Why Is Language Change So Important In Psychotherapy?
The sentences we think and the way we pronounce them in words only make sense if they follow certain rules of the language in which they are expressed: a reasonably correct grammatical order, being arranged in a certain way and that the words that make them up are known by the people who hear and think about them. Any change in any of these parameters may vary the meaning of the phrase and, consequently, its interpretation or its own veracity.
But the meaning of words and the contextuality of sentences can not only be altered by these syntactic and semantic parameters. There are other elements with great capacity to influence how we understand and interpret what we say or what they tell us. The form, tone and rhythm of how things are said also exert a notable influence on the way we understand them, how we think about them and how we believe they affect us.
When we talk about the processes of our lives, we are rarely aware that we are having thoughts about those events we are recounting. We focus entirely on the content of those thoughts, with little or no awareness of the process by which we have created them or of the mental process that leads from one thought to another, and from this to the next
That is, it is difficult for us to understand that, finally, a thought is just that, a thought, a set of words and phrases that, sometimes (particularly when we have some type of psychological conflict), we literally associate with our real experience. We have the impression that we are literally describing the content of our thinking and how it is affecting us.
We focus entirely on the content of those thoughts, with little or no awareness – particularly those that are disruptive and ruminative – of the mental process that leads from one thought to the next. Focusing on the literality of what we think and talk about distracts us from the absorbing content of those thoughts and their effect on us
When, in psychotherapy, we focus our patients on the awareness of the production processes of the words with which we construct those distressing, problematic thoughts, we encourage the person to realize that these thoughts are not the exact reflection of our inner world, nor the surrounding one.
The changes in the language parameters with which we construct thoughts and their expression as unequivocal from the person’s experience, require great empathy and prudent action on the part of the psychotherapy professional. Some techniques, especially cognitive defusion, favor the shift of attention from the content of thoughts to the processes that generate them and, consequently, that we perceive reality and the world as fallible as the people who create it
Tips for psychotherapists
Some of the techniques that we can use for this purpose are brief techniques and can be easily incorporated into dialogue and conversation with patients. Simple techniques that allow distancing to occur between people and their thoughts. For example, initial non-invasive techniques such as the “mind and thoughts” conventions make it easier for the patient to begin to experience thoughts only as thoughts and to learn to differentiate them and defuse (to stop taking them too seriously) from those that are problematic.
An exercise like “word repetition” also works well to avoid taking a thought literally It consists of, through exaggerated repetition of a word, being able to dismantle its problematic content and reveal its arbitrary nature. While your client is discussing thoughts or topics that distress him, he selects from his narration a word that can, more or less, condense all of his discomfort, and have him repeat it in a neutral, decontextualized tone, many times.
This exercise, carried out well (probably with the introduction of a neutral word to rehearse), allows the client to end up becoming more distrustful of the literal content of his thoughts and the problematic words that support them.
Another practice of interest for therapists, within the framework of contextual therapies, is what is known as “having a thought.” This is another technique with the potential to focus the person’s attention on the fact that they are generating a problematic, disturbing and annoying thought or thoughts, not verbally expressing a truth A technique that, used well, is especially effective in stopping the entanglements of stories and focusing more on why and how we construct certain problematic thoughts than on the content of those thoughts themselves.
“Contrasting thoughts with the present moment, slow speech and absurd voices”, and many others, are techniques for defusing problematic, disruptive, obsessive and ruminative thoughts that, like those explained in a little more detail, allow changing linguistic parameters. of the contents of the thoughts and the way we express them, to give rise to a necessary distancing from those mental and verbal contents that generate so much discomfort. About distancing yourself from problematic thoughts, if you like, we will talk about it in more detail in a future article.
