More than words - on therapeutic vocabulary

Talking therapy involves infinite words, streams of consciousness, reflections and reactions. Therapeutic vocabulary can be extremely powerful, and endlessly analysed. What even is 'emotion'?

We know that motion means 'to move', or to go forwards. The added “e” can be considered part of the Latin “ex-“ (out of), and emotion can be considered “outward motion”, or the external demonstration of feelings and sensations. Or possibly, to add my own spin, merely an externalised sense of movement, simply the experience of being alive and travelling through time. 

Emotion can also be described as a conscious mental reaction like anger or fear that's directed towards something and usually accompanied by physiological and behavioural changes in the body. Emotion can be described in many ways and it's different for everyone. Where one person might laugh in moments of high stress, another might cry.

If you've had therapy before, you're likely to know that language and the words we therapists use are really important. They can decide how educated you sound, how experienced, how much respect you might command, how much you might alienate, and how well you connect with a client.

Consider these words for a moment: therapist, psychotherapist, counsellor, shrink, coach, psychologist, psychiatrist. Some of them can mean roughly the same thing, whereas others might have tighter definitions, less fixed boundaries, and different expectations. Or, depending on where you're coming from and what your experiences have been, they might all mean pretty much the same thing.  

When it comes to the language we use and the words we select, there are often layers of grey, ambiguities, crossovers, and subjectivity. Sometimes we just have to pick one.

Much credibility and value can be attributed to specific names, and indeed whole systems of language carefully designed to explain or illuminate certain psychological phenomena.

We see them in psychotherapy specialisms, in counselling modalities and CPD courses, in types of conditions and diagnoses, and even personal experiences. Once again, the boundaries of those can blur and overlap. It can seem like there is an endless quest to label everything anew, in an improved and simplified way. Assertive and qualified articulation can appear like a magic wand where diagnoses are concerned. 

But it can also have the opposite effect. It can lead to over-complication, obfuscation, mystification, as often as it can lead to illumination. And of course it is usually all subjective. One person's illumination can be another person's incomprehension, confusion and frustration. A magical key for one person might not fit at all for another. 

As a psychotherapist, I feel I should be able to adapt to clients as much as possible, using language that's familiar to them and the words that they use. I like to keep it simple and to be led by their feelings, and my own feelings about their feelings.