Psychotherapy, put plainly, is a conversation that is supposed to assist someone in making a significant change in their life. Psychotherapy thus rests on the implicit claim that speaking is a necessary or important part of how change happens in our lives. In some ways this is obvious. A situation in a restaurant cannot proceed unless I can vocalize my order, or I cannot complete a work project without similarly communicating. 

In some moments speech can bring about immediate and drastic shifts in our lives. If you say to your partner, “I don’t want to be with you anymore,” or if you tell your boss, “I’m not coming back tomorrow,” everything would change. Uttering this phrase to a partner will initiate a whole sequence of events: an initial processing of the situation, reconciliation or departure, dividing resources, leaving shared housing. Or with an employer it would similarly initiate a whole series of formal processes 

At other times speech is utterly powerless. I briefly worked at a corporate call center, for example. A call center is a profoundly procedural space: there are elaborate systems of rules and procedures, forms and formalities, all which must be observed for something to happen. I remember speaking, for example, to a customer whose mother had passed. They were trying to close her account. In order to close the account, I informed him, we would need documentation and proof of her passing. At the end of the call this customer asked me “Why do we do this to one another?” I sympathized, telling them that I disliked the elaborate structure, but that it needed to happen. In this situation the power of speech has been radically curtailed. It is insufficient for someone to just tell you that their mother has passed. They must follow a complex behavioral and procedural path, one in which their spoken words are secondary to their formal behavior. 

This experience is part of a larger trend in the modern world in which life is primarily behavioral as opposed to active in a fuller sense (in which speech would be effective). The modern world, with its giant institutions, is organized primarily in terms of the rules and roles required to keep those institutions functioning. Thus the political philosopher Hannah Arendt identifies the modern world as profoundly conformist, behavioral, and bureaucratic. For Arendt this is an issue of scale. As society gets larger, as there are more and more people, we are more likely to be organized in terms of our basic behavior, reduced or leveled to common denominators. Our uniqueness as individuals is swallowed up in the behavioral patterns of our massive society. Arendt thus claims that “the larger the population in any given body politic, the more likely it will be the social [i.e. behavioral] rather than the political [i.e. active] that constitutes the public realm” (The Human Condition, p. 43).

The experience of a call center, or any large bureaucracy, is a perfect example of this triumph of generic behavior over individual action. I can imagine a scene in which someone begs a DMV employee to accept their application without the fee or signature (or whatever). This DMV employee could easily make an appeal to “policy” and dismiss any particular circumstances this person may be conveying. “Yes, I understand that you lost your mother and you don’t have her social security card… but it is our policy that…” My sense is that most of the institutions that we navigate are mazes of rules and procedures in which we are required to meet generic behavioral criteria. Our political situation is thus one that chronically disempowers speech, making it so that our particular words and stories don’t matter as much as the generic behavior we are induced to undertake. 

I wonder if this makes it hard for us to recognize when speech can be genuinely powerful or transformative. I believe there are many moments in our lives when real, particularized speech can make all the difference in the world. This is true in some public situations, like being kind to a cashier or stopping to talk with a Real Change vendor. The power of speech is even more palpable in our close and intimate relationships with friends, partners, and family members. Those relationships, too, can become mired in the behavioral: we get lost in the routines of work, sustenance, and family care. If we are to stay in contact with our loved ones, however, we must remember to speak about what is happening right now in a fresh way, and not just let behavioral routines take over.

I believe psychotherapy is a unique place within modern life in that we are largely concerned with how speech can be powerful, effective, or bring about genuine change. When someone is processing traumatic experiences or approaching a major life change, for example, it can be essential to speak about it in the right way. Generally this means speaking in particularized, precise, individualized ways. The generic concepts will get us through the DMV, but they will not get us through our conflicts and challenges. If a client tells me they are feeling tense, for example, I will push them to refine the quality of that tension. “Are you tense like a piano wire that is about to snap, like a bridge that is about to break, like a piece of saran wrap, or something else altogether?” Getting precise about the exact quality of a feeling is therapeutically essential. Being precise and particular rather than generic allows us to see and experience the detailed contours of our situations.

It is in revealing these detailed contours, in showing us the intricacy of a situation, that speech is powerful. If we push past the merely behavioral layers of our lives, we will find a much richer individual tapestry of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But learning to perceive these more detailed contours is a challenge in our massive behavioral society. Thus I think that a crucial role of psychotherapy is learning where and why speech is genuinely powerful, and how we can bring our speech to bear on our personal and intimate situations. Honestly, I think it can be helpful in navigating something like a call center! Speech can be surprisingly effective sometimes, even in the face of our massive generic bureaucracies.

Riley Paterson is a Self Space Seattle therapist who works with individuals who are healing from past traumas; who are looking to recover a sense of wholeness in the face of depression and demoralization, and those working to get a handle on anxiety. He is also interested in questions around queerness and/or gender.