What is a loaded term?
When addressing the root cause of anxiety, you may find that you assume some words or phrases have universal definitions, but they don’t. For example, how you define intelligence may differ from how someone else defines intelligence or how someone in another country defines intelligence.
At Clarity we call these these words/phrases, “loaded terms.” You may sometimes use these words without fully understanding what they mean to you, and this lack of clarity is an often root cause of something that triggers your anxiety. The solutions on Clarity will help you uncover and clarify the meanings you’ve stored in the loaded terms you use when talking to yourself and others. This will likely reveal that you sometimes use definitions you don’t agree with or want to live by. These realizations alone have the power to eliminate some of your triggers.
Loaded term examples:
Good person, healthy, stupid, smart, competent, attractive, ugly, inadequate, bad, good, intelligent.
Tips for identifying a loaded word or phrase
Ask yourself, would every single person in the universe define this the same way? If the answer is no, take time and figure out what that word currently means to you. Not what you think it should mean or what others think it means, but what it means to you. Why? The definition of the word and how it impacts your everyday life is uniquely in your brain and has to be pulled out for you to evaluate.
Examples of a loaded term used in everyday life:
- “What if I lose control and it happens?”
There is room to clarify what this person means by “lose control”
For more on this, you can read this, which is an academic read of the theory of Personal construct psychology that is supported by what we’ve written here and our clinical results.
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