The Deception of Words: A Reflection on Human Connection.

The loss or near loss of those who mattered most in life often brings about a harsh academic learning—a truth realized perhaps too late to amend past mistakes or reclaim lost relationships. This reflection acknowledges the profound difficulty of translating this hard-won knowledge into practical application, especially when seeking to mend emotional bonds.

 At the heart of this struggle lies the inherent deceptiveness of language, both spoken and written, suggesting that an over-reliance on the literal meaning of words is fundamentally misguided. 

Words and structured sentences prove highly effective in transactional or business-like interactions. However, their utility diminishes significantly in communication with people with whom one shares a close, emotional bond. Paradoxically, the closer the person, the more deceptive the spoken word becomes. This distortion is a multi-stage process inherent to human communication. 

The Stages of Communication Distortion 

The flaws in emotional communication begin with the speaker's inability to perfectly encode their thoughts and feelings into words. The intended meaning is rarely captured with perfect fidelity. 

 * Speaker Encoding Flaw: What one truly feels and thinks is not exactly converted into words. 

 * Listener Interpretation and Prejudice: Once the words reach the listener, they are interpreted through the lens of the listener's own long-term positive or negative prejudice regarding the speaker. This established bias warps the received message. 

 * Listener Response Flaw: The listener then formulates their response, which is influenced by their own interpretation, current mental state, or emotional state. At this stage, the response is estimated to be almost 60% distorted from the original thought of the speaker. 

 * Speaker Re-interpretation and Escalation: The original speaker, in turn, responds to this already distorted response, committing the same flaws related to interpretation, prejudice, and current mental state. Consequently, this subsequent response is further distorted, reaching an estimated 90% distortion relative to the original thought. 

This rapid deterioration in meaning and quality leads to the  subsequent dialogue becoming increasingly flawed. 

Flawed Outcomes and Future Consequences 

Decisions and actions are ultimately taken based on these "highly flawed  and distorted interactions"—dialogue that bears little resemblance to the initial, genuine meaning. The ensuing actions, founded on heavily distorted communication, are inherently bound to have catastrophic effects, even beyond repair. Without correction at nascent stage itself or intervention, they are ill fated to create more ugliness in future interactions, perpetuating a cycle of misunderstanding and emotional damage. 

This self-reflection underscores a critical lesson: in emotionally significant relationships, one must look beyond the literal words and account for the deep layers of subjective prejudice and emotional state that cloud both expression and reception. The path to mending these bonds requires a commitment to understanding the intent and feeling that words so often fail to convey.  Thus, the path begins with being immediately aware of deception of words. 

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