There are patterns in syntax that are like x-rays of perception. What we say, both aloud and silently, reveals us by revealing how we perceive reality. We are never so naked as when we open our mouths to speak. Only someone who is both illiterate and mute is truly anonymous. 

 

I’m not a trained counselor, but in decades of teaching teen-agers, I became one by listening to their grammar, to the syntax of their thoughts, and not only hearing my students, but often their parents as well. If you listen to someone’s grammar, you can see a very clear outline—actually, a diagnostic x-ray—of an unhealthy relationship. A small example is a mother talking to me about the surly rebelliousness of her son, one of my students.

“His behavior is disgusting.”

“Disgusting to whom?”

“To anybody.”

 

At bottom, this mother didn’t like her son. Whether she loved him doesn’t matter; she was forced to live with someone who disgusted her. That’s a very uncomfortable situation, bound to cause her to rebel. Her son’s rebelliousness was only a healthy self-defensive response, even as he struggled futilely to please her. Being forced to live with someone you don’t like is not as bad, as destructive, as being forced to live with someone who doesn’t like you. But she thought the problem was the “disgusting” behavior of her son. Her syntax revealed the absence of the necessary pronoun object of “disgust.” By making the subject of her sentence “his behavior,” she was hiding her dislike of her son from herself. Why? Probably because she wouldn’t approve of it. It didn’t fit her emotional image of “mother.”

 

There were many instances like this one. “I can’t stand him” was impossible for her. Now, maybe if I’d been a counselor instead of just her son’s English teacher, I would have referred her to a professional setting wherein, possibly after years of self-examination, she might have been able to discover the pronoun I, but that would be too late for her son. I thought, this kid should move out of his mother’s house—immediately. I gave the mother sympathy (she wouldn’t have accepted anything else, anyway), but I told the boy I thought he should move out—never mind that he wasn’t even seventeen yet. I know that advice blasphemes against our sentimental perception of “family,” but he’s now a happily married man and a successful lawyer, and I don’t know what would have happened to him if he’d stayed with his mother. 

 

When I was teaching, I met a lot of parents who despised their children. Every one of them had problems with personal pronouns, and every one of them used the phrase “our family” way too many times. Family, for all the emotional security that it can provide, is a context that is, of itself, neutral. When it’s used (as it so often is today) as a haven from maturity or differentiation, it can be incredibly destructive. Sometimes the best relationship one can have with one’s family may be a distant one—a very distant one. The best indicator is a look at how pronouns are used in syntax. I’ve met some people who can’t even think outside first-person plural. The mother in my example was stuck in third-person singular.   

 

One might be tempted to blame this mother for disliking her son—or me, for being more interested in the welfare of her son than in his mother. But she was a Southern Lady, and that’s a place one should go only with an understanding of what that means. There is a real difference between southern women and—others. I won’t go into it, but it has connotations both very admirable and very destructive. The admirable is exemplified in the well-known character of Melanie Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind.” But the same thing that makes Melanie admirable can have other effects as well. I don’t know what the stats are now, but a generation or two ago, the suicide rate for women was higher in the South than anywhere else in the country. A lady, we all know, is defined as someone who never does anything to attract attention to herself, but a Southern Lady adds, “including her own.” There’s a reason this mother had trouble with the pronoun I, and one doesn’t just wantonly go around pointing some things out to people in the interest of “correcting” their relationships. My aunt was a Class A Southern Lady. In her old age, she accidentally discovered I and put a pistol to her temple. 

 

A more generic and less specific example: The function of a preposition is to relate a noun or pronoun to the sentence in which it’s used. “He came TO the store” establishes a relationship between the location of “he” and “the store.” And “He came FROM the store” establishes a different relationship. However, if you listen, you can know something else: You can know the location of the speaker—even though he never tells you where he is.

 

It can be illuminating, too, to listen to the syntax of our thoughts as we think about ourselves, others, the world, God—but only if we bear in mind that the relationship is in the syntax, not in the thoughts themselves, and that the purpose of the exercise is not to judge ourselves, but simply to see how we relate ourselves and our world to each other. Even one hour—not sure anyone could take more than that—can be very surprising. But, again, one must look only at the syntax, not at the thoughts.