I wrote in my book, early on, in the Preface on page 11, that “Living with PTSD is like living with a not-so-imaginary but still invisible friend. This friend doesn’t exactly live inside you but it doesn’t live outside you, either. It hovers in a ‘nether space,’ not quite real, not quite fictitious. And yet at times its bizarre enough to make a movie about.”
If we focus on the Imaginary friend part and ask how it came to be, [ref the song] then we enter a world where Identity, Perception and Social behaviors interact. In all of these cases, Language is in play.
Inside the conceptual sphere is Our Language, how we talk to ourselves. On the next level, the imaginary Friend sphere, are the interactions that make it what it is. Outside, are the viewpoints of others passed along through language and behaviors that influence the nature and perception of the Imaginary Friend.
The Imaginary Friend has now become a real thing because for a lot of people, the Imaginary Friend is who we have become. It’s not the real “We,” the person inside trying to say their truth, but the constructed image built of attitudes, behaviors, limited experience, and many different kinds of expectations and desperations.
Our struggle is to tell our own Story, in our own words, and or but perhaps, we need to begin to develop our own Language, the words that say our own experience, not the words that say our behaviours as observed and named by others.
Other posts talk about the academic terms for how Language constrains, confines or elaborates what can exist, what can be talked about. What exists is Ontology. It is important as the foundation because it includes all the things that can be, that can be real, that are available for observation and exploration.
Then there is the keyword that in Semantics becomes the “key player” in what emerges as a game: Epistemology. This controls what can be said, what can be thought, what can be explored.
So far, the Epistemology of PTSD language says that only “trained observers” are allowed to make Story about us from their directional questions and their observations. There are some references about this somewhere.
