I have been thinking about the vocabulary we use for the inner life. How much of it actually belongs to us.
Most of the words we reach for when we try to describe what is happening inside, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and fear, were handed to us. By language. By family. By the culture we were born into. We use them because we have them. Not because they are precise.
There is a practice gaining attention in psychology circles: inventing your own terms for emotional states that standard language doesn’t quite reach. Coining something private, personal, exact.
I think this practice is more significant than it sounds. Because the words you use for your inner states are not just descriptive. They are partly constitutive. The word shapes the internal representation. It makes certain moves available and closes off others. An approximate word gives you an approximate relationship with what is actually happening.
NLP calls this making a distinction. When you can name something specifically, you have cut it out from the blur around it. You can see its edges. Anything you can see the edges of, you can begin to choose something about.
The map is not the territory. But more importantly, someone else’s map of your territory is especially not the territory.
Clay Lowe