Each of us has an arsenal of words at the tip of our tongue. We can use them to encourage, heal, and lift up a family member or friend in need or we can use them to punish others by tearing down character. Words are a gift, but instead of wrapping them in lovely gift paper, we often serve words up with destructive rhetoric.
Words are cataloged as encouraging, loving, or lethal and destructive. How we use them is our choice but many of us let them fly without thinking of the consequences. We hurt people we don’t want to hurt and we bear the burden for their emotional whipping.
We all suffer when we’re indifferent about the power of words.
There are words that have soul crushing power. If you were ever the recipient of a verbal assault when you were a child, the words crushed your spirit. One of the worst examples of this assault is when a parent says to a child, “You’ll never amount to anything.” or “You’re too stupid to do anything right.”
Do parents really mean what they say?
Nine of ten times they don’t mean the words and they don’t understand how the words affect their children. If their parents used the same type of verbiage on them, they may be repeating what they heard as children.
People in general store those old emotional tapes forever in memory and sometimes they replay them without meaning to do so. The same is true for our children, if we crush their confidence how can we expect them to survive and thrive when they meet the greatest challenges in his life?
Words carry enormous power. Certain people build their entire reputation on words. The salesman, attorney and politician succeed or fail by words and they are well aware of the power of words.
As adults we set boundaries for what we will tolerate from others and what we will not allow. When someone says, “You’re crossing the line,” they mean that you are stepping over their acceptable verbal boundaries.
Children don’t have well defined and well established boundaries but even if they did, they are subject to the authority of parents. As we learn to honor our words as gifts
A child or an adult will often shut down and close off the best part of his soul when he’s been continually on the receiving end of verbal assault. Words can be music or they can be explosives. It’s your choice of how you choose to use them.
Discipline and accountability is necessary as we parent our children but words that tear down the foundation of their inner being is not fair or balanced.
Someone said “you cannot hope to master the world, until you first master yourself.”
