STICK AND STONES – 

STICK AND STONES – 

Growing up I always heard, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you”. Not true. Words can and do hurt. In fact, broken bones heal and, for the most part, we forget about the break. Words, though . . . sometimes the damage done by words is so great that we do not heal from their impact and they are never forgotten.

I am sure that everyone can remember something hurtful someone said to them years ago. These words may not bother you continuously, but something will trigger that memory and those words hurt just as much today as they did back then.

Everyone has said hurtful words to others, too. No matter how hard we try, we have hurt someone with our words whether we intended to or not. I’ve been told that those people probably don’t remember our words, but my mind says that they do.

How do we get over things like this? I know what works for me. A while ago I heard or read somewhere that you can mentally tell your thoughts, “Go away.” Yes, it is as easy as that once you get the hang of it. At the beginning, it may take several “Go away” messages for the thought to actually go away but eventually your brain is able to remove that thought on the first try. Does that mean that the thought never comes back? Absolutely not. It does get easier to remove the thought with a “go away” command again. For me now, the thought totally goes away (for the time being) and if I try to remember what the thought was, I usually cannot recall it. That is amazing and very helpful. Being able to do this has made sleeping through the night easier and eased a lot of waking stress.

I never taught my children that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you” because I didn’t believe that to be true. I wonder what they think about this.