Words can also cause harm. Childhood bullying, verbal abuse in domestic relationships, and even word choice by medical professionals can lead to emotional challenges. When you're faced with hurtful words, you can take steps to keep yourself safe.
Negative words can make people feel tense, nervous and even fearful as they attempt to figure out what you want and how to respond to you. They can cause people to experience a sense of confusion, defensiveness, conflict and even lowered self-esteem.
Ultimately, negative words, whether spoken, heard, or thought, not only cause situational stress, but also contribute to long-term anxiety.
The research, published in the journal Child Development and involving 900 families, found that adolescents who experienced harsh verbal discipline from their parents were more likely to foster anger, be irritable, show signs of depression and misbehave in school.
So, when we allow negative words and concepts into our thoughts, we are increasing the activity in our brain's fear center (the amygdala), and causing stress-producing hormones to flood our system.
Research has found that the choice of words can cause specific areas of the brain to activate and can affect a person's subjective experience of pain. People use word associations to perceive neutral events as positive or negative. Words can hurt, but they may also heal.
Using these words indicate that you are not accepting, acknowledging or are dismissing whatever was said before. The effect on your recipient is therefore that they feel confronted, dismissed, unappreciated and probably argumentative, and will therefore result in them disengaging and losing trust in you.
When your child says hurtful things to you, it's usually an expression of frustration or loss of control. Parents often forget that kids are communicating with brains that are not fully formed. The mean words are their way of expressing feelings rather than describing their actual feelings about you.
New research shows that the brain's pain matrix gets activated by pain-related words. When people hear or read words such as "plaguing," "tormenting" and "grueling," the section of the brain that retains memories of painful experiences is triggered.
Triggers can be people, places or things, as well as smells, words or colours. Emotional triggers are automatic responses to the way others express emotions, like anger or sadness. For example, you may not have a problem interacting with an angry person, but find it hard to deal with someone who's crying.
“ You're *#@! % stupid. ” “ I wish you were never born. ” “ No one is ever going to love you, you're so *#@! % fat and ugly. ” “ You never get anything right. ” “ You're worthless. ” These are mean and degrading things to say to someone.
Words do hurt and as recent research suggests, they can have more serious and lasting consequences than physical violence.
What Are Toxic Parents? Toxic parents create a negative and toxic home environment. They use fear, guilt, and humiliation as tools to get what they want and ensure compliance from their children. They are often neglectful, emotionally unavailable, and abusive in some cases.
“You're a bad mom”
Kids are often quick to say this phrase when they don't agree with a decision a parent made or when they're not allowed to do something that everyone else their age is doing.
The most common toxic behavior of parents is to criticize their child, express self-wishes, complain about the difficulties of raising a child, make unhealthy comparisons, and make hurtful statements1.
Emotional or psychological child abuse is a pattern of behavior that impairs a child's emotional development or sense of self-worth. This may include constant criticism, threats, or rejection, as well as withholding love, support, or guidance.
Emotional abuse is any type of abuse that involves the continual emotional mistreatment of a child. It's sometimes called psychological abuse. Emotional abuse can involve deliberately trying to scare, humiliate, isolate or ignore a child.
In Breaking the Power of Negative Words, the author shows how we can be set free from the effects of negative words, whether they are words spoken to us, words we speak to other people, or words we say to ourselves, no matter if these words were spoken recently or decades ago.
These positive words can activate the motivational centers of the brain and jump start them into action. Positive words cultivate joy in the brain of the speaker and the receiver, so it creates a “win – win” situation.
Avoid derogatory language. Terms such as psycho, crazy and junkie should not be used. In addition, avoid words like “suffering” or “victim” when discussing those who have mental health challenges.