Tag: Psychology

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The Words We Choose Matter – Let’s Choose Positive Words

colorful sticky notes with positive words
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Do You Have Positive Words in Your Vocabulary?

We all know the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” or something along those lines, but the truth is, words do hurt. We have to be VERY selective with our words. The words we use are more of a reflection of our character than what they are of the person who we are talking to or about.

Words are powerful, and what we say can and usually does come true. If we speak negatively, we are going to attract negative things, but if we speak positively, than we will attract positive things. So, why not use more positive words? Not just to attract positive things but be favorable to ourselves and others.

How Do You Speak to Your Children?

Think about children and how we speak to them, if we tell a child they are stupid, they are going to believe they are stupid, but if we tell them they are smart, they will believe it. We should be speaking life into our children, into ourselves, and onto others as well.

Sometimes we speak out of anger and say things we don’t mean. However, being able to pause, take a few deep breaths, count to 10, and just think about what we are about to say before we say something we’ll regret later, will be beneficial in the long run.

We don’t want to say things because of our emotions at the time, we want to say things we actually believe, which again, why we should be selective with our words.

You might like: The Importance of Saying Encouraging Words to Your Children

What Does the Bible Say About Positive Words?

The Bible mentions the power of words and how we should watch how we talk, in Proverbs 18:21 (NIV), “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

Death and life are in the power of the tongue…..WOW! That is powerful, you have the power to give life to someone or death, solely with your words. Think about that for a moment.

Everyone is going through different challenges, and we don’t know if the words we speak to them will help them or make them feel worse. If it’s encouraging words, then yes, this will help them, but if we start talking negatively to them, then this will make them believe that the negative thoughts they have are right.

Another verse in the Bible that talks about the words we use are Ephesians 4:29 (NIV), “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

In other words, LET’S BUILD EACH OTHER UP! Be positive! Encourage each other! Empower each other and help each other. Simple words like, “You got this!” “You can do this!” “You are capable!” “I believe in you!” Those are simple words that can mean the world to someone and could be the little push they need to get over whatever issue they may be going through.

Verbal Abuse Is Real

Did you know that verbal abuse is real? Psychology Today talks about recognizing verbal abuse and how to stop it; it starts with us, with ourselves. In the article, they reference the book Teen Torment: Overcoming Verbal Abuse at Home and School, and the author Patricia Evans, says, “words can be as damaging to the mind as physical blows are to the body, the scars from verbal assaults can last for years,” Let’s not scar others for life with our words.

I grew up always hearing things, “you don’t do anything right,” or “is there anything you can do?” or “you never use your head to think.” And hearing these comments repeatedly for years broke down my self-esteem. I felt worthless at one point and truly felt like I couldn’t do anything right. It made me feel like a disappointment, but I promised myself to break that cycle. It took years to be able to work on my self-esteem and feel confident in myself. Nevertheless, I was able to overcome it.

Positive Words Only

I want to challenge you. If you are a person who usually thinks negatively or speaks negatively, I challenge you for a week to try to catch yourself when you’re thinking or saying something negative and see if you can change that into something positive. Write down what your thoughts were and how you turned it into something positive and look back at your notes after a week. Then answer yourself this, how did you feel? Did you see a pattern? Where do you think these negative thoughts are coming from?

Let me know how it goes for you, either in the comments or private message. Let’s work together in changing our word selections and being more positive

With Love, Heidy

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Categories
Blog Book Review

Book Review: What Happened to You?

Book what happened to you there is a women drawn with blue and green colors, this is the cover of the book.
Picture I took of the cover – I removed the library sticker that was covering the word, “What.”

If you want to understand how events or trauma from your childhood affect your current behaviors, I suggest this book! Oprah writes about her upbringing and connects events from her adulthood to her childhood. And Dr. Perry shares his findings from over 30 years of neuroscience research and different stories from clients he’s helped. He breaks down how the brain stores memories and where in the brain they are stored. It’s truly an insightful book.

Few things I learned:

  1. Our viewpoint of the world starts as soon as we are born, believe it or not.
  2. Infants can sense the environment, for example, if there is tension or if they are in a loving home.
  3. Our brain associates trauma with our senses – like touch or smell.
  4. How we were cared for as infants and children affects our brain development, and not only that – but also the timing of when the trauma happened is important and impactful. Since children’s brains develop the fastest before the first two years – that is where the event affects the brain most.
  5. Trauma affects our health (from mental health or physical health).

Few things that stood out to me:

  1. Dr. Perry writes that therapy is more about building new associations and making new, healthier default pathways.
  2. When he talked about implicit bias – he said, “These beliefs and values are stored in the highest, most complex part of your braid – the cortex. But other parts of your brain can make associations – distorted, inaccurate, racist associations.” He explains that a person can have anti-racist beliefs but still have implicit biases that come with racist comments or actions.
  3. His definition of racism is, “In the U.S., racism is the marginalization and oppression of people of color by systems created by white men to privilege white people.” Yup, that is systemic racism, and that does fall into CRT.
  4. The last thing that stood out to me was how Dr. Perry says we can heal as a society. “How can our society move toward a more humane, socially just, creative, and productive future without confronting our collective historical trauma? Both trauma experienced and trauma inflicted. If we truly want to understand ourselves, we need to understand our history – our true history. Because the emotional residue of our past follows us.” – Dr. Bruce Perry.

Overall, this book is about changing the question from “why are you like that” to “what happened to you.” Because our upbringing has a lot to do with who we are.

This book is a great resource, but I still fully believe in therapy and doing the work to heal and better ourselves.

With Love, Heidy

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Blog

3 Things I Learned From Watching the Show Alone

A few weeks ago, my husband and I signed up for the Discovery Plus streaming service to watch Janet Jackson’s documentary. When you first sign up for any streaming service, they usually offer a free trial, so the plan was to cancel after the free trial expired.

As we browsed through the app, my husband found the show Alone from the History channel. He had seen the last two seasons on Netflix when it was available there, but on Discovery Plus, all the seasons were available, so we decided to keep the service. 

The show is about ten participants going out to a remote location – usually in the wilderness where they will have to survive off the land. They have ten approved items they can take with them, medical emergency equipment, cameras to record their journey, and a phone to call to “tap out.” The last person left wins $500,000.

The person who had lasted the longest in the show’s history, out of seven seasons, was 100 days. That’s 100 days of surviving out in the wilderness!

Well, as my husband would sit and watch the show, I would listen while doing chores around the house a lot of the time. And while listening to the journey of these participants, I learned three valuable lessons.

The Mind Is Truly Powerful

We know that the mind is powerful but watching this show further affirmed that. One of the main reasons participants would “tab out” and wanted to go home was that they were mentally broken, especially in the first season. It wasn’t because they got physically hurt or weren’t eating; it was because they mentally could not do it anymore.

They craved social interactions. They were missing their families and their daily routine. They no longer could be “alone” in the wilderness. I remember some stating that they wished they had someone else to share the experience to make their time out there easier.

Solitary Confinement Is an Inhumane Punishment in Our Prison System

Watching and listening to these participants’ experiences and seeing how they were becoming mentally broken reminded me of the solitary confinement punishment that is practiced in our current prison system. It made me realize that this punishment is completely inhumane.

According to Science Alert, “isolation has profound effects on the human body and brain.” The article explains that researchers found that the immune system of a person who is lonely responds differently to fighting viruses, which puts them at higher risk when developing an illness. There are also negative psychological effects like increased paranoia, inability to think clearly, anxiety, and panic attacks.

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Prisoners report having long-term mental health problems after being in solitary confinement. One story that always comes to mind is the story of Kalief Browder. He was sent to Riker’s Island, at the age of sixteen, for a crime he did not commit and spent almost three years in solitary confinement. Shortly after being released from prison, he committed suicide. He tried to live an everyday life after being released, he even enrolled in community college, but he kept being admitted to the psych ward at the local hospital in Bronx, NY, because of his mental health. Solitary confinement should not be a form of punishment for prisoners.

We Aren’t Made/Wired to Be Alone

The reason why participants have so much trouble with isolation in this show is simply that we aren’t made to be alone. Humans are social beings. As stated above, they were craving human interactions, the only thing they had was a camera to record their journey, but that doesn’t help their isolation.

The Bible tells us we are all part of the body of Christ, in Romans 12:4-5 (NIV), “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ, we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

In other words, we all need each other.

In conclusion

It’s interesting what one can learn from certain television shows. I knew these three lessons, but the show further validated them and really got me thinking about how we were created and how our environments affect us, both negatively and positively.

Have you seen the show Alone? If so, what are your thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

With Love, Heidy

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