Word Power - Power of Understanding How You Communicate

It was a simple rule and we were required to live by it throughout our formative years. Our family household rule was to think before we spoke and to consider before we expressed, because words were things and words, once delivered, could never be taken back.

The lesson that taught us was priceless, on the one hand, because we were constantly in touch with our own emotions and constantly seeking to be aware of the emotional vulnerability of others we were interacting with, but it also had a downside in that it caused us to assume our rule was the rule the world around us operated under.

It did not take us long, once we ventured into the universe about us, to come to understand our household rule was the exception, and by no means the norm.

As an adult, years after the formation of my thinking, I am forced to take a closer look at it in the light of life's practical application as opposed to its theory. I think of the consideration of words before they were spoken in retrospect to the major events in my own life and wonder how some of those events may have turned out, for the better or the worst, had I spoken first and thought later.

I also look at the unfolding of circumstances, the successes, and the failures of others with whom those rules were shared and I am forced both to smile and to weep knowing the role their formation, like my own, played in the quality and quantity of their existences. Belatedly, I understand, more now than ever, the suggestion that rules are meant to be broken, and if not broken, at least amended.

But what is the alternative to considered expression? At close hand, I have observed the opposite teaching.

Through a host of personal relationships in classrooms, workplaces, within friendships and romances, in the roles of parenting or community service or day to day interaction with fellowman, I have experienced or witnessed the so often caustic impact of corrosive words delivered without forethought or consideration.

I've seen the torment caused by those damaging words not only to the recipient, but by the one who set them free. More often than not, the person who speaks first and thinks later laments that lack of verbal discipline, regrets the trail of bloody disruption unguarded words have left within their life, and yearns for a means to curtail what is often viewed as a means of self-destruction.

It is of little surprise that I have discovered that it is the balance of these two opposing teachings where emotional health resides, a teaching most psychologist no doubt promote everyday. But, of course, not all of us seek the guidance and direction of professionals to regain our emotional balance, and even fewer of us consult psychologist to recommend how we set the rules within our own family structures. The question becomes then, how do we bring about change in our own formative thinking when we know change is needed?

We start with truth.

So often we teach what we were taught - even when what we were taught we know is faulty. Facing the truth of that recognition is a difficult, but major step towards emotional health. It is not betrayal, it is not sacrilegious, and it is not an admission of personal failure. It is the acknowledgement of the need for change and understanding that change is the fundamental root element of life.

It is okay to reexamine and to restructure the rules of our lives. We have the right to shed our cocoons when metamorphous is pushing us towards our higher selves. We have every right to fly above our limitations when we discover that we have wings.