Pilar Sordo laid out the conclusions of eight years of research on emotional stability and language in the Conversaciones de LA NACION series, arguing that personality is not fixed and that the way people speak to themselves and one another determines mental health.
Sordo said plainly: "Cambiamos todo el tiempo." She added, "Sería triste que las experiencias no te cambien," and used both lines to frame a central claim of her work — the evolution of character responds to the mutation of priorities and opinions, and people change as their circumstances do.
She expanded that point with a careful personal example: "Vamos evolucionando, porque somos dependiendo de las circunstancias, porque yo soy ansiosa en determinadas circunstancias e hiper tranquila en otras, porque puedo ser ordenada en algunas cosas y desordenada en otras." That variability, she said, is not pathology but the normal movement of a life shaped by external change.
The weight of Sordo's argument rests on her insistence that language and internal narrative are the scaffolding of mental health. "Llego a que la unidad más básica de salud mental es el diálogo interno," she said, and she drew a direct line from inner speech to self-regard: "Cómo te hablás define tu amor propio y tu visión del mundo." From that premise she argued that confidence and resilience follow from how a person narrates their own life.
Her talk turned urgent when she linked those ideas to a decline in expressive resources. Quoting the psychiatrist José Luis Marín, Sordo warned about a lexical erosion driven in part by visual technologies: "Nos enfermamos por falta de vocabulario." She repeated the observation in three forms — "Hemos reducido la cantidad de palabras que usamos," "Estamos hablando menos. Estamos usando menos vocabulario al hablar" — to stress that poorer language use carries emotional risk.
Context matters here: these claims came as the public result of an eight-year program of research that, Sordo said, combined observation and reflection on how people change. The conversational examples and the focus on inner speech are presented by Sordo as the outcomes of that sustained inquiry rather than as off-the-cuff advice.
The tension in Sordo's message is sharp. She insists that growth requires exposure to discomfort even while contemporary life encourages avoidance. "Crecer duele," she said, and she placed the cultural tendency to flee from difficulty opposite the work of maturation. "Es necesario ser dócil frente al dolor," she argued, going further: "Mientras más rebelde seas frente al dolor, más se queda contigo, más te jode, más persiste, y por lo tanto menos aprendizajes te produce, la docilidad frente al dolor a mí me parece que es algo clave en el proceso del crecimiento humano."
That prescription — attend to your inner dialogue, expand the vocabulary you have available, and allow yourself to be changed by what others say — is also practical. "La conversación tiene que tener ese desafío en el que yo me exponga a transformarme con lo que tú me dices. Porque si no se transforma en una especie de monólogo intermitente," she warned, linking the quality of social exchange to the possibility of learning and healing.
Her final thrust was both clinical and moral: the health of a person’s mind begins in the words they use with themselves and with others. If Sordo is right, the immediate consequence for readers is clear — paying attention to how we narrate our lives and to the words we retain or discard matters as much as diet or sleep. In her view, accepting vulnerability and letting language do its work are the acts that make growth possible.
