There is a phrase I use often in this work: borrowed language.
I want to be precise about what I mean by it, because it is easy to hear it as blame, and it is not.
Borrowed language is not the language other people used against you. It is the language other people used around you, or toward you, in moments before you had the capacity to evaluate it, that your nervous system absorbed as instruction.
A parent who said, under pressure and with no cruelty intended: you’re so sensitive. A teacher who wrote on a report, in good faith: lacks focus. A sibling. A classroom. A culture. A religion. A relationship where love had conditions you learned to meet before they were ever spoken aloud.
None of these sources had to intend harm for the language to land. That is the thing about the developing nervous system: it does not apply intent filters. It simply receives. And what is received often enough becomes the internal voice that organises everything that follows.
What I have found, both in my own life and in working with the those who come to this work, is that the most powerful borrowed scripts are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the quiet ones. The ones spoken in passing, without weight, that landed anyway. The ones that were never even addressed to you specifically but that you absorbed as if they were.
The word borrowed matters because it carries a particular implication: what is borrowed can be returned.
This is not the same as forgetting. Or forgiving, necessarily. Or rewriting history. It is the recognition that a script which was formed by language can be interrupted by language, at the point where the nervous system is receptive enough to receive something new.
That is the work. Not excavating the past for the source of every pattern. But learning to notice, in the present moment, when a borrowed script is running. And discovering, slowly and with the body’s agreement, that there is a truer sentence available.
