The Magnetized Man

“Your words are powerful.”

“Change how you speak about yourself and change your life.”

We’ve likely all heard these sayings, but have found ourselves unable to implement them. 

One reason could be that you’ve hardwired an understanding of English based on reactions and interactions that are divorced from social reality. 

Maybe you’ve hardwired an understanding of what people mean based on your relatives’ broken English or an abusive boss’ specific triggers. When this happens, we create our own internal version of whatever language society speaks in a healthy way, and we extrapolate that language onto other people and circumstances. 

What may be needed is a re-wiring of how we use language and that requires three things: an understanding of authority, facts and statistics, and our own emotional triggers. 

What we often forget is that language is a tool. And just like any other tool, it can be used incorrectly. It can also be learned incorrectly. For instance, if you grew up in public schooling learning English, you probably weren’t taught the intricacies of grammar. You were taught the basics and then corrected when you wrote something incorrectly. 

Your understanding of English becomes a bit of an orgy with no protection. You experience all of these different sensations as you build a lexical set based on others’ damaged lexical sets. Over time, you begin speaking the language of your remembered body rather than the language as it was meant to be spoken. And when your baby – your understanding of communication – comes along, you have no clue who its daddy is. You have no clue what the authoritative source is. You’re fluent but you’re emotionally stuck, unable to get what you want out of society. Your understanding of English comes from watching how specific phrases and intonations get specific reactions, and instead of speaking you’re constantly performing, terrified that you’re a hypocrite and wondering how everyone else gets away with speaking their true feelings and needs. 

When you become obsessed with grammar and view words as powerful spells that push specific buttons in people’s brains, things start to make more sense. You start to view it not as the determiner of reality (like the Sapir-Whorf) hypothesis, but just as a way to strike a compromise between your internal needs and your contract with society. 

Consider an experiment where someone is made to feel pain whenever they hear words associated with “money”, “sex”, or “death” and pleasure when they hear words related to “respect”, “reputation”, and “honour.” Suppose their primary caregivers were people who didn’t speak much English and who lived in a state of stress and fear, their secondary caregiver was the public school system, and their tertiary caregiver was popular media. They would then absorb stories, data sets, and lexical maps that are related to these initial maps of pleasure and pain. 

Or let’s say you have something you’re secretly ashamed of that you haven’t processed. You may develop sense clusters around that specific sore spot or source of shame. Any words you’ve included in that shame-based lexical set have a heavy and visceral weight. You’re like a language model that’s been weighted too heavily for the wrong society or cultural norms.

All words – and their effect on you – come from the firing of circuits in your brain. A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning. When you think meaning, think sense/feeling, or reference to a material thing. For instance, if a word makes you suddenly feel scared or it tells you something about the material world (e.g., the word that you can access with your 5 senses) then you can say that it’s meaningful. 

Throughout your life, you’ve built a lexical map and all of the words in this lexical map are weighed differently. You may have a lexical map for your conversations with your mother, a lexical map for conversations with your significant other, or a lexical map for conversations with your boss. Depending on how good you are at recognizing your own biases, these lexical maps are either based on reality – how these individuals actually are and what they respond to – or based on your perception of reality – how you think these individuals are and what you believe they’ll respond to. You may also have developed sense clusters for specific words. 

Based on your life and experiences, words or different combinations of words are given a different weight in your mind. Words that lead to more negative, emotionally-charged experiences become burned in your brain for both defensive and offensive purposes. This is because your brain has a chemical reaction to words based on their semantic content. 

As a result, the words you use become your predictive engine. If you’re constantly absorbing news about people who’ve fallen from grace, people who’ve been charged with heinous crimes, or scandals, your brain can take seemingly benign words – “fame” “celebrity” – or words that don’t really apply to you “murder” “rape” “affair” and create entire lexical maps and danger-filled sense clusters that would be meaningless to someone who isn’t steeped in this kind of content, making you edgy around people who can be beneficial to your life and complementary to people who can be detrimental to your life. We are constantly looking for proof that we are not alone or not insane and so we’ll keep seeking out people who have similar internal lexical maps. This repetition and increased exposure strengthens those neural pathways. Meanwhile, any words that we feel are related to ourselves get more emotional weight in the brain. As more and more words get added to a toxic lexical map, we feel like we are more and more guilty and unclean and as a result, the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, the reverse inference problem states that our brain is always just guessing at what caused a specific stimulus based on previous data and experiences. So if you hear someone say something neutral or positive, but it echoes with your existing lexical map, you’ll have a negative response, a defensive response, or an avoidant response, leading to you pushing away what’s good and going towards what’s bad. 

In Games People Play, Eric Berne talks about different ego states. He claims that there is a parent, a child, and an ego. When you are speaking to others — or listening to others — as if they’re your parents, you are assuming that they are registering everything that you say in a childlike brain. This makes you feel responsible for them and you spend an inordinate amount of time either explaining things or trying to make that reality true for them. And then when you see them operating as an adult — operating as an adult without you! — you make them the parent and yourself the child. How dare they not consider you after how much you’ve considered them! 

If you come from a culture where parents are treated like children, but you are living within a new culture, you are unfortunately serving a crystallized culture. In that system, all of the webs of understanding and support were understood by the population. But when that gets roughly transplanted here, it’s given the blanket term of “respect.” At the same time, your parents are infantilized. They cannot fill out forms that every other child can fill out. They commit small-scale fraud but they also are sticklers about the wrongness of lying and stealing. At the same time, they give you food, shelter, and all the necessities of life. As a result, you both swap roles constantly: sometimes, you’re parent and sometimes you’re child. Meanwhile, you can’t develop an objective view of reality in order to become an adult. You sense intuitively — if not technically and academically — that the objective reality that you’re trying to parent your infantilized parents through is determined by culture. And so you’re stuck. Once you figure out culture or “pretend objective reality” you’re behind. And now you’re crazy. Temperamental. Bitter. Jealous. 

But you also still don’t want your actions to hurt anyone, so you go back and forth between parent and child and occasionally — when slightly more stable yet still relative aspects of objective reality pop in — you become the adult.

In Chapter 9 of The Magnetized Man, there are many examples of this happening to Omar. While he’s fantasizing about getting his life back together, the words that bring him falling back down to reality are “An official pardon is only one call away!” Instead of objectively weighing the situation based on a lexical map that focuses on his innocence and some faith in the justice system, he automatically assumes that he’s going to become a pariah in society. Someone who can’t get a job. He creates strong emotional responses and associations to a bus advertisement even though there are countless other bus advertisements and visual stimuli. 

Again, when he apologizes for making loud noises in pain at the bus stop, he’s not apologizing out of regret for disturbing them. In his lexical map, “sorry” is used when you’ve done something that threatens your self image as evidenced by him saying, “They probably thought he was nuts.” 

When he runs into the shop, he’s in even more pain when he reassures the man that he’ll pay for something. Why? Because his lexical map and sense clusters are responding to him not being considered a freeloader. He views all of the interactions negatively. 

Finally, when Hafsa screams at him, Omar is given raw energy, which he desperately needs right now. It’s like a sugar high. The raw energy of the scream forces him to get out of his own head and his own needs and fears. The fact that the’s also sought Hafsa out means that he trusts her to help him, even as he’s confused, hurt, and in distress. So her words take on more weighting in his brain in terms of how to respond emotionally. 

You can read Chapter 9 of The Magnetized Man for free here.