The Power of Language

Language has a great deal of power. Language can raise a person's heart rate, it can change someone's blood pressure, it can cause fluid overflow in someone's sinuses, and it can incite actions that would otherwise not occur. It can motivate and it can depress.

The line between purposefully painful words and physical action is surprisingly thin. The act of causing mental distress is so often ignored in favor of physical distress, despite the two being directly linked. If our physiological state can be altered purely through communication with language, then that would hint that the mental and physical are one in the same. Harmful communication can cause physical harm, and physical harm can cause emotional harm.

So why is it that emotional harm through language is not treated as seriously as direct physical harm?

Those who doubt the power of language should consider how dictatorships have formed. Did the tyrants themselves directly do all the work, or did they use the nuance of language to get others to do it for them? Would those others have helped if it were not for the power of that one person's language?

How about mental health counselors? They use nothing but language in their practice. It's all just words, and yet those words are healing to their clients. Those words change people's lives.

Lawyers develop arguments that determine the entire lives of their clients, and those arguments are comprised of nothing but words. The fate of these people lie in the way their representative words their arguments in court.

The entirety of our laws were written using nothing but words. The specific wording of those laws are referenced every day during legal battles to determine whose language was more powerful than the other's. Who used their words more effectively?

Language has power. Words have power. And therefore, doesn't it make sense that choice of wording also has power? Wrong choice of wording can make or break a leader, a lawyer, a therapist, a mediator, a teacher...

Since words and language can have such influence as this, why would we use such power as carelessly as we do? And why would we deny the power it holds, despite using it every day and creating evidence to the contrary?

Those who just want to say whatever they want without repercussion clearly do not understand the power their words have over others, or, whether it be through ignorance or denial, even the power words can have on themselves.

It seems very irresponsible and extremely inconsiderate for someone to willfully ignore the impact their words have on others, and for them to deliberately choose to continue using harmful words, despite it being explained to them how those words are harmful.

I dunno, just food for thought. I don't really have a point of conclusion, I'm just thinking aloud. But if by reading this my words have changed your emotional or physical state, then I guess that's a point I mean to prove.