Just words?

One of the key ideas/techniques in most cognitive work is learning how to identify unhelpful and inaccurate thoughts and replace them with statements that work better for you and happen to also accord better with reality.


"It's hopeless," for example, is an unhelpful (it discourages you from doing anything) and incorrect (making absolute predictions about the future), albeit familiar, thought/feeling. Thinking about it, one might decide that "Things are tough now, but I've dealt OK with similar crises before and I have a lot of resources" serves one better.

One of my favorite parts of Albert Ellis' "A New Guide to Rational Living," one of the foundations of cognitive psychology, is where Ellis anticipates a common objection to such mental work. "But it's just semantics," the skeptic might argue. "You're just playing with words."


Exactly, Ellis responds. But please drop the "just."


Because words are everything. As uniquely verbal creatures, we think in words. Our thoughts guide our emotions. So if you want to use your thoughts to changes your emotions, semantics is the tool set you're going to have to work with. "By the time we reach adulthood, (we) seem to do most of our important thinking, and consequently our emoting, in terms of self-talk or internalized sentences," Ellis writes.


So how better to reshape a one's emotional life than start playing with those sentences? 


Perhaps this is a position that appeals to my biases as someone who's spent 30 years tangling with words for a living. But I still can't think of a better way to get the big brain talking with the lizard brain.