How do the words others use to describe us influence us?

The adjectives and labels that others address to us can limit us.

From the moment a human being is born, he becomes a subject of language, thanks to the words that his parents and family give him.. He learns to name things and people. Also, little by little, to himself.

He incorporates phrases that will form the world around him, which teach him how to react, how to manage emotions, how to get what he wants, how to describe and describe himself; in short, they give him the tools to position himself. The influence of the first five years is decisive.

Those repertoire-words will be the ones with which he goes out into the world. They will leave an imprint. Moreover, he incorporates them, repeats them and even, on occasion, makes a show of them.

Labels become flesh, they become empowering beliefs, but also, many times, they restrict the child's development.. An exercise that can be easily done is to pay attention to the phrases that we use in our daily life and reflect on them. Even those that we do not say in public, to everyone; those that we say in front of the mirror. It is believed that they are only that: "made phrases" but of so much repeating them, they are fixing the to do.

Language and its participation in how we see ourselves

We often hear: "Carlos is very nice", "Maria is very docile", "Alberto is just like his father", "Ana is very stubborn". Some of these phrases can sometimes be flattering and almost flattering, and others the opposite. What they all do is to establish a stereotype, to mark a character, a role.They are setting a sphere of movement, a boundary.

Words have enormous power and yet the subject is not fully aware of this. They have an impact on him and will make him build his reality from them (from the subjectivity with which he endows them). Because words are loaded with a peculiar meaning: the one that each human being attributes to them.. Each word has a weight, a smell, a color, a temperature, a quality, an emotion. That is why "being happy" is not the same for some as it is for others.

The good thing is that this can be modified, you can work on expanding the connotation of the words or give them multiple meanings, depending on the moment, the place, the conversation.

Going beyond labels

The assumption of roles (the nice one, the docile one, the stubborn one, the one just like the father), can continue into adulthood and impede the satisfactory prevent satisfactory development in some areas and relationships..

To follow so closely what has been said is a way of anchoring oneself in a past that probably no longer works (because it is outdated). In many cases, the permanence in those roles obeys a misunderstood loyalty, a loyalty to the one who said that phrase. a misunderstood loyalty, a loyalty to the person who said that phrase.. To be what was expected of that subject.

There is an (unconscious) tendency to remain faithful to what was, expecting recognition from someone. The question that the patient should ask himself is whether this is necessary for him, whether it is useful in his current life. It is a question of thinking for whom one is acting and what one is looking for with this action.

The infantile contents will be known in the analysis. It will be in that space where the unconscious vestige of those phrases the unconscious vestige of these set phrases, how they are working, how they position the subject, etc., etc.etc. Because the time of the unconscious is different from chronological time, there may be situations in which we psychically relive our childhood, and one of those phrases conditions the present. It is necessary to work to transform this, to construct new phrases that inhabit the present and deactivate, transmute those phrases. From those infantile constructions may occur psychic impediments, ways (that do not prosper) to solve some problems, scenes that are repeated without (apparently) finding an explanation, limitations, fears, contradictions... all that is giving us clues. When we have not been able to put words to them, when we have not been able to transform these desires, they will be transformed into obsessions, into pathology.

In everything there is a jouissance, even in the symptom..... The symptom comes to show that which has not been able to unfold in a healthier way, which has not been put into words. It is a way of telling the patient's story without the patient realizing it, because the unconscious only needs/desires to manifest itself, it wants to concretize that which is repressed, and when it does not manage to do it by the linear way (because it would be extremely unpleasant for the consciousness), it does it disguised, scrambled, distorted.

Psychoanalysis is a very useful instrument that listens to detect what are those phrases and limiting beliefs, that is permeable to listen to that which is repeated in the subject, indicating what even the subject does not perceive from the conscience.

Through interpretation, new chains of signifiers will be constructed that will deactivate old/current beliefs. that will deactivate old/current beliefs, endowing them with other perspectives, understanding them in a richer and broader way, appreciating how this phenomenon can be thought of, learning to tolerate that this is part of the past and that what is important is what is to come.

In the analytic process the patient will be the one who will do the work of construction of the new words. These are transformed, changed, allowing others - more appropriate, more in line with the subject and his time - to re-build the subject.