When Words Return
From Dissertation to Essay
There are experiences that remain without language for a long time.
Not because the person is unable to speak, but because no words yet seem large enough to contain what has happened. Some experiences first live as bodily reactions, moods, dreams, or a vague sense of unease. They are present, but without a language that makes them understandable.
We like to think that experience comes first and words afterwards.
But life is often more complex.
Sometimes words come too early. Other people name what has happened before the person who experienced it is ready. Then language may feel alien.
At other times, words come far too late.
The experience has been there all along, but without a language capable of carrying it.
Much of human life unfolds between these two extremes.
Silence Is Not Always Empty
We often associate silence with absence.
No words.
No story.
No explanation.
But silence may be full of meaning.
A person may remain silent because the experience is incomprehensible.
They may remain silent because no one has listened before.
They may remain silent because the words would threaten something upon which they still depend.
Or because there is no language that feels true.
This became increasingly clear in the work on my doctoral dissertation. Many people did not describe an absence of memories or feelings. Rather, they described an absence of words. The experience was present, but it could not easily be told.
This reminds us of something fundamental.
There is a difference between living through an experience and being able to tell it.
When Language Is Borrowed from Others
No one develops language alone.
We learn words from other people. We learn what may be spoken, what should remain silent, and which experiences fit within the stories accepted by the community.
Language is therefore never merely a private instrument.
It is also a social inheritance.
If a child grows up in an environment where violations are never spoken about, where blame is placed on the person who was harmed, or where certain experiences are not permitted to exist, language becomes poorest precisely where the child needs it most.
The person may then feel the pain without being able to describe it.
They may know that something is wrong without knowing what to call it.
They may feel shame without understanding why.
The absence of words then becomes part of the suffering.
Finding the First Words
Many imagine that the decisive moment comes when a person finally tells everything.
Reality is often far more modest.
The first word may be:
“Something.”
“I do not know.”
“It is difficult.”
“Something happened.”
These words may seem small.
Yet they may contain a decisive turning point.
For the first time, the experience moves from complete silence into a language that can be shared.
The listener may easily become impatient.
What happened?
Who did it?
When did it happen?
But such questions may come too early.
Before a person can tell the story, they often need to experience that they are allowed to own the pace.
Language That Does Not Violate
Words can liberate.
Words can also violate.
A person may experience that others impose diagnoses, explanations, or moral judgements upon experiences that have not yet found their own form.
Language may then once again become something imposed from the outside.
This also applies to professional concepts.
Concepts are necessary. They make it possible to understand patterns, share knowledge, and develop forms of help.
But every concept is smaller than the person it describes.
No one is fully understood by being placed within a category.
The task of the professional is therefore not only to find the right words.
It is also to know when words must wait.
The Story as a Gradual Rediscovery
We often speak of “telling one’s story.”
The expression may suggest that the story already exists in a finished form and is simply waiting to be told.
This is rarely the case.
The story often takes shape while it is being told.
The person discovers connections they had not previously seen.
They find new words.
Old experiences acquire another meaning.
This does not make the story less true.
It makes it more deeply understood.
Hermeneutics teaches us that understanding always moves between part and whole. In the same way, a person’s life story may gradually acquire a new coherence. Individual events change meaning when seen in the light of the whole life, while the whole life is understood differently when certain events are given language.
When Someone Can Bear to Hear
What matters is not only that a person finds words.
What matters is that the words find someone who can receive them.
We all know the experience of telling another person something important and sensing that the words fall to the ground.
The other person changes the subject.
Offers quick advice.
Becomes uneasy.
Or begins speaking about themselves.
Then the words become lonely.
The good listener does something different.
Not necessarily by saying very much.
But by remaining present.
By allowing pauses.
By not filling the silence too quickly.
Sometimes the greatest gift is not a wise answer.
It is a presence that makes it possible to continue.
When Words Change the Relationship to the Past
Words cannot undo what happened.
What has happened has happened.
Language does not abolish the violation.
But language may change a person’s relationship to what has happened.
What was previously only a shapeless pain may gradually become an experience with a beginning, a history, and a context.
This does not mean that the pain disappears.
But it is no longer the whole of reality.
When experience is given language, it may also become an object of reflection.
The person can examine it.
Ask questions.
Challenge the interpretations created by shame.
Distinguish between responsibility and guilt.
What was previously only lived may also become thought.
The Responsibility of the Professional
This gives the helper a particular responsibility.
Not to create the story.
Not to own the story.
But to protect the space in which the story may slowly emerge.
This requires professional knowledge.
But also restraint.
The professional must be able to live with the fact that understanding does not come immediately.
That some questions must, for the time being, remain open.
That there are experiences which need time before language can carry them.
This is not a sign of weakness in helping work.
It is an expression of respect.
Finding One’s Way Back to One’s Voice
Through the work on the doctoral dissertation, it became increasingly clear to me that shame does not merely take away people’s courage to speak.
It may also take away their belief that their own voice has value.
A person who has lived with violations for a long time may begin to doubt their own understanding.
Was it really like that?
Have I misunderstood?
Do I have the right to say this?
The way back therefore involves more than beginning to speak.
It involves gradually discovering that one’s own voice is worth listening to.
This is an existential experience.
The person does not merely find the words.
They slowly find their way back to themselves.
More Than a Story
No story can contain an entire human being.
Even the most coherent life narrative will always be smaller than life itself.
There are experiences that can never be fully expressed.
There are emotions that exceed language.
And there is silence that is not an absence of words, but another way of being close to life.
The aim is therefore not that everything should be said.
The aim is that the person should no longer remain alone with what must be carried.
When words return, they rarely come as a flood.
They come slowly.
Carefully.
Sometimes hesitantly.
But they may open a door that has long been closed.
Not because words alone heal.
But because they make it possible to share what could previously only be carried in solitude.
Perhaps this is language’s deepest human task.
Not to explain the whole of life.
But to make it possible for human beings to live it together.
There are experiences that can never be fully expressed.
There are emotions that exceed language.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This essay is part of the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based particularly on the dissertation’s existential-dialogical discussion of language, narrative, dialogue, shame, recognition, and the human struggle to find language for experiences of violation: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. NTNU.
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