I’ve been doing a bunch of writing during the past month, working on what I hope will be a book. The book is about my life, the stories that I have told myself about my life and myself, and the way in which those stories impact my experience of myself and my life and other people. I have always been fascinated with and attentive to language. Through the words my clients use, I learn a lot about their mental models. I listen for embedded assumptions. I pay attention to the energy that their words carry, and the energy that their words create. My own writing has underscored for me again the incredible power of language. Think, for example, about the difference between saying “I am adopted” versus “I was adopted”. It seems simple, almost unworthy of notice, but what mindsets or assumptions or beliefs are embedded in those phrases?
“I am adopted” embraces being adopted as something that defines me, a part of my self-concept. Just like being a woman, being 5’5”, having brown hair and brown eyes, being a good athlete, being an amazing friend. What are the implications of incorporating being adopted into my self-concept? Does that choice serve me and support me? It’s worth digging deeper in considering those questions, because the implications vary from person to person. For me, taking on being adopted as part of my self-concept means living my life with a story that I have abandonment issues, that separations are hard for me, that love leaves and cannot be counted on.
“I was adopted” views my adoption as an event that took place in my life. It’s an event that changed the people I knew as and called “mom” and “dad”, an even that changed the family I grew up in, and even the city where I lived. It impacted the course of my life, in the way that the school I attended or the friends that I had impacted the course of my life. But just as my friends and my school don’t define who I am, neither does being adopted.
Can you see the way in which I grant less power to the fact of having been adopted if I say and believe “I was adopted” instead of “I am adopted”? Are there ways in which you are undermining yourself or keeping yourself stuck or taking an unnecessarily fixed view of the people in your life?
Consider the difference between:
- “She is bossy.” vs. “She is asserting herself in talking with that person this morning.”
- “He is controlling.” vs. “He really wants everyone to do what he wants them to do.”
- “They are mean.” vs. “What they just said wasn’t particularly friendly or compassionate.”
What if we all chose to loosen the grip of labels by paying attention to the interpretations we make and the language we use?
