Naming names?

"Sticks and stones will break our bones,
but words will break our hearts."
~~ Robert Fulghum

Yesterday I ran across this quote from Robert Fulghum, a very pithy writer, and was struck by the truth it embodies. This morning I ran across this bit on verbal victimization from a book on psychology and began to question Fulghum's conclusion:

Most people these days think that nasty names "naturally" hurt folks. Such erroneous thinking is causing huge amounts of unhappiness.

The process of name-calling is typically based upon feeling not OK, and name-callers are trying to make themselves feel more powerful by using the process. If I call you a name and get you upset, then I temporarily feel more powerful because I had a powerful effect upon you. My self-esteem rises at your expense. I project my unhappiness on to you and you take it on if you allow yourself to be upset. If you do not get upset at my attempt, then I cannot dump my original unhappiness on you. Then I am left not only with my failure to successfully dump it on you but also with my original unhappiness to boot. Thus, if you're successful at being unbothered by my words, then I wind up more unhappy; and I'll probably quickly stop those words. This is a key element to understand, that name-callers will usually feel worse if you do not react to their name-calling. They will therefore be much quicker to stop such behavior than if you get visibly upset.

Ver-rrr-rry interesting. I'm a wordsmith, so I'm looking at this from the "wordy" point of view. At the same time, I've started reading Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth to discuss with a group of seekers (we met for the first time last night). Tolle is predicting (and enabling through his books) a shift in consciousness, not just of a single person, but of a majority of people. Can we change our thinking? Why should we? According to Tolle, we are too bound up in ego (he calls it "egoic mind") and need to get over our collective dysfunction. For a start, he suggests that we recognize that we use words to label persons and things, and we've got to get past that.

Um-huh, if I'm not concerned about labels,
then your words can't break my heart,
like sticks and stones hurled at me,
'cause that ain't me!
(Now I wonder what other writers will have to say about "sticks and stones" over at Weekend Wordsmith.)