Thought for shrinks in training

[gaudior]

If you cannot describe what you think is going on with someone using primarily words of one syllable, preferably four letters, you should rethink.

Here are some useful words:
hurt
love
feel
want
pain
need
shit
stop
help
lose
heal
grow

Basic emotions are good, too, but they have more or fewer letters.

I'm not saying that technical, abstract formulations aren't useful, or that people's worldviews and psychologies aren't massively complicated and in need of more empirically validated meaning-making, because they are. But after your journey through theory, you want to be sure you come back to somewhere recognizably human.

--R

Comments

[signy1.livejournal.com]

I don't remember where I read this, but I heard once that all the most important things in the world can be said in three words or less, and usually the one-syllable words, too-- I love you, please help me, I don't understand, make it stop. Etcetera. There's a lot of merit to the idea, really; the simplest words really are the most important ones.

Delaney said it, too-- describing novel writing. 'I was born. I must die. I am suffering. Help me.' That was the whole thing. And it works.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

i've heard that too. too muddleheaded to remember (or be motivated to find) the reference though.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

For the first one, I feel like I've seen it somewhere else, but I remember Cordelia saying something like that in Barrayar, talking to Kou and Drou. (And if Cordelia says it, it's gotta be right...)

The Delaney quote is breathtakingly cool.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of this works for medical doctors as well.

Actually, I'll take more polysyllabic words if it means getting away from some of the more absurd and confounding acronyms. "She has No Light Perception in one eye" (yes I'm doing optho this month) is much more humane than the "she's NLP on the right." Sure. And how is she feeling?

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's always scary. Very much the opposite of English, I think-- and if I were a patient, I'd want the doctor to talk about my body in ways I understood.

You know the other one that drives me nuts-- not an acronym, but a word that might as well be? "Trauma." I mean, if the person was, say, held at gunpoint, or raped by her father for years and years, I'd want to respect him/her and his/her experience enough to acknowledge that, rather than just say "there was trauma." I mean, sometimes people don't want to talk about it, and that's worth respecting-- but I hate the person's doctors/shrinks trying to hide behind a nice, neutral word to avoid dealing with thinking about what the person's been through, because gods know, the person can't.

< / rant>

[alaria-lyon.livejournal.com]

A DSS favorite word:

safe

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

Or "home."

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Neat point. Thanks.