Several years ago, a friend of mine asked for Hypnotherapy sessions for a personal problem. One of the very striking things about this person was that he always dressed impeccably. He took minute care for of his clothing, grooming, and all other aspects of appearance.
In one of the regressions sessions, he recollected a time when his mother scolded him for not being intelligent enough. She went to the extent of comparing him to a kid in the same class as her son and pointed out how smart the other kid was.
In the same session, my friend regressed to several such instances where his mother compared him to other kids, always pointing out the smartness of the other kids. Those incidents did not have the anticipated effect of the mother on her son. It almost never does. Largely in such instances, such comparisons have the opposite effect. The kids tend to neglect studies because they eventually come to believe they are not smart or as an act of rebellion.
But in my friend’s case a stranger change took place. He started being sloppy and very disheveled about his appearance. It was only in the regression, did he realize what happened as an effect of those comparisons his mother had made. In the kid’s mind the word smart got associated with the meaning of looking smart rather than thinking smart. Since the word smart was used in both contexts, the meaning that the mother had intended got miscommunicated. And believing that he was not smart because his mother always said so, he started neglecting his appearance. He would go to school in soiled clothes, dig his nose in front of teachers, never combed his hair, or cared to keep his shoes clean. Of course many kids do that, but his sloppiness was so extreme that he used to stand out in the class.
And years later, as he put efforts to start up a business and run it, he became obsessed with appearing smart. And hence his extreme care over his looks. For several years, he moved between phases of looking smart and appearing sloppy, depending on his inner motivations and his zeal for life.
I noticed this dual meaning of words in many cases with many other people who come to therapy. Words themselves always have dual meanings (if not more). And such inter-changed associations in mind is common.
In some cases, the meaning of the word is not drastically different as seen above but there is an eventual degradation in our use of them from one meaning to another. By eventual degradation, I mean how we start using the word for one meaning and then eventually move to mean a more insulting or derogatory meaning of it. And children experience this duality and eventual degradation of meaning from their parents and other elders.
Take the word naughty. Some parents start using the meaning as a word of affection with their child whenever the child does something cute but mildly disruptive. Perhaps the child keeps kicking over a mug and the parent laughs and call it “Naughty!”. Then as the child grows up, the same word may be used by the parents to express their genuine displeasure, like “Don’t be a naughty boy!“.
This duality of words and their eventual degradation of meaning can happen in any language. For instance, in Telugu the word donga means thief. It is used in the same context as the word naughty is used for kids. But again, when the child grows up and a does something deceptive, the same word is used to mean its actual meaning of being sly or thieving.
This is true not only in case of a child to adult communication, but also in adult to adult conversations. Best examples would be the meaning of words success and loser. Their meaning could be taken in context of a situation or can be applied to entire life. So, if someone is called a loser, it could be regarding the current context or define the person in general.
Therapy often reveals many such situations that have created an unnecessary belief or trait in a person just because the word was either associated with a different meaning or they experienced an eventual degradation of meaning. In either case, they could be worked upon in therapy provided the client is willing to heal through it.
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