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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

Every seminar, book and expert on realizing goals, changing habits and self-actualization stress the power of visualization and journaling. The more time, effort and imagination you put into an image, the more likely that image is to integrate into your personality -- to become real.

A very powerful tool in understanding and accepting behaviors and in altering your own beliefs and behaviors is role playing: you assume the identity of the person you wish to understand or emulate and you "play" their role in a guided session and you then discuss and evaluate what you learned by that. You can do the same thing for negative behaviors in order to better understand them.

The main – and best – way for children to learn is through playing and pretending. However, it is a proven fact that after playing/pretending in situations where aggression and violence are main components, those aggressive behaviors stay with the child even after the play/pretending is stopped. The mere act of behaving in a certain manner while playing makes that manner of behaving more acceptable when the children are not playing or pretending.

As parents we discourage our children from continuously playing or pretending to be evil, hurtful people because we know that such behavior will influence their future choices and actions. When evil deeds (even in play) are rewarded, it increases the acceptability of future evil deeds.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. Vonnegut is on to something, there. I have a similar saying as my sig on email: You are what you believe. Journals, writings, stories they all explore what we believe and what we feel.

I understand, even enjoy the catharsis of role playing a behavior that bothers me. I enjoy the freedom of role playing a behavior that is completely different than I would ever consider doing in real life. At the same time, I respect power that pretending and fantasizing has. Our pretending shapes our fantasies and our fantasies shape our lives. It’s a powerful thing. It’s the very way our brains are wired to work: The more you think in a certain way, the harder it is to change the way you think.

Words are powerful things. They can be tools for understanding or for division, to heal or to harm. They can reinforce the positive and excise the negative. They can explore possibilities in order for a better understanding of complex issues. Or they can do just the opposite. They can be used to glorify harmful behaviors and reinforce destructive deeds. They can be used to narrow choices and discourage other views.

Our words, beliefs and fantasy/pretend life shape who we are. We ought to be careful what we pretend to be or we may just end up being something we don’t want to be.