CHANGE YOUR PRONOUNS, CHANGE YOUR LIFE?
YUP. THE POWER OF POSITIVE PRONOUNS.
Want to get rid of anxiety and find inner peace? Try changing your pronouns. A crazy idea? Yes. Academic research that proves it? Yes.
There’s a mountain of research on how and why writing can heal your wounds and increase your personal happiness. Journaling helps us understand our situations. Expressive writing promotes mental and physical health. Pronouns promote inner peace…?
Yes. If you change your pronouns you produce personal peace. Here’s how to get there.
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS COUNT. WRITERS FEEL.
I’ve read a ton of academic articles about happiness and writing. I get lost in the reductionism of counting words for algorithms instead of judging words for their impact. The results are often positive, but tracking the minds of people who judge words by their quantity and not their emotional resonance is a challenge. What a terrible waste of words, I thought.
Okay, I was wrong. Sometimes counting the smallest words can give you the biggest change.
People have been writing to find happiness since writing itself began. The serious study of the effects of writing on our emotional states didn’t begin until James Pennebaker began researching it and publishing his first results in 1986[1]. Pennebaker and progeny study “expressive writing”. They have produced a tsunami of statistics that purport to explain the statistically analyzable results of writing exercises.
The standard expressive writing exercise asks you to write for twenty minutes a day, four days in a row. There can be specific instructions such as writing about something that bothers you or about a past event. The social scientists count the number of times particular pronouns are used and compare that to “happiness”, usually calculated by the number of later visits to a doctor or hospital.
No, they don’t count elegance, story structure, or powerful metaphors. They study the stuff that an algorithm can analyze. Their goal is to get measurable results. To attain that, they obsessively measure. That which they measure gets smaller and smaller in a journey to the infinitesimally minute.
Social scientists count. They will take a piece of writing and analyze it for, say, the number of happy words, completely ignoring the content of the writing itself. A good expressive writing study might test for the frequency of negative adjectives. The result is a number of adjectives.
Creatives look for emotional impact. They search for the resonance of the adjectives chosen. Looking at the number of adjectives seems small, heartless, and too much like accounting to have any value.
Truly, these are two separate worlds.
TESTING, TESTING.
The researchers calculate happy words, sad words, action words, past tense verbs, present tense verbs, and ever-smaller types of categories of words. Eventually, they count pronouns.
When they got down to quantifying subgroups of pronouns, I was pretty sure the accountants had taken over the writing experience, and they were nuts.
In pronoun-world, the standard exercise was altered. People were asked to write diary entries four times in two weeks. They were to write about a recent negative life experience[2].
Half of the people, the control group, wrote the diary entries one time each.
The other half of the group, the subject group, were told to write each entry three times, in a particular sequence. They call this process the “the psychological displacement paradigm in diary-writing” or PDPD.
First, the subject would write the narrative in the first person. “I did this.”
Then the subject would write the diary entry in the second person, “she did this.”
Then the subject would write the narrative in the third person or objective voice. “They did that.”
ONE. TWO. THREE.
The writers who wrote in that specific sequence enjoyed real benefits from the exercise. Short term, they experienced a decrease in negative emotions and an increase in positive emotions. In the medium term, the writers increased their level of psychological well-being.
The control group got hosed: they showed lower positive emotions and higher negative emotions.
The subjects who wrote in sequence did not simply wipe out negative emotions and replace them with positive emotions. The results were more nuanced and elegant. They increased the good and decreased the bad to approach a magical state: inner balance, with a side helping of detachment.
The sequential changes in pronouns is “intended to provide a way for people to transcend their self-immersed focus and achieve a self-distanced perspective with self-awareness and self-acceptance…. a relatively balanced state that could be noted as a feeling of relative peace and calm.”[3]
For all the accounting measures used to quantify emotional states, this process (PDPD) achieves a holistic perspective. Finally, the social scientists and the creatives can share a space.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CHANGE PRONOUNS:
Imagine it as a series of steps. At the beginning, you, first-person, are standing in exactly the same place as the event you are describing. It happened to you, and you write what you felt like when you experienced it.
Then you take a step away from the event because it is in the second-person. Usually, this voice takes on the characteristic of a person close to the event or you, like a partner, parent, or friend. It’s not strictly your experience, but it’s pretty close.
Then you take another step away for the third-person narrator. There is no “I” in the event. It is objective, like an omnipotent narrator.
A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE IS A CHANGE INDEED
In the first version, everything comes from within you, the teller. This first-person narrative will include your emotions and reactions. Everything happens to the writer, and the writer gives only the personal perspective.
The second-person narrative tells us the warm version of the story. It is from a trusted person, and usually, it has less emotion. There is some distance from the event.
The third-person narrative is called the objective voice because there is no personal point of view. The narrator sees everything and is in overview. The event is still visible, but distant.
Each step away from the event itself decreases both the quantity and quality of the emotions in the writer. We can comfortably say we are “more distant” in the purely emotional sense. The decrease in emotion doesn’t leave a vacuum. Instead, the cognition of the second person fills the space. It includes some emotion, and often some affection, but also more overview and more objective content.
When we step back to a third-person voice, we see overview. The personal emotional content is minimized.
Because that view is objective, we see more of the picture… more characters interacting, more outside causation, more meta. We see more of the picture, and less of ourselves. It takes the sting out of the experience because, at last, it isn’t just all about us.
From the first-person perspective, everything is not just about us but is caused by us. Because the assignment is to write about a negative event, if you write from the first person you probably caused the event in the first place. You blame yourself.
The further away we get from the event itself, the larger our perspective. As we take in the roles of other people, we can see more possible causes. Other players have done negative things or caused difficult complications. Seen in context, the blame we were so willing to lay on ourselves dissolves, and responsibility is more accurately shared among participants.
The objective voice allows us to see causes beyond ourself, and then make connections between causes and effects. When we can see these events as a series of cause-and-effect events, we can understand the event more rationally. That in turn allows us to understand what happened.
When we feel we understand what happened, we feel greater agency or power over our own lives.
We may still know how we contributed to the event, but we are no longer suffering under a big cloud of self-blame. Instead, we can understand the event in our rational mind, and appreciate the participation of others. Now we can learn from it. Now we can grow from it.
WHY YOU SHOULD TRY IT…
When we change the pronouns we use to tell the story, we gain the benefits of different perspectives. Other people have impacted the event and have some responsibility. The event becomes comprehensible rationally instead of a pool of raw emotions. The more we understand an event, the less we suffer personal anxiety about it.
We grow. We find more peace. We find balance.
We can all thank the accountants… but just this once.
What are your thoughts about pronouns?
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[1]James W. Pennebaker and Sandra K. Beall, “Confronting a Traumatic Event. Toward an Understanding of Inhibition and Disease,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95, no. 3 (August 1986): 274–281, doi:10.1037//0021–843x.95.3.274. See also James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth, Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2016), 23.
[2] Chang, JH., Huang, CL. & Lin, YC. The Psychological Displacement Paradigm in Diary-Writing (PDPD) and its Psychological Benefits. J Happiness Stud 14, 155–167 (2013). https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1007/s10902-012-9321-y
[3] Ibid
