I cannot pronounce Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s name, but I love his writing.
Like when he said, “Words can get sick and lose their meaning. We have to detoxify the words and make them healthy again.”
We may not be aware of it, but all of us are toxifying or detoxifying words throughout our lives. Most of our dominant words have gone through changes of meaning as we have seen more of life.
Take the word love. In our earliest years, we gain our meaning from parental love. If we have a good mother, the word comes to mean warmth, security, tenderness and kindness. If we have a bad mother, it may come to mean a lack of warmth, security, tenderness and kindness. At some point, we have to realize how the word was perverted by a disturbed mother and detoxify it, or we will carry it into all our adult relationships.
The same is true for a father. We tend to underestimate the impact of our fathers on our personalities and lives. If we have a good father, the word love tends to mean protection, strength, stability and gentleness. If we have a bad father, it tends to mean a lack of protection, strength, stability and gentleness. Again, unless we detoxify how our father has colored the meaning of the word love, we will carry this concept of love into our adult relationships.