The Power of Emotion Filled Words

We have all done it more times than we care to admit. Our tempers flare. Our emotions get the best of us. We boil over and words come out. Often at times, they are blunt and do not accurately reflect the truth. However, we are often too charged to think about correcting ourselves, so we don't. The venom of our words reach the target they are thrown at and it begins to slowly seep in. Like ink in a carpet, it begins to saturate deep into the fiber of another. The damage is done. Grant it, if we had acted fast, we could have minimized the area of impact, but we rarely do. The day continues and we go on with our lives, never fully understanding to what extent we just damaged another. 

Lately, I have been thinking about my life. I have been reflecting on the choices I have made and the true reasons why I made those choices. I can rationalize things until the cows come home. I can give you a million and one excuses as to why I did or did not do something. The truth however is always very simple. It took 10 years of therapy to realize that. The truth behind everything can be summed up in a simple sentence. The simpler the sentence, the more honest it is. Most of my choices in my life can be summed into these simple statements: I am insignificant. I am not good enough. I am unloveable. I am scared. 

I think most of us can relate to those statements. I believe most of us are crippled by them as well. Why? Why do we believe these about ourselves? That is simple. Because someone told us so. Somewhere throughout our lives, we were told things (by people we love, by the media, by society, by authority figures, by mentors) that can be filed into one of those beliefs. As a result, we learned to feel defeated and hopeless. Those are the beliefs that are taking up the most space in our brain. 

Our brain likes to sort and store things into little neat compartments. Almost everything someone says to me is broken down to a basic statement and stored in its appropriate box. When someone says something with strong emotion, its file is bigger. it has more information attached to it. We recall the words, facial expressions, inflection, tone, volume level.....everything. I like to think of it as a RAW file (storing every speck of information captured) as opposed to the JPEG files (storing only bits of information that seem necessary or relevant) that are saved when things are spoken with or elicit no particular form of emotion whatsoever. Have you ever noticed that when someone tells you something negative, your memory of it is so detailed that you are almost experiencing it first hand? Yet, when someone compliments you, you can remember the words, but have little to no recollection of what it felt like to hear that compliment? We stored the information differently. That is why it is often so hard to get someone to believe something amazing or beautiful about themselves. It is often because, we as humans, display and elicit more emotion when we are angry or upset, than when we are happy and proud. That has to change. We all need to make a point to allow positive feeling and emotions flood our words. We need speak praise and compliments with just as much inflection and enthusiasm as we do when we yell or scream in anger or jealousy. In fact, we need to overpower the negative. We need our brains to store messages of encouragement and affirmation in RAW files and kick those others down to a GIF file. 

Our words have so much power. The power to uplift and the power to snuff out. The way we choose to speak those words have even more power. I pray that when our emotions flood us, the words we choose to speak be joyful and filled with love and beauty rather than anger and frustration. That when we are angry and rant and rave (which we all do and most likely continue to do), may those instances pale in comparison to the positive ones. May our brains be reformatted, and have encouragement and affirmation take up 95% of our files we store. 

Blessings!