by David Lindemann How Grammar Can Save Your Life

How Grammar Can Save Your Life by David Lindemann

I’M not a Latin teacher; I'm a doctor. I didn't learn Latin growing up, other than maybe the conjugation of amo, but I'm learning it now as I teach my children. I have heard many times about the benefits of Latin—not only how it helps to build vocabulary knowledge, but how it helps you to better understand and master English grammar.

Grammar is indeed important. We are linguistic creatures. There is something about the structure of language that reflects things that go very deep into our souls. As a doctor working with PTSD patients, I have seen this again and again.

David Lindemann trained at the University of Kentucky and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R). He retired from the military in 2017 to pursue his current work assisting clients healing from chronic health issues related to trauma. He and his wife, Jenn, live in Kentucky and have seven children.

One morning in 2015, I was seeing a patient suffering from PTSD at Eisenhower Army Medical Center in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinic in Augusta, Georgia, where I was a physician. I had not planned to teach a grammar lesson that day, and yet I found myself reviewing basic categories of verbs with a patient.

I asked her, "Are you safe?," which is an existential "I am" question.

She answered using an entirely different kind of verb: "No, I don't feel safe," which is an attributive "I feel" statement.

So, having repeated her answer, I asked my question again: "I know you don't feel (attributive) safe, but are you safe (existential/identity)?" And then a wonderful thing happened. She paused, looked around, and started to implicitly distinguish between existential verbs of being/identity ("I am") and attributive verbs of internal experience/ physiology ("I feel").

"That's weird," she said. "I don't feel safe an individual until it is brought to his or her (inwardly in my body), but I am safe (outwardly in awareness. I have learned that these kinds of issues time and space)." can develop due to the neglect of formal instruction

I had received prior training and experience in school or a lack of healthy daily conversation with vagal tone and primitive brain stem reflexes, that provides informal instruction. They can also so I asked her to do something very simple. I told develop because of injuries, such as traumas, which her, "I want you to verbalize that out loud—'I am disrupt sensory and verbal integration. safe'—and then feel the air moving in and out of In fact, the more severe the trauma physically your nose slowly, while you move your tongue or spiritually, the greater effect it produces around the roof of your mouth and gumlines until on speech centers (Broca's area), sense of time you swallow, sigh, or yawn, just like a baby does (prefrontal cortex), visual processing (Brodmann's when nursing." area), sensory integration

My training taught me that (through the hippocampus the movements and primitive and thalamus), and executive/ reflexes associated with nursing organizational/planning when we are infants are strong function (in the signals of safety and help the Grammar doesn't just prefrontal cortex and body with internalization. In that moment I was asking her order language, left hemisphere).

Sure enough, about thirty seconds after that grammar brings, we can misappropriate verbalizing that she was safe, she swallowed, looked and misinterpret our experiences to our own up, and asked, "Why am I feeling safe now?" which is detriment. Disorganization within language both an attributive and existential question. structures can be trained, organized, healed, and

I said, "You feel safe because you just noticed that built up through grammar. you are safe." She had become aware, not just of her Grammar doesn't just order language, it orders feelings, but of the reality of her circumstances, the mind—and an ordered mind is a healthy one. largely by focusing on it with the aid of a few I am now retired from the military and pursuing simple grammatical concepts. a career in developing hybrid linguistic and

At that point in my career, I had been exposed neurologic tools for others. to a variety of neuromodulation techniques, such I am also a parent who, with my wife, is as adjusting inputs to the brain through muscle homeschooling our children. I often sit around our signals, joint position, and breathing patterns kitchen table with the older of our seven children, among other things, but this was my first foray into Simeon (10), Ransom (9), and Sava (7). We are now grammatical modulation of our sense of reality. working through our first year of Latin together.

Through that and countless other experiences In one recent lesson, I asked, "What are two reasons over the years, I now know that the inability to you would conjugate a verb in a sentence?" distinguish between basic categories of verbs, One of them answered, "To explain who or what is tenses, and other linguistic modifiers can cause doing it, or when it happened." significant physical and emotional problems (in And that's when I came to a realization about this case, anxiety), and that an ability to do so can what I do as a doctor working with PTSD patients. actually promote health. I have discovered, in grammar, an important

The inability to make these important and effective tool: I conjugate experiences for verbal distinctions can be virtually invisible to a living.

We often hear people say to affirm and then focus on and internalize a very significant it orders the mind–they are "left speechless," "dumbfounded," or "without and (for her) relevant truth: and an ordered mind words to express" things they her sa fet y. O ver t he yea rs, have seen or experienced. I've learned that this step is is a healthy one. This is not just a euphemism; extremely important because it is a literal truth. When it is not just the truth heard language deserts us, we are left that changes people, but the without the means to properly truth that is heard, received, integrate experiences in our internalized, and acted upon. minds. And without the order