Your Words Create Your World

Unveiling the Power of Speech: How Dialogue Transforms Your Identity, Relationships, and Self-Understanding

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Everyone takes for granted the most important aspects of our lives. Your most fundamental needs and the best parts of yourself get overlooked. Not only do you lack the proper appreciation for basics like running water, paved streets, and city sanitation. You also miss your personal strengths. Artists are disgusted with their paintings. Writers hate their plot development. Intelligent people believe they are mediocre, at best.

Humanity’s greatest gift is no different. Thank God we’ve all been blessed with the power of speech. This gift reaches down deep to the very roots of your soul. It is the bedrock you’re your identity, relationships, and dreams rest on. Without it you fundamentally lack the ability to know yourself. It’s hard to imagine what this would be like but you’ve gotten a glimpse of this. Remember the last time you had to take a test. Maybe it was at university. You were cruising along in the course and thought you knew everything cold. But, days before the test you had the shocking revelation that you weren’t going to be able to zip through a no brainer multiple-choice exam. Three essay questions worth 100% of your $40,000 dollar a year education. You study your guts out reading and re-reading your notes. You gain back your confidence, take the test, and feel like you slam dunked it. Only to get the score back two weeks later – 72%. How did that happen? It ain’t bad but it ain’t good, either. You know you know the material. You thought you did anyway. If the course had been a psychology course, you would quickly realize what happened. You’d know there is a giant chasm between recognizing something you’ve read and reproducing what you know out of thin air. This is a higher level of articulation. Real knowing that has sunk into your body and lives in your mouth.

Taking this gift for granted is why the world was shocked by Freud’s “talking cure” of therapy. Speech is so fundamental that it’s easy to take it for granted. The same way we take for granted the electricity works every time we flip the switch, we take for granted the healing power of speech. It is the only force powerful enough to pull you out of depression, overcome your fears, and discover who you are is speech. Talking about your life, your friends, your dreams, your problems. All this talking is a type of exploration. The more you know about your world the larger it becomes. Old boundaries expand. New territory is explored. Secrets you took for granted or simply didn’t know about yourself are revealed. A lot of people believe that by talking to a therapist their problems go away. What really happens is by using your power of speech to expand your world, you grow. The problems don’t become smaller. You become bigger.

Yonasan Bender, LSW graduated from Hebrew University’s School of Social Work. He has his psychotherapy practice at The Place: The Jerusalem Centre for Emotional Wellbeing. To share your thoughts, experiences, questions, or a different perspective, you can reach Yonasan Bender at 053-808-0435 or email him by clicking HERE. To learn more about him and his work, click HERE.

The Place

The Place is where therapists, individuals and the community connect to create safety, strength and success. At The Place, men and women discover the freedom and safety to move past those issues which are preventing them from living life to its fullest. Our goal is to help each of our clients discover his or her own strengths as powerful tools in the healing process.

The Place is a multi-faceted clinic offering both individual and group therapy, support groups, interactive evenings and lectures, educational classes, and drop-in hours. Our comfortable, confidential, relaxed environment allows clients and their families to explore sensitive issues and create positive change. We believe that the key to mental health and emotional well-being is inside you.

At The Place, male and female therapists work independently or as a team to explore sensitive issues and facilitate positive change for individuals, couples and families from all sectors of the community. Some of our specialties include emotional eating, grief counseling, internet addiction, phobias, anxiety & OCD, childhood challenges, premarital counseling, couples therapy and intimacy issues, postpartum support, personality disorders, psychiatric care, and more. Connect with a caring professional in person at our comfortable Jerusalem offices, or by video, phone, and text. We’re here for you.