Just A Word

Dec 22

Growing up, I heard the children’s rhyme:

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me

It was assumed that this saying would protect us from other people’s mean words. And when you’re a young child, it is easy to trick yourself into believing it.

But then you get older and you realize the truth. Words are, in fact, more powerful than physical pain. Physical pain definitely has its place. Broken bones, strained joints, diseases, and so on are all painful and uncomfortable (to say the least) to go through. But all of that pales in comparison to the effect that words and emotional trauma can have.

While it’s rather debatable what can hurt a person more, it is pretty easy to see how emotional trauma can scar people for life. The life of a child who has verbally abusive parents can be negatively impacted for good even with counseling. While I do not want to undermine the damage that physical pain can have, the emotional pain is the one that I have seen with my own eyes because it happens all of the time. One can toil for great lengths of time over something, and sometimes it seems like it takes only a single word to make all of that labor futile. Words get at us even through our armor and shields. They needle their way through kinks and prick us to death. And the worst part of all is that it is the words of those closest to us that hurt the most. Well maybe even worse than that is the fact that we are all so horrible in regards to how we use our words.

The tongue: so mighty and so horrible. No one can tame it, but we must try, eh?