On how language shapes understanding, healing, and human connection
I thought I had a pretty strong grasp of my native language until I hit the age of nearly 50. That was when I learned I had no language for what I was going through. At that stage, I found myself benefiting tremendously from the crowd-sourced knowledge of a community that was simultaneously deconstructing from a lifetime inside the framework of a high-control religion. We were not pioneers of what we were going through, but few in the community had yet leaned into the available resources from people with at least a somewhat shared experience. For a community well-conditioned to having our own language, including an obscure tradition of utilizing Shakespearean-era English in our prayers, we had our own vocabulary that meant specific things only those in the 2×2 church could understand. Thus, those who were disaffiliating and navigating their lives forward hugely benefited by learning new terms for the bewildering things we were experiencing in the process.
A term we often heard within the community was “giving words to things.” Two prominent voices in the deconstructing community, Jared Snyder and Shanna Smidt, recently discussed aspects of this concept. This follows extensive work by people like Kyle Hanks on the subject. It finally struck me how profound the impact of “giving words to things” has been for the disaffiliating community.
In many ways, I have long viewed my own English vocabulary as sufficiently robust to express myself, and learning new terms merely provided additional granularity and specificity. I find it confounding that I was (once again) so naive. After all, the most profound moment of my undergraduate studies was when an Anthropology professor introduced me to the concept of Languaculture. In this course, well outside of my core studies, my key takeaways were two fundamental concepts:
- A language cannot functionally exist without a culture behind it
- Our cognitions are limited by the language(s) we know.
That latter concept left me shaken. The idea that my brain’s function was somehow limited by the constraints of the English language felt stifling. The examples the course provided included studies of indigenous cultures and their languages, and how their lack of terms for the societal constructs of the colonizing powers, such as time as something measurable by a clock, created massive integration challenges. I was minoring in German at the time, and had spent some time living in northern Germany; yet these concepts still felt theoretical and not relatable. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I lived in Italy fully immersed in the language and culture, that I realized I was learning words and phrases that were so inextricably tied to Italian culture that it was impossible to express them in English. It was at this time that I finally began to understand the cultural dependency of language.
Fast forward almost 30 years, and I found myself re-learning this same concept in another way. I was learning lots of new terms and meanings for words alongside thousands of other people simultaneously grappling with making sense of their lives, as our childhood-embedded spiritual ideal proved to be a mirage overnight. We learned new words—or at least new meanings for words—that included enmeshment, spiritual abuse, cognitive dissonance, spiritual bypass, gaslighting, purity culture, deconstruction, and exclusivity. These terms became foundational to the social interactions of our support communities. At times, I felt like a child pointing to objects and asking what that thing was called. To our great fortune, we found pioneers from other high-control religious backgrounds that had created the vocabulary we needed. We then adapted the definitions to our own community’s culture and made these words our own.
While this newfound language will surely benefit me for at least this season, there was a bigger epiphany in it all, one that will perpetually benefit my personal relationships. That epiphany is this:
- Sometimes, even as adults, we simply lack the language to describe our current experience.
This realization (which now seems ridiculously obvious) has made me more patient with my social interactions — both with their attempts at self-expression as well as with my own. I’ve become more intentional when trying to meet people where they are at. They may simply lack the words to explain what they are feeling and why. Previously, their lack of words made me judge what they were experiencing as possibly less valid than my own, especially when I did have the words. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of struggling to find the words for our current experience; there may not (yet) exist words for it, at least not ones we have at our disposal. As a result, I’ve become far more comfortable with not understanding others, and with not being understood myself. When that happens—and inevitably it will—I can simply lean into valuing learning and growing, taking comfort in knowing that we will eventually get there. And if we never do, that’s ok too—as this is simply part of the complexity and wonder of being human.
By Steve Paddon
December 31, 2025
READ ON SUBSTACK: https://lastofadozen.substack.com/p/the-value-of-giving-words-to-things?