The thing is that language itself is always abstract. That is what language is. It is a means to communicate something that could be visceral or personal, or even rather general by harnessing a bunch of abstractions to perform this task.

Given that language it itself necessarily and unavoidably abstract, the only way to be assured that one’s meanings are the same as another person’s meanings is on the basis that we have shared (or similar) experiences.

If my experiences really are very different from yours, I will need to harness a lot more of these volatile abstractions — these words — in order to try to convey the missing baggage of knowledge to your mind. The more I am compelled to make this effort, however, the less likely I am to be “convincing” and I am also to that extent less likely to succeed in putting us on the same level of understanding. (It seems that providing too many words give the impression of “protesting too much”. People like things to be kept simple.)

Think about how people of the Medieval ages thought about “elephants” , whom most in Europe had never seen. It could be explained to them that these were creatures like a big dog or a a horse with a trumpet instead of a nose. But then the danger is taking a metaphor as something literal — and Medieval portraits of elephants are often just that, they are pictures of a creature with a trumpet for a nose.

Those who speak of that which others find unexpected or which they have not experienced will, in effect, be conveying ideas and images to the other person’s mind that are not really a good match for what they had been intending to say. It might seem all to “abstract”.

I think that in general counselors do not see that some people are getting counseling in order to consolidate their philosophical or existential perspectives and develop a more complex world view.

Maybe a lot of them see their role as a kind of triage — they are here to help the most desperate and needy, but existential issues are not considered to be part of that package.

I think, too, there is an implicit bias against women, who are deemed in Western culture to represent “emotion” per se, rather than reason.

(I take care to say that women represent “emotion”. I did not say that they are “emotional”, but rather in fact that they can be required to take on the role of male emotion, or any other social role requiring emotional expression as the need comes up. This creates a problem with getting one’s personal needs addressed, because

1. The counselor may not understand that he “emotion” that the client is bringing to the fore is not their own as such, but rather the burden of emotionality placed on them by society. It is this, sometimes excessive or enormous burden that has to be dealt with and alleviated and redressed. You cannot do so by mistaking the social burden for women’s own individual emotions.
2. Women are not considered in need of building any philosophical world view, so their attempts to do so may be punished, or at least discouraged in the counseling environment. Perhaps the driving need to do this is considered a diversion or escape from the main task of processing one’s emotions — (but once again, “one’s emotions” are not always even one’s own, but are the burden of emotional work put on a person by society. )

The answer, alas, is that there has been a decline in the way that language is used, so that it has lost its richness of meaning in popular forums. Since popular forums on social media guide and determine what is meant when people say things generally, there has been a shift (over several decades) to the meaning of words becoming tied in with popular psychology.

Try to think of it as two pillars of popular culture that mutually a certain style of meaning. On the one side is the movement away from technical and complex meanings (and indeed away from meanings that derive from higher culture), and on the other side there is the promulgation of popular psychology (which is also divorced for the most part from the complexities of meaning that would stem from higher culture). Both of these together support a “roof” of seeming “common-sense” about things. But anything that is actually more complex, (or denotes a psychological richness that is less common to the majority) can only exist ABOVE this “roof” of common meanings — that is to say, it seems not to exist at all.

Consequently, if someone make judicious choices, or acts with discernment and “discriminates” between right and wrong, it is easy enough to be misunderstood — especially if one uses the word, “judging”, to describe these actions.

This question, actually, is very timely, since it only dawned on me this morning the extent to which the general populace has hijacked complex meanings, to try to simplify them in a manner that makes them relate to popular psychology.

Popular psychology is the simplification of real psychology, just as the popular usages of language amounts to a reduction of complex conceptual thought to something simpler.

My clue to this phenomenon was from something that I read yesterday, but only understood this morning. It was on Quora where I read that “high pain tolerance” is associated with vulnerability to psychological abuse. Actually, as it happens, I had read something a few years back where somebody had suggested (which seemed contradictory to me) that “high pain tolerance” was correlated with mental illness. I seriously could not make the connection, because in general this is not the case at all, but rather the opposite. But the dots I did not connect at the time was the link to popular culture.

If one takes a human being and reduces them to what is common in popular psychology, one does not see high pain tolerance as being a feature of success, for instance in the case of a successful athlete or a person who surpasses others in their endurance. This is because popular culture does not cater to these more unusual human beings. It almost cannot conceive of them, in fact. Rather, what it can perceive, or analyze, is the situation of a doormat, who allows others to constantly rub their feet on them. Thus “high pain tolerance”, in the context of popular culture, means “susceptibility to experiencing abuse” — nothing more and nothing less.

By the same token, “making a judgment” aka “judging” has the meaning, in popular culture, of “being judgmentally abusive”.

—It is difficult to convey anything about one’s own very different kind of re