Tuesday 3 February 2015

Positive speaking

I have a theory that how we talk about situations, objects and people to each other and to ourselves affects the way we perceive those things. For instance, if you constantly refer to your phone as "this stupid thing", you're not going to develop a healthy relationship with it, are you? You'll be less patient with it and more eager to rid yourself of it, because it's not "my beautiful new phone" any more, just "this stupid thing". It's much easier to attach more negative epithets to "this stupid thing" even than to "my phone". "This stupid thing" can easily turn into "this stupid, slow, ugly thing" and retain those associations for a long time.

I'm not sure what the process of cause and effect is, and it could easily be that the negative associations latch on and cause the insulting name rather than the name causing negative associations, but the point when you assign a negative name must come with some baggage, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do try not to do this myself.
PPS - It's harder than you think, sometimes.

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