The power of words

This morning, while working with a client, I got an insight that for me, doesn't happen very often. I love it when it does happen, though.

The client calls it "our Bible study", but I call it, in the progress notes I have to write, "studying spiritual literature, to help her with her anxiety". I've always been a big believer in using a client's spirituality to help them psychologically. There are plenty of studies that prove that the most emotionally and psychologically healthy people have a healthy spirituality, so I've been known to even use Scripture to help my clients decrease their anxiety.

Without going into too much detail about the client, since confidentiality is involved, we're looking at a Protestant confirmation book my husband has used for teens. This morning, the content focused on creation and on God as creator. We read Genesis 1-2. A couple of things struck me, but the biggest thing was that God spoke, and the universe was created. His words brought creation into being.

Last night, I happened to listen to a Maya Angelou interview on a BBC broadcast, in my on-going project to improve her Wikipedia articles. One of the things Dr. Angelou talked about was her period of muteness after her rape at the age of eight, as described in her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She said that she was traumatized after she heard that her rapist had been murdered and from that point on, she decided to stop speaking. She said, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone..."

Angelou was more traumatized by the murder than by the actual rape. She believed that "the issuing forth" of her words caused the death of another human being and could imagine them killing others. As a result, she was mute for five years. It struck me, as I was reading and talking about Genesis 2, that Angelou must have read it, even as an eight-year old, because she understood that words have great power. It was through God's words that the universe came into being, and in the mind of a narcissistic child, her words had destructive power.

Of course, Angelou spoke again; she became a teacher, she makes much of her living by public speaking, and recited her poem at Clinton's inauguration. Caged Bird says that she began speaking again when her grandmother's friend, Mrs. Flowers, introduced her to great literature and made her memorize poetry. It was through literature that she found her voice again. So not only does words have the power to destroy; they have the power to restore.

Maya Angelou is one of my heroes.