The Sentence.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me...

Bruises fade, cuts heal, bones mend, but words can cut so deeply that you bleed for the rest of your life.

So can one of these:

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

[Ayaan]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me...

Bruises fade, cuts heal, bones mend, but words can cut so deeply that you bleed for the rest of your life.

So can one of these:

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

[Audley Strange]

Well, Hermit, it may well be rubbish as I said we were just shooting shit. Now that your consideration of it being rubbish has been addressed, I'll get back to it. Cheers.

-

There are phrases of course that no-one really wants to hear "We've found your daughter's body!" "I'm sorry the cancer is terminal" but in such a case words are not what really impacts, it's the event. I'd imagine they've sent a few people round the bend. Also one has to take into consideration not just the words themselves and who's saying them and why. From what I can glean and from what others have discussed with me our foundational identities are constructed at a very early age and are consistently reinforced since we take our cues from the surroundings. So it would seem to me that those foundations are weak and vulnerable and with the right push one could bring the whole edifice down.


Rum, you mentioned Voodoo, which I assume was a joke, but I think the cults have a good measure on pushing common and specific vulnerabilities of their flocks. I only need to listen to the likes of Catholics who can still hear the voices of the nuns and the priests condemning them all the time years after their childhoods to see how these things are stuck in the bricks in the mortar of who we are.

Also, if you consider them coming from someone you love and trust as they say, they hurt. Is this not a trauma itself? Now imagine a situation where a role model, someone who you've used a blueprint for yourself, or a parent of a lover says something so hurtful yet so truthful that it undermines everything about you as well as hurts like a motherfucker. Yeah I'd say that could do serious damage to a person and thats only a single consideration.

@Pord.
Not just random phrases no, and marketing tends to not contain much in the way of anything that could be construed as a negative. Non-Winners rather than Losers Better than half price, rather than less than half price etc. It also attempts to remove the concept of autonomy from the individual (which could have an effect) but no. I don't think you're going to hear "Your baby brother wasn't a cot death, you strangled him. " on the next advert for Persil, so I think we're safe.

There may well be only certain people vulnerable to such, people who's pasts were ropey to start with. However since we all know how easy it is to provoke a person into a rage (especially if we know them well) why is it so hard to think we could potentially provoke madness?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me...

Bruises fade, cuts heal, bones mend, but words can cut so deeply that you bleed for the rest of your life.

So can one of these:

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

They'll bleed out in less than three minutes, based on field experience. That's "the rest of their life."

[Ayaan]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me...

Bruises fade, cuts heal, bones mend, but words can cut so deeply that you bleed for the rest of your life.

So can one of these:

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

They'll bleed out in less than three minutes, based on field experience. That's "the rest of their life."

But words generally don't kill you that fast.

[PsychoSerenity]

In most cases I don't think a sequence of words (unless rather long) could carry enough significance to override the noise of everything else in life, including the context through which those words would be delivered. Obviously though, words do influence people, but not necessarily in the way they were intended. People also have many patterns and feedback loops to reduce the effects of noise or unwanted influences.

Theoretically though, there may be sequences of interactions which, if it were possible to predict their outcome, could make anyone do anything. The problem again is getting extraordinarily precisely the correct interactions such that you have a specific effect without it getting lost in the background noise of influences and/or filtered out.

To some extent there are psychological or hypnotising techniques that can achieve this, that tend to work on higher level interactions with an individual's pre-existing concepts (similar to the proposed sequence of words from the OP) but normally require overwhelming of the senses or repeated influences over time.

An actual direct sequence of interactions to influence someone in a specific way on a fundamental level would be impossible to predict, - a one in a billion thing.

[John_fi_Skye]

Apart from the "found-your-daughter's-body" type, whether sentences hurt depends on who says them. If an arsehole condemns you, do you care? But if someone you love, and whose opinions you value, withdraws approval it can be upsetting to the point of trauma. That's always been the secret of good parenting, and kids who are out of parental control are generally those who care little for their parents' opinions of them. Same goes for the teaching profession: no disciplinary measures are ever required when the kids value their teachers' opinions of them.

[pErvinalia]

I doubt all of us (let alone a small fraction of us) have a sentence that could trigger madness. "Triggering" is a specific thing related to PSTD sufferers. If you didn't suffer PSTD from an event in your past, then it's very doubtful that you will be triggered by something.

[Svartalf]

betrayal speaks louder than words.

[Animavore]

Sounds like complete and utter bullshit to me. And yet I get this irrational pang of fear at the very thought.

There's a psychological thriller in there.

[PsychoSerenity]

Sounds like complete and utter bullshit to me. And yet I get this irrational pang of fear at the very thought.

There's a psychological thriller in there.

I know what your sentence is. :twisted:

[Animavore]

Sounds like complete and utter bullshit to me. And yet I get this irrational pang of fear at the very thought.

There's a psychological thriller in there.

I know what your sentence is. :twisted:

[Animavore]

"We've run out of drink."

[Svartalf]

Spoken like a true Gael.

[Hermit]

Well, Hermit, it may well be rubbish as I said we were just shooting shit. Now that your consideration of it being rubbish has been addressed, I'll get back to it. Cheers.

...

There may well be only certain people vulnerable to such, people who's pasts were ropey to start with. However since we all know how easy it is to provoke a person into a rage (especially if we know them well) why is it so hard to think we could potentially provoke madness?

That makes more sense. It's also devoid of the ridiculous hyperbole inherent in "for every human there is a phrase or a sentence that would cause them catastrophic psychological damage." It's also closer to the notion of what Orwell meant with room 101.