Daily Dose of English 196
Therapy
Daily Dose of English 196
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about therapy. Therapy is interesting, definitely. And it has a bit of an interesting history, especially in the U.S. and other English speaking cultures. But I want to talk about it because I've actually been going to, or been taking, taking therapy? No, going to therapy. We say going to therapy for like a month now. Every two weeks I do a session and it is, Different than I thought it would be I guess and in a lot of ways better And I just want to talk a little bit about that and my experience, which is not going to be like everybody else's experience. And so, um, I definitely recommend you try it because it's, there's not really much that you can lose other than some money. And so if you can find somebody who's not too expensive, um, and is recommended, then I would, I would recommend you try it out because you might learn something about yourself or about the whole process that you didn't know before. um so therapy in like the U.S. specifically has a very interesting uh past and sort of cultural cultural significance I guess because there was basically a lot of older people don't think that therapy is useful they think that it is a a bad thing to do, they think that it is weak to do. And then sort of the younger you go, the more that it is seen as something normal or potentially even necessary. I think among a lot of younger people, It's seen as similar to like going to the dentist or going to the doctor every so often where you should get checkups, you should check your teeth, you should check up on your mental health and your own functioning and that sort of thing because it's just a good thing to do. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have anything wrong with you, just that there is it's worth talking about. But sort of the older you go, especially for men, older men, it's seen as something that you shouldn't do, right? You shouldn't talk about your emotions. You shouldn't be emotional. You should just do your thing. You should just work or whatever it is. which creates a bit of an interesting cultural landscape for therapy, and that still prevails. Not everybody is on the same page with therapy and what it's good for, what it is even. And so there are lots of different takes and opinions and whatnot, which is... Interesting to grow up in, because I definitely grew up in a place where it wasn't a bad thing necessarily. Plenty of people that I knew had therapists or went to therapy or did something like that or wanted to be a therapist, right? That's also relatively common. I never saw it as something negative, but I also never went or was really offered to go to therapy because it's still not, I would say, a mainstream thing. There were some counselors in various schools that I went to, but counseling is, especially like a school counselor, is something very different than like somebody trained in other kinds of... I mean, it's really the same idea, right? Counseling and therapy. Just different sort of ways of going about it and that sort of thing. But anyway, so I didn't really see it as a big as a negative or anything, but it's like, okay, I don't really need that. That's not something that I should necessarily go do. Because, I mean, I don't really know why. I think that was just the statement. It's like, okay, I'm functional. There's nothing wrong. And so I guess I don't need anything. Done. Easy. But I've come around to the idea that therapy is not necessarily that anything is inherently wrong, but more to help you to understand things, to give you tips and tricks, or to calm the noise a bit as well in your mind or your brain. because you might be thinking about tons of different things for your own life, for the people around you, whatever it might be, your own emotions, and having somebody to, not necessarily even help you with that, but to talk through them, to give their input, can make some other things very, very clear, which is very helpful, obviously. If things are clearer to you and more straightforward, they're more actionable and you can actually do things. Oh, excuse me. I also like the accountability it provides. Accountability is when, basically when somebody knows that you're doing something or about something that you want to do or should do and can keep you not motivated, but they, but basically they know that you're doing the thing. And so you're like, okay, I should do the thing. Cause I did tell people about it. That's a terrible explanation of accountability. I hope that it kind of makes sense. Um, but I really appreciated having someone to keep me accountable and to help me, uh, keep thinking about these things because it is. Better than if I just leave it up to myself, because like I said, I'm functional. It's not like I, I have, I have any big problems or I have things in my way of being a functional human, but there are definitely things that I want to improve and get better at and that sort of thing. Something that I realized about once I'd been going to therapy, I think for a couple of weeks, was that I do struggle with social anxiety, with talking to people out on the street and interacting with people that I don't know well already. And I realized that primarily because I was thinking about these things more. And I was thinking about my interactions with other people, being more social, and I realized that it does cause me a lot of anxiety and always has. I have specific memories of times where I would think through what I was going to say to somebody five, six, seven, or eight times and still be very nervous just to say something normal. Just to be like, hey, did you do the homework last night? Or whatever. Very simple questions like that back in high school. And I never really realized before that it was causing me anxiety to do social things and to talk to people in that way. Because I never thought about myself as necessarily being anxious or having these anxious issues because my anxiety doesn't really come out in the same way as other people's of showing anxiety or that sort of thing. But it definitely is very much there for me. And so understanding that and realizing that made it so that I could... Talk about that and kind of realize it and work around it better. But if I just ignore it about it existing, right? You can't face it if that makes any sense, right? You can't. Um, look at your, like your social anxiety or your current issue or whatever it is and go, okay, this is something that, that I need to, I know about myself now. So how can I improve it? How can I avoid the problems that it might cause? How can I learn to not have this thing potentially, right? There's all these different things that you can do if you know that something is there. But if you don't know that it exists or you're just ignoring it, you can't even plan around it. I mean, even in English, right? Like an example, if you're learning English and there's certain concepts or grammatical concepts that you don't even know exist, how are you supposed to learn them, right? If it's completely unknown to you or even words, right? How are you supposed to know about a word that you've never heard, never seen, never anything, right? Why would you know that word? You've never ever seen it. Um, but if you do know it, you can, or if you have seen it before, you do know it exists. You can work on learning it. Same thing. Um, sort of to various emotional things or, um, not even necessarily disorders, but like just things that might be going on in your head if you don't ignore them. So if you do pay attention to them, you can understand them better. You can focus on them and that sort of thing. There's actually a lot of really good information out there on more mundane and simple things like discipline or motivation and that sort of thing. Because if you just blindly hope that you're going to be more motivated or more disciplined or more X, Y, Z, without really understanding what it is and how to focus on it, you're never really gonna make progress. And that's where some kind of therapy can be very, very helpful. It's also helpful to have a professional, somebody that knows what they're talking about, who specifically also knows you. Because if you do that thing where you look up something online, people cannot give you specific advice, right? This is in pretty much every medical thing or financial thing that you'll see on the internet will be like, this is not medical advice. This is not financial advice. And that's basically because they cannot give good medical or financial advice if they do not know you specifically. It is impossible, basically. And so everybody has to say that to sort of cover their ass, but then they go to give advice anyways, which is another problem we can talk about at some other point. But somebody that knows you specifically in your situation, whether it's your financial situation, your mental situation, or your situation, can give you specific advice. If they know that you earn a good salary, but you spend all your money on other things like this x, y, z, they can give you specific advice on how to improve that. But if somebody doesn't know anything about you, they can't actually give you very good advice because they don't know anything about you, right? And so that's another thing that I find very helpful is that I can talk to somebody who now knows me and they can give sort of specific recommendations, use things that they know about my life rather than just saying very generic things that you can find on any Wikipedia article or whatever. Anyways. So yeah, that's my rambling about therapy for 11 minutes and 4 seconds. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little bit of something. If you have your own thoughts on therapy, please let me know down in the comments below. I'm very curious to hear. But that is going to be everything for me today. I hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Dose of English. I'll see you then. Bye.
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