There are no words

Language, Paralysis and Action

“There are no words.”

My neighbor, the father of an almost three-year-old, surprised me with this response when I asked how he felt about becoming a first-time parent. There really isn’t a language for the terror and the magic, he said, the complete absorption it takes, and the astonishment of witnessing a human being creating and transforming every single day before your eyes.

I knew exactly what he meant, and not just about parenting. I’ve used that phrase for decades in talking and writing about grief. There are no words.

Then he recommended a book: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

It is not about parenting, but about that central idea: Language has not kept up with human emotion and experience as well as it has for technology, scientific discoveries and facts. We have labels for new things, but not for new feelings.

It is a tiny volume, but it is bending my mind this week.

As a psychologist, I’ve spent my life finding words. Among the ways therapy can help, a primary one is helping someone find the words that describe their experience precisely. People will sometimes jump to their feet, shout or reflexively clap when the perfect words reveal themselves in our conversation. Language gives us power, and confidence, and opens doors that have been closed until then.” I know what I want to do now that I know what I feel,” one person said. It’s rarely that simple or direct, but the right words always move us a step forward in whatever task is before us.

Right now, in our country, we do not have the words for some of what we are experiencing. In seven decades of living, I’ve never felt the mix of disbelief and fear I feel now. I have no word for the disappointment, confusion and shame that overwhelm me when I look at neighbors and friends who want this path. I don’t know how to label the combination of infantile impulse, cruel calculation, and almost-psychotic grandiosity that coalesce in the decision making of some of our newest “leaders”. It is primitive, amoral and terrifying.

If I feel it, it’s true; if I want it, it’s Ok: if it helps me, it is good.

Koenig creates words out of whole cloth, or out of ancient word roots and other languages, and many of them ring true to experience.

Exulansis, n.: the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it-- whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no long even looking for a place to land.

Latin exulans, exile, wanderer, derived from the Latin name of the Wandering Albatross, diomedea exulans, who spend most of their life in flight, rarely landing, without even flapping their wings. The albatross is a symbol of good luck, a curse, and a burden and sometimes all three at once. Pronounced ek-suh-lan-sis.

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, page 25

Add to this the feeling of self-doubt that creeps into that fog, and you’ve got a sense of what I feel talking to those who think DJT’s current behavior is good “because he’s doing SOMETHING, even if I don’t like some of it”; and we might have a word that approaches the confusion-paralysis that descends when the rules of logical action are upended mid-sentence. Am I the one lost in the fog here, not making sense?

It's not only the rules of logical action that are being suspended. The common assumptions of a “greater good,” moral empathy, and concern for unintended consequence have been swept aside in the service of ideological purity. There are a few words for this in my lexicon, psychopathy, sociopathy among them, but they are extreme diagnostic labels that do not fit the masses of people who voted for this regime change in America. I don’t want to fall into the trap of using them.

When we cannot find the right words we wander through a maze of facts, feelings, and assumptions that overlap and double back, refusing to organize themselves neatly. We roam down one path and another, searching for a structure that holds it all together.

We can do that in therapy. We can take the time to pause, to not know, to be unclear about what we must do to feel better or change our circumstances.

But we don’t have the luxury of time in our country. We can’t wait until we’ve figured it all out precisely. Each of us needs to find the thing we do have words for and speak, take action, move now on that front. If you are an educator, educate us. If you know the law, join legal action. If you understand medicine, or public health or financial complexity, use what you know. Speak with authority to those around you. Convince those who need convincing. We need the expertise of every American on board right now.

Future generations of writers, historians and sociologists will find new words to describe what is happening. What we need to do right now is stop it.