What Are We Actually Talking About?
On language
- and how it shapes memory, emotion, and imagination
We are constantly talking.
About things, about people, about problems, about solutions. And most of the time, we simply assume that we are talking about the same thing.
This is precisely where misunderstanding begins.
Because language is not a neutral mirror of reality.
It shapes, organizes, and reduces it
- and in doing so, it reaches much deeper than we are usually aware of.
Language Is Symbolism - and Always a Reduction
A word is never the thing it describes.

It is a symbol, a label for something far more complex.
When we say “anger,” “safety,” or “love,” we are not referring to the same bodily sensations, inner images, or biographical experiences.
Language makes communication possible by reducing complexity - and this is exactly where its risk lies.
We tend to confuse the word with the thing itself.
Staying Factual Is a Skill - Feelings Are Faster
To look at what is being said in a sober, factual way is not self-evident. 
It is a skill that can be trained. 
Emotions, however, react faster and more directly - often before we have consciously examined the content.
A personal example from a former relationship:

A serious argument once erupted over a pair of trousers.
“Have you seen my red trousers?”
 “No.”
 “But you must have walked right past them.”
The conflict escalated. Accusations. Withdrawal. Hurt.
Later, it became clear: we did not mean the same thing by the word “red.”
 My former partner had a red-green color vision deficiency - our color perceptions differed.
Of course, it was never really about the trousers. 
It was about the unspoken question:
“Do you take my needs seriously?”
A linguistic difference was emotionally charged - and turned into a statement about the relationship.
Language Is Invasive - It Interferes with Inner Images
In hypnotherapy, it has long been known that language is not neutral. It directly affects inner imagery, bodily sensations, and emotional states.
That is why experienced therapists are very deliberate in their wording during guided imagery. Instead of prescribing images, they leave space:
“When you reach the water, there is something there that can take you to the other shore.”
This openness allows the unconscious to generate its own meaningful image.
 If one were to say instead, “There is a boat waiting for you at the lake,” the inner experience might collapse. The person would return to the surface level of language - and the deeper effect would be lost.
Language can guide.
 But it can also interrupt.
Words Require Responsibility
If language is this powerful, one uncomfortable conclusion follows:

We carry responsibility for the words we use.
Some psychologists compare language to a surgical instrument: highly effective - and therefore requiring care.
 Words can clarify with precision, and they can injure with the same precision. What matters is not only what is said, but whether and how consciously it is spoken.
This becomes particularly evident in people with heightened sensory or cognitive sensitivity.
 Many autistic individuals, for example, may be in a stable and well-regulated inner state - until they are addressed and pulled out of that state by verbal interaction alone. Not because the words are unkind, but because processing language itself requires energy.
Words - even well-intended ones - demand attention, translation, and integration.
 The finer the inner perception, the more sensitive the nervous system, or the more synesthetic the mode of experience, the stronger the internal waves language can create.
In cultures where extraversion is socially valued more highly than introversion, this often goes unnoticed. 
For some people, unnecessary verbal interaction does not merely distract - it causes physical discomfort, exhaustion, or even pain.
This does not mean we should stop speaking.
 But it does mean that speaking is never a neutral act.
 Sometimes, not speaking is the more attentive form of contact.
Words Alone Are Not Enough
From an evolutionary perspective, language is a relatively young tool.
Humans communicated for a far longer period without differentiated language - through facial expression, gesture, posture, and voice.
This may explain why, to this day, we often react more strongly to how something is said than to the literal content itself. Nonverbal and paraverbal signals - tone of voice, speaking tempo, bodily posture - frequently outweigh the verbal message.
In my work as a trainer and lecturer, I repeatedly encounter the wish for “the right sentences”:
formulations that one would only need to say for conversations to go well.
As understandable as this wish is, such universally effective sentences do not exist.
There is no table, no checklist, no formulation that works in every situation.
And even if there were:
It might work for one person in a specific moment - and fail completely for another.
One uncomfortable truth is this: insecurity is perceptible.
Through the voice. Through posture. Through gaze.
And it is often louder than even the most carefully crafted sentence.
Factors such as body size, gender, and social attribution also play a role.
Language never operates in a vacuum - it is always embodied.
This is why I have integrated elements of voice training into all my professional trainings. Not to make people “sound nicer,” but to ensure that what is formulated well in content can actually be carried and conveyed.
Because words do not unfold their effect through meaning alone - but through the body that speaks them.
When Language Wounds - and Why It Can Also Heal
During my interview for a psychotherapeutic training institute, I was asked why I wanted to become a therapist.
 One of my answers was that I was fascinated by the fact that language can heal wounds - very often wounds that were created by language in the first place.
Devaluing remarks, repeated labels, subtle forms of verbal discrediting:
 Many of these injuries leave no visible scars, yet they continue to have an effect for years. Not because they were “objectively severe enough,” but because they acquired inner meaning.
Language wounds where it narrows meaning, fixes identities, or devalues experience.
It can heal when it opens new spaces of meaning - when experience is named, re-contextualized, and placed into a broader narrative.
 Not by sugarcoating, but by making sense.
Most people intuitively understand that language can hurt. 
That it can also be used deliberately, carefully, and profoundly to heal is far less widely recognized.
Words Change Memory
Research in forensic and cognitive psychology clearly demonstrates how strongly language shapes experience. 
The wording of a single question can influence how people remember an event.
Asking: 
“How fast did the car smash into the other one?”
 versus
 “How fast did the car hit the other one?” does not only change the estimated speed - it even affects whether, and how many, broken glass fragments witnesses later recall at the scene.
Memory is not an objective archive.
 It is a construction - and language is one of its core building materials.
On Basic Trust, Basic Fear - and Why Language Escalates
A well-known psychotherapeutic book opens with a seemingly trivial couple’s conflict.
Susi went grocery shopping and forgot Hans’s favorite sausage.
 Hans confronts her - harshly, accusatory. Unconsciously, the forgotten sausage means: I am not important right now.
 Susi starts to cry. Not because of the sausage, but because of the implicit message: I have failed.
Both are reacting not to the situation itself, but to deeply ingrained emotional patterns.
Hans’s biography is marked by emotional insecurity; basic fear is quickly activated - the feeling of being alone or insignificant.
 Susi grew up in an environment where affection was closely tied to performance; she immediately fears losing her value through “failure.”
Two people with a more stable sense of basic trust would likely have handled the same situation differently:
either without conflict - or with a brief, factual disagreement that allows for clarification.
Not necessarily because they have better communication techniques, but because language does not immediately become existentially charged for them.
(Those interested in emotional overreactions in couple dynamics find a deeper exploration in the article “What Taming Inner Dragons Has to Do with Healthy Relationships,” where the prince/princess complex is discussed in more detail.)
Violence in Language - Even Where We Don’t Expect It
Models such as Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg) have contributed greatly to more conscious use of language.
And yet, there remains a cultural layer.
The German language, for example, is rich in terms that carry implicit harshness:
Aus-druck – literally pressure out (translated as expression)

Er-ziehung – literally pulling or drawing into shape (education / upbringing)
Persönlichkeitsstörung – personality disorder, describing enduring patterns that deviate from norms and cause significant suffering… and implicitly define normality and deviation.
Even when used correctly, such terms evoke images of pressure, deviation, and correction.
 Violence in language is not always loud. Sometimes it is structural.
Meta Level: What This Means for Professional Communication
Anyone who works with people - therapeutically, consultatively, pedagogically, or in leadership - always works with language as an intervention.
The examples above show that misunderstandings do not necessarily arise from ill intent, but often from different inner worlds of meaning and experience that words encounter.
Language Always Works on Two Levels
Words do not merely inform - they activate.
Inner images, memories, emotional patterns. Whether basic trust or basic fear: language never meets neutral ground.
Objectivity Is an Outcome, Not a Starting Point
Where emotional safety is lacking, language cannot be processed factually.
Professional communication therefore begins not with content, but with relationship and affect regulation.
Less Fixing, More Enabling
Open, non-prescriptive language sustains inner processes.
 It reduces resistance, fosters self-efficacy, and creates space for genuine clarification - far beyond therapeutic settings.
Words Are Offers, Not Truths
A helpful shift in perspective is this: 
Words are hypotheses about inner realities, not objective facts.
This stance lowers escalation potential and opens room for development.
So What Are We Actually Talking About?
Perhaps the more relevant question is not what is being said, but which inner images, memories, and fears words activate.
Language is not a mirror of reality.
It is a tool - and like any tool, it can connect or injure, clarify or escalate.
