What never leaves our tongue never leaves our life

There is a sentence I keep overhearing, again and again, and it gets on my nerves!

That sly sentence we say sometimes knowingly and sometimes without noticing, the one that arrives with a sigh and drops our shoulders without consulting us: “there’s nothing to be done.” Come and see what it does to us!

In my last piece I said I had very little patience for that phrase, and that I would come back to it another time (www.mujdecetin.com/en/writing/how-did-i-end-up-agreeing-to-this). I am keeping my word.

First, a small experiment

Let me describe a lemon to you. It is sitting on the chopping board, its skin bright. You run the knife straight through the middle, the juice seeps out, and that sharp, fresh smell spreads through the kitchen. You lift one half to your mouth, and between your teeth it drips slowly onto your tongue…

Now stop. Something happened in your mouth, didn’t it? Yet there is no lemon. There isn’t even a kitchen! There are only a few sentences.

The brain does not always tell what is described apart from what is lived. And the body meets the description as though it were the thing itself.

My work is to listen to what gets said at the table. Over the years I have come to see this: every sentence that leaves our mouth is a live command we hand our own brain. If the description of a lemon can set the salivary glands going, who knows what a sentence we repeat twenty times a day sets going?

Twenty times a day

Say you have broken up with someone. Naturally you are “full” of it, and you tell whoever you run into. You tell the colleague at the next desk, you tell your sister, you tell your closest friend over coffee after work. What you actually want is to get him out of your life. But your brain reads something quite different into all this: this man is still on my mind, because I talk about him twenty times a day. There is that Göksel song whose title says it already — “Bi Seni Konuşurum”, I only talk about you.

There is a study on exactly this. Amanda Rose’s research with 608 participants (Child Development, 2002) shows that going over a problem again and again with the people close to you does two things at once: it brings the friendship closer, and it also raises the anxiety and low mood of the person doing the telling. So the telling feeds the relationship, not the teller.

Back to that sentence

When we say “there’s nothing to be done”, what are we telling our brain? This, I think: dear brain, do not bother with this one, whatever you do it will come to nothing. And the brain takes the command seriously. It stops looking for a way out.

Psychology has a name for this: learned helplessness. In Seligman and Maier’s 1967 experiment, subjects put through a situation they could not escape no longer tried to leave even once the door was opened. The door is open, but nobody tries it.

Here is the good part: fifty years later the same two researchers turned their own theory around (Psychological Review, 2016). On the new reading, helplessness is not the thing that is learned; it is the default response. What is learned is control itself. So a person does not learn helplessness; they stay in it when they have not learned that something is in their hands.

Helplessness, it turns out, is not what we learn. What has to be learned is what we are holding.

Why is there nothing to be done?

At this point the same question always comes to me. Why is there nothing? Are we dead?

If a human being carries a share of the attributes of their creator, then there is always something within their power. Two hundred years ago Şeyh Galib wrote, “Look kindly upon yourself, for you are the essence of the world.” Three centuries before him, Pico della Mirandola looked from a similar place: a human being has no fixed nature, and holds the possibility of shaping themselves.

Of course not every door opens. Some matters really may be beyond us. Even so, the sentence “there’s nothing to be done” is usually built long before that point. Before anyone has looked at what could be done.

A last word

I have a habit of writing down the sentences that stick to us. Then I go back and look: what is this sentence doing to us?

Here are the ones I catch most often, with what they tell our brain written beside them.

Put them side by side and here is what we see: these do not describe a situation. They issue an instruction. There is even a small streak of playing God in them. Lazy sentences, really 😊

So — do you have sentences like these too?