> **🌱 Planted:** Mon 9 December 2024 --- > [!quote] > In psychotherapy the words we use both give rise to and kill meaning. Words can name and create meaning, bringing experience to expression and understanding. However, they never capture precisely what is. We can get lost in words. They can separate us from experience, imposing alien meanings on it instead of being congruent with it. Experience is basic, even though without words we cannot articulate it. [^1] Humans have been using symbols to communicate since the beginning of our times—gestures, vocal sounds, body language, and particularly visual symbols like cave paintings and hieroglyphics such as those seen from the Egyptians and Mayans. The words we use in language are merely the evolved symbols we use to describe and communicate the experience we're having to someone else, but because they are just symbols—"a mark or character used as a conventional representation of an object, function or process"—they cannot accurately represent direct experience, and therefore can never capture the immense richness that takes place in our interiority. --- **➡️ Next:** [[]] --- **️🈁 Expand:** - [[The Felt Sense is always more than words can say]] [^1]: [[Grace Unfolding by Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz]], p. 1.