The power of our words

I was talking to a friend the other day who shared with me that his neighbours regularly talk in a negative and abusing way towards their 2 children. Words like ‘you little s**t, you are a c**t’, f** off’. The children are no older than 8 years of age.

During childhood, roughly up to age 8, the brain has no filter. This means that during this phase of life, the brain takes in everything and processes it in the most basic terms.

As my work mainly focuses on healing trauma from childhood, knowing that these parents use these words towards their children deeply disturbed me, especially because of the impact that those words can have on the children who are learning this behaviour from their own parents.

In my opinion, there are 2 options as to how this will affect them in the future:

1 - They will grow up believing that they are not good enough (or that they are sh**y people) which will lead them to not trying to achieve any goals that they may set for themselves. They may also meet people who might treat them in a negative way so as to confirm and validate the beliefs they have about themselves (instilled by the parents).

2 - They will use the same behaviour and words towards others as it is what they learned growing up. This is the ‘normal’ behaviour to have.