Between naming
and being able.

The other day, in a conversation with no particular purpose, someone said of their boss: «he's a narcissist». They said it just like that, with the ease you'd now say «coeliac» or «left-handed». And a moment later the conversation moved on.

I stayed with the word for a few seconds after the table had gone elsewhere. Because I saw something I've been seeing for a long time, including in myself: the word had done its job. It had closed the matter.

It was named now. There was no need to keep looking.

Slowly.

What a word does when it arrives

Technical words — narcissist, trauma, gaslighting, depression, generalised anxiety — are psychology's gift to ordinary people. They used to be knots without a name, lived alone, with the person convinced the problem was her. Now each knot has a word that points at it from outside and says: this isn't only yours. This happens. This has a shape. And that is enormous.

What happens, though, is that the human brain has a weakness for names. When something gets a name, the mind marks that folder as closed. It happens with difficult concepts, it happens with people, it happens with ourselves. Saying «narcissist» gives the mind the sense of having solved something, when all it has done is label.

And between labelling and understanding — and between understanding and being able to do something different next time — there's a distance that no manual covers.

The three states

Simplifying, there are three places you pass through with anything that matters:

Naming. Having the word. Knowing that this thing that happens to me, or that I see, is called something. Knowing I'm not alone. Having a map, even one without a scale.

Understanding. Knowing why it happens. Knowing the mechanism. Recognising the signs before the whole problem arrives. Having a theory of the thing.

Being able. Doing something different when it happens again. Having the sentence in your mouth when the situation repeats. Being able to say no with your stomach in a knot, and carry on anyway.

There are people who have spent ten years in the first state. People who have spent five in the second. And the distance between the second and the third — the one that matters — isn't covered by reading. It's covered by failing several times in the real moment, until the body learns what the head already knew.

«I know» as a brake

Working on this in my own life, and reading the people who came to me after the books, there's a pattern that repeats a great deal. The person has read fifteen books on the subject. She recognises every concept, every technique, every warning sign. She'll explain the cycle of violence to you more precisely than Lenore Walker's book. And she's still inside.

«I know» started out as a shield against confusion. But past a certain point it becomes a wall against change. Because «I know» implies that the next move should be immediate, logical, painless. And since the move doesn't come, the person punishes herself: «if I know and I don't move, I'm weak». And she becomes even more still.

Knowing isn't what moves you. What moves you is having felt — in the body, in a concrete scene, not in your head — that this hurts more than the head had calculated. Or having practised, a thousand times, a small sentence that next time comes out on its own.

The body learns first

This is what still surprises me after all these years: the head arrives late to the important things. The body notices pressure sooner — before your face even registers it. Your stomach, your jaw, the way you breathe: they know when a conversation is going wrong before your head has the word to describe it.

But language — education, culture, the manuals — trains us to wait for the head to confirm what the body already knows. And while the head gathers evidence, the body endures. And endures. And endures. Until something breaks that takes years to put back together.

The psychological work that interests me — the kind I apply to myself, the kind in the books, the kind that will be in these letters — isn't about giving the head more names. It's about giving the body back its voice. And that isn't done with theory. It's done with small, repeated, almost ridiculous practice.

What does help

Three things, from least to most useful.

One. Read the same thing several times. Not to learn it better — you already know it — but so that on each reading a different part of you recognises something. The first book teaches you the word. The fourth teaches you to notice it in your own voice while you're speaking.

Two. Write down what happened to you, in short sentences, without interpretation. No analysis. No why. Facts. «On Tuesday he said X. I felt this in my chest.» That trains the body to be the witness. And it's the body, not the head, that needs the microphone back.

Three. Practise sentences out loud, alone, before you need them. Sitting in the car. Standing in the shower. «No.» «Not today.» «I don't accept this.» Ridiculous. It works. When the real moment comes, the sentence already has a body. And because your brain has it preloaded, it doesn't have to improvise out of fear.

One more thing

I'm telling you this because it happens to me too. I've spent years writing about human behaviour and there are still days when I notice something in a conversation, name it correctly, understand it in real time — and I'm not able to do what I know I have to do. The head runs ahead. The hand lags behind. And between the two there's a floor that gives a little each time.

What changes over the years isn't the distance between naming, understanding and being able. That distance stays. What changes is how quickly you recognise that you're inside it. And that's already something. Recognising it early saves you years.

The pattern isn't cut with force. It's cut with clarity. And clarity, almost always, arrives slowly. One sentence at a time.

Until next Sunday. Miguel