Healing on the Wings of Words
by Judith Simon Prager, Ph. D.
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Recently, on my way to teach
a class I love in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, I found myself
teetering on the edge of a tension headache. I was feeling rushed, cranky
and overwhelmed. Carrying a bag full of books and papers, my mind filled
to the brim and distracted, I ducked into the student store and picked
up a bottle of ibuprofen. Someone ahead of me was buying candy bars.
I plunked my purchase down on the counter and began digging in my purse
for my wallet. “Three ninety-five,” the cashier said, and I handed over
the money. When I looked up for my change, I met the soft brown eyes
of a quiet young man who said to me as he placed the nickel in my palm,
“I hope you feel better soon.”
I walked out of there with
a smile so big, it pushed the headache out of my mind and I forgot to
take the pills. Of course you’ve heard of the placebo effect. In pharmaceutical
tests it means that a sugar pill and the suggestion by an authority
figure that it will cure you regularly causes 33% of suffers to notice
a marked improvement. Sometimes the change is truly physiological, and
the body has actually provided the needed chemical itself. In this case,
the words alone were enough.
And words are powerful tolls
for healing or harming. When someone has said something cruel or cutting
to us, we often say, “That hurt me.”
Isn’t it interesting that we use a physical language to describe
a mental bruise? And yet, if we look closer, all interactions are both:
physical and mental. And spiritual, if you really want to be accurate
about it. We can feel a hurt, deep down to our core.
Have you ever seen someone
“crushed” by an unkind word? When told, “You look tired,” what happens
to your energy level? And when someone says, “Gee, you look great! You
losing weight?” what happens to your mind, your body, your spirit?
Verbal First Aid is a tool
for speaking to the whole person to create calm, provide pain relief,
promote healing, and save lives. It sounds like a very big promise,
but, in fact, our words have just such power.
EMTs in a 1970’s study used
particular words as they rescued people and took them to the Emergency
Room. They never said, “It’ll be all right,” which might seem to deny
the seriousness of the situation and the victim’s fear. Instead, they
said, “The worst is over. We’re taking you to the hospital. Everything
is being made ready. Let your body concentrate on repairing itself…”
Simply by using the right words in the right way—a technique available
to us all under any circumstances—the medical outcomes were significantly
improved because they were able to help the victims begin their own
inner healing.
What is the inner healing mechanism?
Think of the last time that you cut yourself, and, upon removing the
bandage, saw that your skin had knit itself back together. Remember
a bruise that turned every color under the sun and then disappeared.
This natural healing ability, this desire for homeostasis, is built
into your system. In an emergency, however, in our fear and panic, the
movie in our mind is of disaster and helplessness, and the chemicals
they cause can inhibit the healing mechanism. That is when words can
change the picture.
Even simply saying, “Remember
when you broke your arm and it healed so fast, you practically tore
cast off?” can start the healing. Or, “I know a guy who this happened
to, and today he’s walking around just fine.” And the body hears that.
You might say, “As soon as your wound is clean, stop your bleeding and
save your blood.” Hard as it is to believe, doctors, firefighters, and
other first responders have testified that saying that sentence with
authority and love has caused victims to stop bleeding.
The love part is the
ingredient you’ll want to focus on. There is a Swedish word, uffda,
that means “ouch for you.” The
empathy in I’m sorry for your pain. I can almost feel it, myself,
opens the door to healing, to rapport. When you show that you understand,
your words are believable and believed. “The ambulance is on the way
and you can begin to breathe more easily now,” you say, and the injured
person, seeing you care, takes a deep, calming breath. And the chemicals
that flow through his or her body are the ones that heal, not the ones
that harm. |