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Key points
- Unless people have access to a word, they cannot truly recognize their own experience of it.
- Language shapes thought.
- Education and collaborative discourse can help people create new meaning and experience.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a nearly century-old idea based on the belief that people experience their world through their language and that language shapes thought. Recent research in support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis demonstrated interactions between language and cognition through fMRI experiments. Brain scans showed that learning a word “rewires” cognitive circuits in the brain; thus, demonstrating the effect language has on thinking.
Why is this important for the everyday person?
Unless people have access to a word, they cannot truly recognize their own experience of it. For example, studies have shown that if people don’t know the word “ambivalent,” they don’t recognize the experience of conflicting feelings about something. Essentially, if a person does not have the language to describe an experience, the person is not having the experience.
This happened to me following the birth of my first child. I underwent an emergency c-section under general anesthesia when the nurse monitoring the fetal heartbeat stopped getting a reading. The days afterward in the hospital, medical providers who examined him and I continued to provide me with reassuring information, “You’re healing just fine. The baby is healthy!”
However, something felt so disorienting. Maybe physically I looked fine, but that’s not at all how I was feeling. I just experienced what everyone had been telling me was supposed to be the best day of my life, giving birth to my son, and my medical providers were telling me I was recovering. Why was I not feeling that way?
It wasn’t until several weeks later that a friend visited and upon hearing my birth story named it for me: birth trauma. Just having words that I could tie to my experience catapulted me forward in my healing. It allowed me to begin making sense of what happened (trauma!), why I was feeling the way I was, and what I needed to do to move forward.
As a therapist, I also find language to be a powerful tool in clients' healing. Helping clients put words to their own experiences, whether through education or collaborative discourse, is often a powerful change agent in itself. For example, I’ve seen this firsthand in my work with postpartum clients when helping them identify their own reproductive traumas. Or when working with couples when they learn about the concept of flooding and why they’ve struggled for one partner (or both) to remain engaged.
