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Have a Go Spaghettio! Have you been semantically disturbed lately?


A semantic disturbance arises when a person’s constructed virtual

representation of reality or mind map doesn’t approximate how

things are, the territory, the ‘real’ world.

Bear in mind that Einstein and others said that reality itself is a

persistent illusion, something concocted based on the organism’s

assessment of how they believe things are. A poor assessment, one

that doesn’t consider the facts available, is a mis conception or

misunderstanding.

What we believe or tell ourselves about something is semantically

inaccurate and therefore a semantic disturbance exists. This is

characterised by feelings of upset to varying degrees, or ‘upsetness’

as Dr Albert Ellis says.

Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics theory tells us the map is not

the territory it represents or the word is not the thing it describes. The

‘self’ under construction in the minds of our young Have a Go

Spaghettio! audience can be a helpful, healthy Success Helper type

or one that is self-defeating, where Brain Bully dominates! Believing

that they can ‘be’ dumb or equate the quality of their being to the

word dumb causes a semantic disturbance. What has our young

constructivist determined to be true about their ‘self?’

The young person has abstracted one thing from the many qualities

they have and decided it ‘is’ them e.g., they ‘are their’ dumbness.

What can be the emotional and behavioural consequence of this?

Brain Bully thinking or Success Stopper thinking causes upset in the

child. Thinking that we can be any word used by ourselves or others

to define out total being is a semantic disturbance, the language

describes someone or something that can’t ‘be’ how it/they are

described. It is a nonsensical proposition.

So Have a Go Spaghettio! teaches young people about helpful belief

building, so that what they believe better approximates the reality of

the life they experience. Give it a try banana pie! and see how you

and your young charges go!

 
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