Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, Phil wrote on how the play between words and feelings affects your relationships. Here are some posts that discuss some of the aspects of this topic.
Why Language is the Human Superpower “More than fire, more than the wheel, language has enabled humans to dominate the earth. Earlier life responded to the world with reflexes, then emotions, then thoughts, but it was the human invention of language that turned thinking into a superpower. It started by using words for things we could point at: objects like apples, actions like running, and interior experiences like sadness. These words were reused as metaphors to explain the world, and new words were coined for categories like fruit, color, and time.”
How Relationships are Your Path Toward Growth “In the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how language is a relatively recent invention, and its benefits have been so great that we use it for all our interactions with the world. Before language, we used senses, instincts, feelings, intuitions to survive in the world (and successfully so, or else we wouldn’t be here.) All of those responses still exist, but I (and most other people, I think) only pay attention to the verbal half. Isn’t this fascinating! There is a whole other part of me that influences my life that I don’t pay attention to. Sure, this is not an original insight; Freud, Kahneman, and others have written about this, but I find the verbal/nonverbal divide a useful way to think about it. To understand my other side, I must move my attention away from words, and what I find, I cannot (by definition) even speak about. The best I can do is use words to point.”
Rely on Relationships to Stay Sane in an Insane World “Another way to handle stress is through your relationships. I’d like to talk about this by starting with what may seem a strange subject: language. Humans used to survive quite well without it, thank you (or we wouldn’t be here.) Language gave us a way to capture our thinking and reach conclusions that did not always reflect our senses and emotions. It has been so effective that our consciousness operates almost completely in the verbal arena. Senses and emotions that arise are labeled and incorporated into that arena; if they are not labeled, they are effectively invisible to our normal verbal consciousness. In a relationship, any relationship, we connect through language. In a casual encounter, we hide a part of ourselves by saying what is socially acceptable; in closer relationships, we share ourselves, our ideas and our views. Just think how magical this is: an idea in my head can appear in your head through language. But a relationship is more than words; it is also how you feel about the other person. We are born to be social; there is a natural attraction to other people. And so the nature of relationships is both verbal and nonverbal, and being aware of the nonverbal side will serve you well in these worrying times because a relationship has a reality that the news doesn’t. The news is really just words and images floating out there. But a relationship, if you pay attention to how it feels as well as what you are talking about, is a visceral experience. It can be very calming because our connections with other people are such a basic need.”