Nominalisations

This lesson is here to make you see your problems a bit differently.

Here’s a question for you that I can guarantee that nobody has ever asked you before. Can you physically put your problem that’s holding you back into a wheelbarrow? I’m serious. Could you pick it up, carry it outside, dump it in a wheelbarrow, and wheel it away? Because if you can’t, your problem might not actually exist in quite the way you think it does.

What you’ve got instead is what’s called a nominalisation, and in a moment I’ll explain exactly what this means and why it’s so bloody important if you actually want to get rid of that problem you’ve been dragging around with you.

A nominalisation, by definition, is something that’s not really there. There’s a popular definition in therapy and coaching circles that goes like this: “A nominalisation is something that can’t be put in a wheelbarrow.” Metaphorically, this implies that a nominalisation has no real physical structure. If it can’t go into the wheelbarrow, then it either doesn’t exist at all, or it must be something you’re doing instead. Bear with me because in a moment this is going to make a lot more sense.

Looking at things grammatically (I promise this won’t take long), a nominalisation is when we turn a verb into a noun. This creates what’s properly known as a nominalised verb, or nominalisation for short. By the end of this chapter, you’ll hopefully realise just how slippery and dangerous these things can be. But also what you can do about them.

A nominalisation starts as a verb. It’s a process. If you remember from school, a verb is a doing word. It’s something you do. The trouble is we have this terrible habit of turning these processes into something that seems more real, more solid, more like an actual thing (that’s a noun, which is a name, a real object, a place, or a person). We nominalise the verb into something it isn’t.

Let me give you an example. Imagine a person with lots of “get up and go.” Now try to find that get up and go. Where is it? Can you see it? Touch it? No. That “get up and go” is actually two nominalisations rolled into one delightful phrase. It doesn’t exist physically. There are days when I wish I had a bit more get up and go myself, but it doesn’t come in bottles. You can’t put it in a wheelbarrow. It’s not something I can write a prescription for (though God knows people have asked).

Instead, a person who has “get up and go” has it because they have a habit of getting up and going. “Getting up” and “going” are verbs. They’re things you do. “Get up and go” is a nominalisation. It’s something you’ve turned into a noun, made it sound like a thing you possess or don’t possess, when really it’s just a pattern of behaviour.

Let’s take another example, one that’s probably more relevant to you right now. I’m stressing about writing my daily word count for the lessons in this course. “Stressing” is a process, something I’m doing to myself about something. It’s an action, a verb. Yet when I say “I have stress,” I’ve turned that verb into a noun, a nominalisation. Stress is real, it absolutely exists, but it’s something you’re doing. You can’t really collect it. You can’t put it in a wheelbarrow. Not in real life, anyway.

Here’s where the problem gets worse. When you create a nominalisation, you lose control over it. Remember, it’s a process, something you’re doing, but you’ve transformed it into what feels like a physical entity. Try the test. Try to put your stress into a wheelbarrow. You can’t. It fails the wheelbarrow test because stress, in this context, is a nominalisation. You’ve turned a verb into a noun, and here’s where the real damage happens: when you nominalise your stress, you give it a virtual structure. You make it more real. You give it a presence. You mentally forget it’s something you’re doing, and therefore you lose control over it completely.

It’s frighteningly easy to lose control over a nominalisation because try finding that stress. It could be nowhere, or it could be everywhere. It’s no longer something that only happens when you’re doing a specific thing. Instead, it can be there all the time. The feelings attached to it can be there all the time. It becomes this constant presence in your life rather than a response to specific situations.

To protect yourself psychologically against nominalisations, you need to turn them back mentally into verbs again. Then you can practically get control over what you’re doing to cause that feeling, and you can do something different instead.

So when a patient says to me “I’m really stressed,” the first thing I ask is “So what are you stressing about?” In doing so, I’m making the nominalisation back into a process again. A process is something you can do something about. A nominalisation distances you from taking action. It makes your problem seem bigger, more permanent, more out of your control than it actually is.

Nominalisations are vague. They mean different things to different people. They’re difficult to get rid of because they’re hard to visualise, even if they’re incredibly easy to feel. You feel the stress. You feel the anxiety. You feel low. But can you picture exactly what “low mood” looks like? Can you describe its shape, its colour, its texture? Probably not.

Nominalisations are also terrible goals to have. “I want more confidence.” “I want more happiness.” These are difficult goals to achieve because they’re nominalisations. A good coach will notice this immediately and ask that person “What do you want to do confidently?” or “What will you do to make yourself happy?” We need to turn it back into a process, an action, something you can actually do.

It’s crucially important that you notice nominalisations and turn them back into processes, even when that nominalisation you notice is a positive one. Remember in a previous lesson when I asked you to imagine and visualise your goals with a clear image in your head? One thing this does is it gets rid of some of the nominalisations. For example, just try to imagine all of your happiness. You’re probably just going to get a vague good feeling inside. But when you de-nominalise this back into a process and imagine a picture of yourself happily doing something specific, you start to get an actual image. This is something you can work towards. This is something you can make happen.

We’ll come back to this later when we get onto goal setting properly. For now, just remember that if you really want to make a goal attainable, it can’t be a nominalisation. It needs to be something real, tangible, or something you do to cause that emotion. It needs to be something you can visualise clearly.

A word of care before I go any further with this technique. It’s a genuinely useful way of loosening the grip a vague, frightening feeling can have on you, but it has its limits, and it isn’t a clinical diagnosis. Depression in particular is a recognised illness with biological, psychological and social causes, not simply something a person is doing to themselves, and if you’re dealing with more than a passing low mood, the right first step is to talk to your GP, not to reason your way out of it alone. With that said, here’s how the technique works for the everyday version of these feelings.

When working with people who notice a nominalisation getting in their way, the first step is to de-nominalise it and shift the problem back into a process. For example, “I’m a failure” could be de-nominalised by asking “What caused you to fail at this?” “How did you go about it?” “How else could you do it?” “How would you do it differently next time?” “Before this attempt, what other options did you have?”

As you can see in this example, when you de-nominalise something, you can actually work with it and start to make progress. You turn a permanent-sounding state (I am a failure) into a specific, temporary event (I failed at this particular thing). One you can change. The other feels much harder to shift.

Let’s look at a couple more examples from my practice. “I’ve got stress I can’t shake” could be de-nominalised by asking “What’s stressing you at the moment?” Suddenly it’s not this permanent cloud hanging over you. It’s a response to specific things in your life, and those things can often be changed, one at a time.

“I have anger issues” could be de-nominalised by asking “What’s happening just before you get angry?” and “What are you doing in that moment that you might do differently?” This isn’t about pretending anger simply appears from nowhere, or that it’s entirely within someone’s control in the heat of the moment. It’s about noticing that there’s usually a trigger, a pattern, and a response, and that the response is often the part with the most room to change.

“I want that sense of achievement” could be de-nominalised by asking “What do you want to achieve and how are you going to achieve it?” Turn the vague feeling into specific actions and outcomes.

Nominalisations are as difficult to get rid of as they are to notice. They’re slippery little things that carry real feelings, and you need to get into the habit of noticing them in your own thoughts and in the language you use in your self-talk.

Here’s an exchange I had with a patient recently. “I’m a loser,” he said, slumped in the chair in front of me. “What have you lost?” I replied. He looked at me like I’d just asked him to solve a differential equation. He hadn’t lost anything specific. He just “was” a loser, in his own mind. That’s the nominalisation doing its work.

So let’s go back to the stress example. A patient tells me they have too much stress and anxiety (both nominalisations, as you now know), and sometimes I’ll prescribe medication to help with that. Let’s think about this a bit more carefully. The patient is getting a pill, a physical thing, to help with something that has no physical form. You might be thinking “Well, no wonder they don’t always work.” But it’s not quite as simple as that. That medication can genuinely help readdress some of the imbalance caused by all of that anxious thinking, or it might take the edge off enough to stop you overthinking in the first place. Either way, a bit of work on how or what you are stressing and worrying about can’t fail to help too. That’s the real point I’m trying to make here.

But let’s look at this another way. If you’re still carrying all of your stress and anxiety around with you right now, if it’s weighing you down, why don’t you try a bit of mental imagery work with it instead? If you still think it’s real and not something you’re doing, if despite this particularly repetitive lesson you still can’t get your head around the concept of nominalisations, then let’s do a short technique.

In a few minutes, close your eyes. When your eyes are closed, and only when you’re ready and feeling fully relaxed, just imagine dumping all of that stress and anxiety into that wheelbarrow. Make that stress real. Give it a colour. Give it a smell. Give it a texture. Dump it all in that wheelbarrow. Let it take as long as it takes. Now imagine that wheelbarrow rolling off by itself into the distance with all that stress and anxiety in it. Make it go further and further until you can hardly see it. Maybe a little further. Until it’s just a tiny spot on the horizon. Then even smaller still. Ask yourself how far does it have to go before those feelings that were attached to that stress and anxiety fall away too?

What you’ve just done is a visualisation technique that some people find genuinely helpful alongside other approaches for dealing with nominalisations. Useful things, wheelbarrows. Just ask any gardener. Or any half-decent coach or therapist.

Further reading

Comfort Zone and Safety Zone

Denial and the Ostrich Effect

The Framing Effect

Extreme Thinking

Enjoy the Journey

Further reading

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