Broken and Empty Words

Repaired, they become the doorway home

The headline caught me like a sudden gust from an unseen world:

“Unseen leader of the world.”

It was the Hull Daily Mail, not a mystic text — yet there it was, a phrase that opened the air around me. For a moment it startled me, then it revealed something already known: the way language slips, distorts, exaggerates, and sometimes — unexpectedly — points toward truth.

In an age where words crack under strain, even a newspaper headline can become a small parable.

We live in a time when language has thinned. Words are stretched until their meanings leak away, and the world begins to mirror this breakdown. When words become broken and empty, people follow: behaviour loses its centre, cultures tilt into confusion, and the inner government that should hold a life steady becomes divided against itself.

I work precisely at this fault-line. My service — Diction Resolution Therapy — begins where words have failed. Addiction, for instance, is not merely a behaviour; it is a wounded word. It has been pulled so far from its original purpose that it now obscures its own healing. My task has been to return such words to their rightful places in the architecture of human functioning. When the word is restored, the person often follows.

This is why the headline mattered. It showed, in miniature, the cultural moment we inhabit: an era where what is seen has swollen into spectacle, and what is unseen — the inner leadership, the quiet truth, the subtle alignment — has faded from awareness. And yet, paradoxically, it is the unseen that holds the power.

A word is unseen. Meaning is unseen. The shift in a heart, the rearrangement of a pattern, the moment a soul remembers how to breathe — all unseen.

The Sufis have always known this.

“I follow the religion of Love,” sang Ibn ʿArabī, throwing open the gates of belonging. Rūmī called us from every possible state — broken, weary, ashamed — into the circle of return. These voices have tracked me my whole life, reminding me that unity speaks through every tongue when the tongue is healed.

The cultural stage we are living on — the political tumult, the fragmentation of common meaning, the rise of spectacle over substance — is simply the outer version of what happens inside a person enslaved to a broken word. Society mirrors the individual; the individual mirrors society. When a word collapses, worlds collapse.

And so the work is simple, though never easy:

Repair the words.

Restore their truth.

Return people to themselves through the doorway of meaning.

When a person sits before me, lost in the fog of stuck-addiction or broken-addiction, what I am listening for is not their story alone — but the wounded architecture of their language. Their words have become brittle, overused, emptied out. When we repair the meaning, a reconnection begins. “Behaviour” reclaims its inner structure again — be and have, the two lights that must meet before any transformation can rise.

This is the opposite of the toxic positivity that orthodox models often slide into, the bypassing that smooths the surface while leaving the foundations fractured. Healing demands the marriage of opposites. The paradox — the very thing Tom Chetwynd observed the intellectual orthodoxy despises — becomes the medicine. Opposites are not problems; they are partners. They form the mandorla in which new life appears.

The headline called me “unseen”, and in truth that is accurate: the deepest work is always invisible. What is visible — articles, interviews, roles, names — is merely the foam on the surface. The real leadership is interior: the alignment of word and meaning, being and having, love and discipline, that allows healing to take root.

We are living in a moment where cultures, like individuals, are crying out for this reconnection. Broken words have brought us here. Whole words will lead us out.

To repair a word is to repair a world.

One restored meaning at a time, the way home re-opens.