fulfillment, about their love, about their friends and their spiritual beliefs. They CHOSE to think and feel positively about everything in their lives, and because of this they were happy, contented, could deal with stressful situations, were fit and in good health, had good coping mechanisms, felt resilient and were grateful. Their positive attitude permeated every area of their lives.
This chapter isn’t just about ‘being positive’, this concerns all of our unhelpful thinking styles.
There is plenty of other research surrounding language suggesting that what you think and say is important! For example, those with depression and those who are suicidal tend to use a greater number of first person singular pronouns, mostly ‘I’, and a lack of second and third person pronouns, such as ‘we’ and ‘he’ (Pennebaker, Mehl and Niederhoffer, 2003). This might suggest a lack of connection with others and a focus on the self. Pennebaker and King (1999) found that linguistic style and personality traits were linked. For example, results suggested that ‘neurotic’ people use more negative and fewer positive words than those who are not neurotic. A higher ratio of positive to negative words has been found to be associated with better health (Pennebaker, Mayne and Francis, 1997). Wolf, Sedway, Bulik, Kordy (2007) found that language use of inpatients with eating disorders contained high numbers of negative emotion words and low numbers of positive emotion words, along with high rates of anxiety words. They stated that:
Overall, the cognitive style of individuals in our sample is best described as ruminative, past-oriented, negativistic, self-focused, and avoidant.
As I said in chapter 2, you need to pay attention to your thinking for a few weeks, and this is going to take effort. I’m not going to lie to you; although this process is VERY EASY, it is going to take effort, MASSIVE DETERMINED EFFORT in fact.
What you want to notice in your language are clues that give away how you think or what you believe about something. Once you recognise what the thinking behind the language is, you can change the thinking by changing the language.
A phrase I would like you to get used to saying to yourself is ‘what does that say about what I think, feel or believe?’
Have a look at the following statements/thoughts:
‘I couldn’t do that’
‘I wouldn’t be able to make it’
‘I’m not good enough’
‘She’s out of my league’
‘I haven’t got the qualifications’
‘I should have gone to see granny today’
‘I’m not strong enough’
‘I should be able to do this by now’
‘I’d never be able to afford one of those’
‘I must get better at sending Xmas cards’
‘This is too much for me to deal with’
The statements are all very negative, and I have underlined the key word or words that make them negative.
People with low self-esteem and social anxiety, because they are forever scrutinising themselves and comparing themselves to others, are often very self-critical and judgemental. They judge and compare themselves continuously with what they think they SHOULD have done, OUGHT to do, and MUST do. A well-known psychologist, Albert Ellis, called this ‘Musterbation’, as in ‘I must do this’ (actually, he went on to say: ‘Masturbation is good and delicious, but musterbation is evil and pernicious’. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up about that!).
In a ‘musterbation statement’, you are stating what you think you SHOULD be doing, rather than what you are doing. For example: you might be out clothes shopping and thinking, ‘I should really have gone to see grandma today’. In other words, you are making yourself feel bad and guilty because you are out shopping and enjoying yourself. You don’t feel that you DESERVE to be out enjoying yourself, so you berate yourself (give yourself a hard time) by stating something nice that you could be doing for someone else instead. The actual message behind the statement could be ‘who do I think I am, wandering around these shops and spending money without a care in the world, when my poor granny is at home ill, what sort of person am I?’ So, in effect, this statement is a real (though self-inflicted) put-down. It’s not surprising that people who speak to themselves like this, have low self-esteem and judge themselves very harshly.
See the same statements below, now with a more positive, kind and ‘internal’ version beneath…
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