Difficulty in decoding emotions (Part 1)

This is an English translation of an Italian article in several parts by Donatella Lai, a practising psychiatrist, based on her own experience as a member of the Focolare Movement and her contact with other ex-members.  It was originally published on her website www.sacroprofano.net.  It will appear here divided into sections as in the original.

This article will deal with the relationship between words, and our inner and outer worlds, especially in reference to emotions and feelings.

Words cannot express fully and directly our inner world - they are one of the filters between us and the world, indeed the most explicit filter.  When words lose their meaning, one of the things that happens is that the person loses the ability to decode their own emotional world, which they experience as a stormy sea, limitless and formless, without any points of reference, within which they feel completely powerless and out of control.

I must point out, however, that this can happen for many different reasons.  In childhood, the individual does not usually learn to use words as the key to clarifying his or her interior world.  In adolescence, the development of areas of adult thought lead the young person to ask themselves many questions, to explore various paths which can vary according to their basic character, exploring themselves and their presence in the external world.

Part of this process is the fact that words acquire a fuller meaning, a more complete meaning when they are compared with practical and emotional experiences.

If someone joins a movement during this period, the meaning of words is channeled into the jargon and stereotyped language peculiar to that group.  I don't mean that this language is void of meaning, in fact it might evolve from concepts of great depth, but normally it is reduced to a kind of shorthand which has little to do with the original concept.  Additionally, even in cases when the original concept is maintained, it is already  seriously problematic that the words take on a meaning which is not commonly accepted but is only shared by the groups of adepts.

I have spoken elsewhere of how the word 'love' is distorted, but this kind of alteration of meaning applies not only to that but also every aspect of the language of the emotions.

Words are important because their significance alters our interior life in a very real way.  A dramatic example of this is the way that during hypnosis, simply through the use of words, it is possible to cause burn marks on the skin purely by 'telling' the subject that he or she has touched, for example, a hot iron.

In the movement, (just as, I believe, in all movements with esoteric levels of membership), ones emotional world is wholly transformed in order to re-orientate it towards a mystical experience according to this or that significance, fixing it furthermore in a symbolic structure of the suffering, death and resurrection of a god become man.

This generates all sorts of consequences; one of these, which I will not enlarge on here, is the fact that the movement only gives value to experiences lived according to that metaphor (which, obviously, the internal members do not see as such), heavily undervaluing all life experiences and feelings of those who do not live within this mystical code.

(continues...)