Words That Hurt: How the Language of Wellness Is Quietly Shaping Your Body

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

It's one of the first things many of us were taught as children but I'm not sure I agree.

Because words don't break like bones do, and then heal. Words stay. They settle into the subconscious mind, quietly, and they keep shaping how we feel about ourselves and our bodies for years — sometimes for a lifetime. Broken bones knit back together in six weeks. A sentence someone said to you when you were seven can still be running the show at forty.

In the most recent episode of The Subconscious Proof, I sat down with hypnotist Matt Dickson to talk about something both of us have felt frustrated by for a long time: the language of the health and wellness world, and the quiet harm it does. This is a conversation about words — the ones influencers use, the ones doctors use, the ones we use on ourselves — and the hidden beliefs standing behind them.

Here's some of what we explored, and why it matters for anyone trying to heal in a world that often makes healing harder than it needs to be.

Why language matters more than we think

In hypnotherapy, we are trained to be exquisitely careful with words. Not because we're being precious about it — because we've seen, over and over, that language produces a real effect in the mind and the body. The words a person hears become the images they see, and the images they see become the story they believe, and the story they believe shapes their physiology.

This isn't a metaphor (although we do love to use metaphors in hypnosis). When you hold a belief about your body, your body responds to it. And that means the careless language all around us — in marketing, in movies, in songs, on social media, in the doctor's office — is not neutral. It's an input. And most of the people delivering it have never once stopped to consider what it does on the way in. I do believe that as we educate more people on the both mental and physiological effect of words on a person that hopefully professionals in the health and wellness industry will be more mindful of the language they use.

The wellness industry's quiet elitism

One of the first things Matt named in our conversation is something I think a lot of people feel but can't quite articulate: the elitism baked into so much wellness content.

The energy of if you're not doing it perfectly, don't even bother.

If you're not eating organic, why bother eating well at all. If you're wearing the wrong shoes, you're wrecking your gut biome. If you didn't meal-prep six color-coded containers on Sunday, what are you even doing.

The cruelty of this is that it alienates the very people who need support the most — the people at ground zero, who aren't already moving and eating well, who maybe were never taught to feel connected to their bodies in the first place. Someone finally works up the courage to think I'd like to get healthy, opens Instagram, and is immediately met with a wall of impossible perfection. A beautiful backdrop they could never afford. Skin they'll never have. A body that says, wordlessly, you will never get here.

And so they don't start at all.

Both Matt and I are firm believers in meeting people where they are. But "meeting people where they are" doesn't perform well in the click economy. Shame does. Pain points do. As Matt put it, this kind of messaging is designed to press the pain points — and it works, for maybe forty percent of the people who see it. The problem is that for the other sixty percent, it's doing real damage. And it looks like it's working far more than it actually is, because we only ever see the success stories.

It creates more fear, confusion and overwhelm when someone is just trying to make a positive change in their life.

The peanut butter and apples problem

Here's a small example that made both of us a little crazy. An influencer, talking about blood sugar, claimed that eating peanut butter with apples was essentially the same as eating a chocolate bar. We both had many voice notes to each other about the frustration over such a thoughtless post that would reach thousands of people.

Think about what that does to a real person. Someone who, instead of grabbing the Snickers at the checkout, thought: no, I'll wait until I get home, and I'll slice up an apple, and I'll have it with peanut butter, and I'll eat it mindfully. A genuinely good choice. A win. And then a thirty-second video tells them it was pointless — that they may as well have had the candy bar.

That's not education. That's a person on a pedestal pressing a pain point. It's this elitist view that makes you believe that you couldn't possibly know what's the healthy choice without their advice. And the subconscious takes it in whole: I can't get anything right. Why do I even try. Maybe if I paid this person I could finally be healthy.

"What did you do today?" — the weight of an innocent question

Matt offered a subtle example that stuck with me. Picture the fitness influencer laying out all their meal-prepped food, or doing burpees on vacation, captioned with a simple question: What did you do today?

On its own, that question is nothing. Innocuous. But paired with the image, the implied story, everything else the subconscious is absorbing in that moment — it lands as an accusation. What did I do today? And just like that, the viewer drops into judgment and shame.

This is how language works beneath our awareness. It's rarely the single word. It's the word plus the picture plus the story plus the belief you already carried in the door. Which brings us to the most important point of the whole conversation.

The reason we are both so passionate about hypnosis techniques is because Matt and I love working with clients to change a sentence like, "What did I do today?" from shame to curiosity. From pain to excitement.

Why the words hurt: it's about the beliefs underneath

Here's the piece most people miss. The reason those words hurt isn't only the words. It's the beliefs they land on.

The same influencer video can leave one person inspired and another person crushed — because they're carrying different beliefs about themselves. So while it's absolutely worth asking creators and clinicians to be more responsible with their language, the deeper healing work is on the other side: the beliefs we hold that make certain words land like a blow.

This is the work I do, and the work Matt does. When you change the belief underneath, the same piece of content that used to wound you can simply become information. You can look at the beautiful fitness reel and think that's lovely, and not for me, and take what's useful and leave the rest. Not because the content changed. Because you did.

We can't control the words people say to us, but we can control how we decide to respond and absorb them. This is the tough work. Working through our long held belief systems that may be using words others use to harm us instead of help us.

When doctors' words hurt: the "degenerative disc disease" problem

This isn't only a social media problem. Healthcare is riddled with words that hurt, often delivered with no awareness of their weight at all.

The example I shared with Matt is one I see constantly in my manual therapy practice: degenerative disc disease. For years, this was the term used for what is essentially normal, age-related arthritic change in the spine. It isn't a disease. It isn't even really a condition. It's aging. The term has largely fallen out of use for exactly this reason — but the damage lingers, because so many people are still walking around with those three words lodged in their minds.

And the words themselves create harm. Say "degenerative disc disease" to someone and the image their mind produces is one of brokenness — bones crumbling, a spine barely holding them upright, a body that could give out at any moment. That's not the reality. But the language created the fear, and the fear is not harmless. There's research showing that this kind of catastrophizing belief can actually increase inflammation in the body. The belief becomes biology.

As manual therapy practitioners and professionals in healthcare we need to recognize that our words can either contribute to someone receiving care and health or it can bring in more fear and dis-ease with it.

We need to make sure we are mindful with the images our words conjure up and we take the time to explain where biomechanics and chronic pain split off.

The Middle Path: why "something is better than nothing"

If all-or-nothing perfectionism is the disease, the middle path is the medicine.

Matt teaches a concept from yoga called sthira sukham — stability and ease. The idea of using only what's necessary to create stability, and no more. He illustrates it with a slinky: compressed in the box, it's all tension, I have to fix everything right now. Pulled fully open, it wobbles and overwhelms, this is too hard, I can't. The middle is where it actually works.

So many of us live at the two ends of that slinky. We white-knuckle our way through change with raw force — the way we do in addiction recovery, forcing it through sheer will with no capacity for softness — or we don't start at all, because we can't do it perfectly.

I say it all the time, and I'll say it here: something is better than nothing. When I was younger and trapped in the do-it-perfectly-or-not-at-all mindset, I missed out on so much. You miss the joys of life waiting until you can do it flawlessly. You skip the swim because you don't want to be seen in a swimsuit — and the truth is, nobody's really watching. Everyone is far too busy thinking about themselves.

The middle path is realizing you can love yourself exactly as you are and recognize there are things you'd like to improve. Those two things are not in conflict. You don't have to pick a direction. You can walk down the middle. And if you're curious about more ways to use the Middle Path please do check out my book!

The Middle Path: Finding Balance, Health, and Happiness in a World of Extremes

Trauma-informed language: the words we use in the healing room

The back half of my conversation with Matt went somewhere I think every practitioner needs to hear: trauma-informed language in hypnosis and healing work.

Matt came to this through his trauma-informed yoga training, and then began looking hard at the language of classic hypnosis — and realized how much of it can land badly for someone with a history of being made small. Words like unconscious (which carries the embedded suggestion you're unconscious), or sleep, or deeper, or I'm going to put you under. Instructions like close your eyes and relax, delivered as commands. For someone who has experienced abuse, being bullied, or simply being in a smaller body than the person speaking, these can create resistance, or worse, genuinely re-trigger old wounds.

The trauma-informed alternative is permissive rather than directive. Not close your eyes, but consider closing your eyes, if that feels good for you — and if it doesn't, leave them open. It's your choice. And here's the beautiful part: permissive language isn't only safer. It's more effective. When a person feels they're making the choice themselves, the work goes deeper.

Because trauma, at its root, is so often about having your autonomy taken away. Which means that any healing language that does something to a person — rather than inviting them to do it themselves — is working against the very thing that needs to heal.

Why authority is the wrong goal in healing

This connects to something both Matt and I feel strongly about. In marketing, practitioners are constantly told to "build authority." And in some contexts, sure. But in healing? Authority can be exactly the wrong thing.

If a client hands their power to you — the authority, the one who will fix them — then they've given away the very thing they need to heal. Real healing requires a person to step into their own power, to believe the capacity to heal already lives inside them. My job is not to cure anyone. Nobody can cure another human being. My job is to create the conditions in which healing can happen — and then get out of the way.

As I told Matt: if anyone ever tells you they're the one who's going to cure you — run.

Talking to the body

There's a thread that runs under this entire conversation, and it's the one closest to my heart. In my manual therapy work, I describe what I do as having a conversation with the body. I don't tell a tight muscle to relax. I ask it. And if it says no, I don't force it — I get curious. Why aren't we relaxing here? Is there something I'm not seeing? Is this tightness holding something up? Does it need to stay this way to keep you safe?

This view and body language is also why I have come to develop a hybrid of hypnotherapy and subconscious healing work with hands on massage and manual therapy techniques. My goal is to encourage the re-coupling of how we feel mentally and emotionally with what we are holding in our body and work to find balance and ease in both.

Matt and I talked about how our capacity for spoken language is actually very new in human evolution — and how, in gaining it, we may have de-evolved in the older, deeper language the body speaks. Animals read each other fluently in body language; it's their primary channel. We've largely lost it. And I think that costs us something real: the ability to connect with our own bodies, and with each other, beneath the level of words.

The invitation — for practitioners and for everyone — is to relearn that language. To zoom in and zoom out. To stop treating the body as a machine with a broken part and start treating it as a whole, intelligent system that is always, always trying to tell us something.

Listen to the full conversation

There is so much more in the full episode — Viktoria's story of being adopted from Russia and communicating across languages as a toddler, the fascinating research on hypnosis and chronic pain, the handshake as a form of trauma-informed communication, and why getting triggered might just be a gift.

If you've ever felt shamed by a wellness message that was supposed to help you — or if you work with people and want to be more careful with the words you carry into the room — this episode is for you.

🎧 Listen to "Words That Hurt" with Matt Dickson on The Subconscious Proof — available now on Spotify, iHeartMusic and Amazon Music, and wherever you listen.

Connect with Matt: Find him as @thehypnoticyogi on TikTok, and at his website.

⁠https://www.mattdicksonhypnosis.com/⁠

⁠https://www.youtube.com/@HypnoticYogi⁠

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-dickson-02a1b09/

Take what lands. Leave what doesn't.

Viktoria Hamma is a Biopsychosocial Wellness Practitioner, Hypnotherapist, Quantum Biology Practitioner and Registered Massage Therapist, and the host of The Subconscious Proof — a podcast exploring the place where quantum biology, the subconscious mind, and ancient wisdom meet the science of healing.