In William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ She is lamenting that Romeo is called Romeo, of the house of Montague. She was, of course, a Capulet, and they were enemies. Her point is that if Romeo were called something else, their problems would disappear and they could live happily ever after, or something like that.
Unfortunately for our romantic ideals, that just isn’t true. What she is saying, in effect, is that if Romeo were just someone else, she could marry him. But Romeo is who he is. And changing his name won’t change the fact that he is who he is, and she is who she is. Reality bites.
What we call something does change our perception of it. A new book, Language v. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, by N J Enfield explores this topic. One of the research experiments showed participants ambiguously shaped images and then asked them to redraw it as accurately as they could from memory. In one of the tasks, they were shown an image that was somewhere between a crescent moon and the letter ‘C’. The participants were all shown the same image, but for half the participants it was labelled ‘the letter C,’ and for the others, it was labelled ‘crescent moon.’ They were then asked to draw it from memory as accurately as they could. Sure enough, those who saw it labelled ‘crescent moon’ drew a crescent moon, and those who saw ‘the letter C’ drew the letter C.
In a previous life as a lawyer, I often represented defendants who were charged with crimes. Inevitably, by the time we got to trial, the eye witnesses had changed their stories, sometimes changing them completely, thanks to the influence of the prosecutors and police who had convinced them that what they saw was in keeping with the prosecution’s version of events. To which one of my clients whispered to me, in great indignation, while a key witness was testifying, ‘No, man! It wasn’t me with the sawed-off shotgun. It was my buddy. I had the .45!’ I’m not sure what my client thought that I could do with that information.
We convince ourselves of things that are just not possible. Just as there are significant numbers of people who are convinced that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, there are those who are convinced that the events of January 6th was just a normal tourist visit and have said as much. This, of course, distorts reality beyond recognition.
In the same way, we can convince ourselves of beliefs that prevent us from being our best, from loving our partners, from nurturing our children. These distortions of reality are what Attachment Centred Therapy is designed to correct, so that we can see the truth clearly. ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,’ the Bible tells us. And as Confucius said, ‘The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.’
Bullshit artists, of which there are many in life, want to convince us to call things by the wrong names, because it suits their purposes. And, unfortunately, we often bullshit ourselves by calling things by the wrong name. For example, many of my clients refer to being ‘disciplined,’ because that is what their parents told them it was called. Yet what they are describing is not discipline, but punishment.
Punishment is defined as, ‘the infliction of a penalty as retribution for an offence.’ That is very different from discipline, which is ‘training … to do something in a controlled and habitual way.’ Sometimes we confuse ourselves because training in a discipline is sometimes accompanied by punishment to ensure compliance with training, and so even people who write dictionaries can make mistakes of meaning. Discipline can be imposed from without, or it can arise from within oneself.
Many researchers have investigated these phenomena that can blind us to reality, cause us to twist it and distort it until it is no longer a reliable reflection of reality. That is why the bliss of newly-weds (or newly partnered) can become the hell of living with an enemy for so many people. Or why the hopes and dreams one had for one’s child have been dashed on the brutal reality of addictions or some other dysfunctional behaviour.
And the most pernicious distortion of reality is the belief the our reality can’t be distorted, only others with whom we disagree. There are a couple of books that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to know more about the workings of the unconscious mind and how it can compel us in ways we neither understand nor desire: Before You Know It, by John Bargh, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.
Attachment Centred Therapy utilizes a number of approaches that allow us to change our unconscious mind. First is the information processing itself that is instinctively done by the unconscious mind. I remember when I was in college theatre and our director poked a bit of fun my way because I could not distinguish between the difference in sound between the words ‘bum’ and ‘bomb.’ To me, they sounded the same. It turns out that the sounds are not distinguished in the German language (or so I was told) and so, because I had been raised in a Germanic community, that particular ability to distinguish those two sounds was missing from my unconscious mind learning about language. According to some theorists, it is this inability to distinguish sounds that is the basis of dyslexia, and this inability to distinguish those sounds comes from the way that caregivers interact with infants when they are learning the rudiments of language.
I don’t know if that last is correct or not. I do know that one of the persons interviewed on the program giving me that previous bit of information was a man, whose name I do not know, who said something so important to me that I have remembered it ever since. He said, ‘Words are more than mere concepts. They are the tools we use to grasp and grapple with reality.’
If that is true, then the way to change our reality is to change the words we use to describe it, to grasp and grapple with it. There is much evidence to support this proposition. For example, research shows that people who are depressed use absolutes in their language. Things are ‘never’ right and are ‘always’ going against them. This is seldom the literal truth. It is almost always wrong to use always, and never a good idea to say never unless we really mean it! Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy – the original and still the best form of CBT – is excellent for correcting this distortion of information processing.
Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is another excellent approach to examining our language in order to change our reality. And so is the ‘I feel … when … because ….’ model for expressing our feelings.
I will close with this final thought, which is something of a cliché, and I don’t mind cliché’s when they are appropriately chosen. Clichés, after all, become clichéd because they express a certain truth. It is the one about the obstacles in one’s path, the kinds of things that often motivate people to get help in therapy. Those obstacles can be regarded as stumbling blocks which will impede our progress and perhaps injure us, or they can be stepping stones to help us reach new heights and continue our journey.
I prefer the latter.