Yesterday I was feeling a little depressed. Now I know that depression is a nominalisation but it was the first label that popped into my head. After a little thought I decided it probably had something to do with a late night on Tuesday and 7 hours driving on Wednesday plus a long days work.

I thought I would try something different so I deconstructed the word and looked for opposites. After a few minutes I didn't even know what depression was and I was laughing so I guess it worked.

Try it yourself next time you use a label for yourself.

Depression
becomes
High pressure. (weather)

Depressed
becomes
Embossed. (paper shapes)

de pression
becomes
bottled Beer (sort of French opposite)

I came up with lots more but you get the idea. The sillier you can make it the faster you get on with the rest of your day. Once the word doesn't mean anything you are finished.

I like the way you went from 'feeling a little depressed' to having fun with the label 'depression' - applying a nominalisation in order to denominalise it. I imagine this would be very useful for any non-specific negative feelings too - find the nominalisation that best describes the feeling and there's something to play with. Great stuff

I remember this as a fun game from childhood. Being fascinated with language from an early age, I always found that the sounds attached to certain meanings were quite comically divorced from the meanings themselves. When I was alone, I spent a lot of time sounding out words slowly, relating the absurdity of arbitrary sounds, to concrete meanings.

I think this kind of understanding allows for a certain flexibility of language and thought, and in my own personal experience, it was probably an early mechanism that made many of the principles behind NLP so easy for me to absorb.

I think it was a great idea to bring up this idea of wordplay, as a therapeutic method, because I've yet to read about it in any book I've encountered so far, and it seems to have real experiential value.

de pression
becomes
bottled Beer (sort of French opposite)



Nick

Have you ever got anything to do with Japanese genre of poetry called Haiku?

Check out, please.

The one quoted above meets all extreme criteria and standards. (first line intro of the subject, second - follow-up, and te third - satori/nirvana - enlightment)

Get if published in the haiku forums as well and this way tell them about the sublime art of NLP, which as we see evidenced here contains poetry as its integral part.

Cheers

Thanks, that wasn't my intention, it just popped into my head fully formed. Any forums you would recomend?

Nick

Nick,


Please try this one:

The Creative Pen - Home

When the page opens up, try Ctrl+F to look for haiku section, or just scroll down - the section is a cople of screens "down there."

Direct link is The Creative Pen - Haiku Poetry, but it sometime links resulting from search do not work very well.

Cheers