Getting a compliment, or hearing how well you’ve done is always an ego boost, yet when someone casually tosses cruel or careless slurs, the effects of negative words on the recipient often aren’t taken into consideration by the one doing the insulting. Of course, we don’t want a nation of narcissists, who can’t bear to hear even the most carefully worded criticism, no matter how justified.... but by the same token, there are still people who think that nasty, ill-intentioned words aren’t a big deal. In reality, they are, especially if the victim of the insult hears criticism, and only criticism.
Power of Negative Words
Negative words can have long-lasting results that spread far beyond the person to whom they were hurled.
Words are powerful. Children who were brought up in a household where sharp criticism and cruel taunts were the norm can tell you that words can hurt even more than body blows. That’s because they imbed themselves in young minds, along with the pain that someone who should love you and cherish you - a mother, a father - apparently doesn’t think very much of you at all.
Those kind of painful hurts replay themselves for decades to come. Very few children growing up can unleash themselves from the brand labeled on them by a cruel parent or other authority figure.
If people who are powerful and in charge think so little of the child, what will he learn about how to think of himself? How can he get away from words that burn themselves mercilessly into young, unformed souls? Negative words are powerful indeed.
Repercussive Results
Children who are brought up in an atmosphere where harsh criticism, taunts, and mocking are their daily fare can and will easily internalize the sentiments behind the words. They learn that they aren’t worth very much, and that if the adults around them think that of them, who are they to refuse the judgment?
As they grow up, kids will repeat these things to themselves. “I’m stupid, I’m an idiot, I’ll never learn,†and the end result is that the only thing they do learn is never to trust themselves.
They’ve been branded by sarcasm as not being worthy. They can see how their friends with kinder parents fare, and that just emphasizes all the more that there must be something wrong with them. After all, the parents of their friends treat them kindly and with consideration. They don’t berate them with sarcasm and foul language.
If their friends, their contemporaries, are treated well by their parents, to the childhood victim of negative words, it just cements it in his mind that the things his parents or other adults say to him must be true. In his childish heart, he firmly believes the message these authority figures have said: that he is worthless. Now imagine the life of a child who believes that of himself as he grows up.
Self-Defeating Behavior
There are plenty of studies that show the emotions of adults which were caused by hearing nothing but harsh and cruel things as they grew up. Many teenagers with poor self images engage in bad behaviors that hurt them even worse: sexual promiscuity, drug addiction, even crimes like theft.
These young adults have a tendency to lash out, and it’s common for children who grew up under such burdens to become more violent than children raised in a more positive and nurturing environment.
Cruelty breeds cruelty. A child who knows nothing else but mockery, name calling, and sarcasm, will become the bully his parents were. That’s the only way he knows how to survive.
The effects caused by negative words, if that’s all a child knows, are long lasting and far reaching. They will do to others as they’ve had done to them, and that is can have devastating effects on people who never knew the victim as a child, but who may meet him in a dark alley as an adult!
Please, think before you criticize. Remember that children have tender and impressionable minds and hearts. What you say, and how you say it, can change a life forever, and not for the good.
I became interested in the social function of insults while doing research on the Stoic philosophers, who spent a lot of time thinking about how best to deal with them. I thought this was an odd thing for philosophers to do, but ultimately realized that they were on to something. After all, one role of philosophy is to teach us how to have a good life, and insults—whether blatant, benign, or even backhanded—have the power to make us miserable.
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What I realized was that the pain caused by insults is really just a symptom of a far more serious ailment: our participation in the social hierarchy game. We are people who need to be among people. The problem is that once we are among them, we feel compelled to sort ourselves into social hierarchies. If we were wolves, we’d fight to establish the social order of the pack. But since we are humans with outsized brains and language, we use words instead.
It is the social hierarchy game that makes insults sting. We are wired so that it feels bad to lose social status and feels good to gain it. That’s why a teasing jibe from a good friend isn’t painful—we haven’t lost status from it—but an unanswered email from our boss or a dilatory response to an invitation can diminish our sense of self-worth.
Those playing the social hierarchy game try to score points by insulting others, who respond with counter-insults. Game-players also spend their days saying, doing, and even buying things calculated to gain the admiration of other people. Such attempts are likely to fail, though, since people rarely want only to admire, preferring instead to be admired. It is a recipe for social strife and personal misery.
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The solution to this predicament is simple: withdraw from the social hierarchy game. In practical terms, this means becoming an insult pacifist: when insulted, you carry on as if nothing happened. Or if you do respond to an insult, you use self‑deprecating humor: you insult yourself even worse than they did and laugh while doing it.
You might worry that practicing insult pacifism would invite a barrage of more verbal abuse. I have been an insult pacifist for several years now and have found just the opposite. When you respond to people’s insults not with counter‑insults but with humor, you make them look foolish: they hit you with their best verbal shot, and you only laughed in response. As a result, they are less likely to insult you again. I have also discovered that by responding to insults with self‑deprecating humor, you take much of the sting out of them. This is because it is psychologically difficult to get upset over something you are making a joke about.
