Listen & Learn: Improve Your English & Fix Family Ties?
#BritishEnglish 📘 Can Sibling Therapy Resolve Childhood Rivalries? In this podcast we explore the intriguing world of Sibling Therapy while you effortlessly work on your English vocabulary and listening skills! Another lesson that helps you stay curious & grow as you develop your language skills through interesting topics!
What do we have lined up in today's English language lesson?
- Improve Family Vocabulary: Learn key English terms about family dynamics and therapy.
- Boost Listening Skills: Enhance understanding with repeated listening and clear explanations.
- Practice English Naturally: Gain automatic grammar skills through engaging topics.
✔Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/english-listening-practice-sibling-therapy-explained/
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
⭐ Carl Jung
Explore the intriguing world of Sibling Therapy while effortlessly improving your English vocabulary and listening skills! In just over 10 minutes of listening you will explore the nuances of sibling relationships, which will sharpen your English and introduce you to key terms in an engaging, practical context.
Family is not an important thing. It's everything.
⭐ Michael J. Fox
Are you ready to transform your language skills and perhaps even your family dynamics? 🌍 Join learners worldwide & start speaking English fluently today! Visit AdeptEnglish.com
More About This Lesson
A unique English lesson on "Sibling Therapy" to improve both your British English language skills and maybe even some family relationships! This lesson helps will help you with family vocabulary while you discover a revolutionary approach to therapy that might change forever how you interact with your family.
Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.
⭐ Sam Levenson
How will your English skills gain from this lesson?
- You improve listening skills by repeatedly hearing new vocabulary.
- You expand your vocabulary, especially on family relationships.
- You practice automatic grammar learning for more correct speech.
- You learn therapy-related terms, enhancing topic-specific language.
- You engage with advanced sentence structures through varied topics.
- You gain insight into therapy concepts, aiding comprehension skills.
- You discover contextual usage of words, boosting real-life understanding.
- You explore sibling dynamics in English, enriching conversational topics.
This lesson allows you to practice English in a meaningful context. You'll learn how multilingualism and sibling communication can boost cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence, enriching both your language skills and personal relationships. Now that's a complicated English sentence!
Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.
⭐ Dalai Lama
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FAQ
- What is sibling therapy? Sibling therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on improving the relationships between brothers and sisters. By addressing long-standing conflicts and fostering a deeper understanding among siblings, this therapy aims to enhance familial relationships, which can also positively impact your English learning journey by creating a more supportive environment.
- How can sibling therapy help me learn English more effectively? Just listening to this lesson will help improve your English. However sibling therapy, the communication skills you develop, can directly translate into improved English fluency as well. Moreover, the emotional regulation skills learned in therapy can help you feel more confident in your English conversations.
- What types of issues are typically addressed in sibling therapy? Sibling therapy can address a range of issues, including unresolved conflicts from childhood, jealousy, competition, and differing perceptions of family roles and dynamics. By understanding and resolving these issues, you can improve your interpersonal skills, which are crucial for both personal relationships and effective language learning.
- Can I participate in sibling therapy if I am an only child? Yes, sibling therapy can be adapted to suit those who do not have biological siblings but may have step-siblings or close familial-like relationships that mimic sibling dynamics. These sessions can help you understand and improve any significant long-term relationships, which is beneficial for personal development and language learning.
- What should I expect during a sibling therapy session? During a sibling therapy session, expect to engage in guided discussions with your therapist and siblings about your relationships and personal experiences. The therapist might use various therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) or person-centred therapy, to facilitate understanding and healing. These sessions not only improve familial ties but also enhance your listening and speaking skills in English.
Exploring sibling therapy enriches your English and bonds like two branches growing from the same tree, uniquely shaped yet fundamentally connected.
Most Unusual Words:
- SIBLING: A brother or sister.
- SPOUSE: A husband or a wife.
- THERAPY: Activities or talking sessions designed to help someone feel better mentally.
- COGNITIVE: Related to thinking or understanding.
- BEHAVIOURAL: Concerning the actions or behaviors of a person.
- CONTEXT: The circumstances or setting in which something happens.
- SUPERFICIAL: Concerning only the surface, not deep or complex.
- INTEGRATIVE: Combining different methods and approaches.
- BLENDED: Mixed or combined, especially regarding family structures with step-parents and half-siblings.
- ROLES: The parts people play in specific situations, like characters in a play.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| About | 19 |
| Therapy | 19 |
| People | 12 |
| Means | 12 |
| Relationships | 10 |
| Different | 10 |
| Sibling | 9 |
| Their | 8 |
| Think | 7 |
| There | 7 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
Transcript: Therapy Has A Sibling Rivalry Problem-Listen And Learn
Explore Family Vocabulary Through Sibling Therapy
Hi there. Would you think about going for therapy with your sister or brother? You may have heard how people go to therapy with their partner, their husband or their wife. This is to work on difficulties in a relationship. But apparently there is a new trend - ‘Sibling Therapy’. The word 'sibling', SIBLING means ‘a brother or sister’. It’s a word that covers both. A little bit like ‘spouse’, SPOUSE means a husband or a wife. So now people are having ‘Sibling Therapy’. So this podcast is about therapy, THERAPY - meaning ‘one of the things that people might do if they need psychological help’. Usually, but not always, this means sitting in a room, talking with a therapist about your problems’, but it is sometimes done outside too and the therapeutic activity may be something other than talking. The longer word is ‘psychotherapy’ - and it’s what I do as my main job. But it’s about this idea of going to therapy ‘with your sister or brother! This is quite a new idea in therapy, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Your relationships with your siblings can shape your life almost as profoundly as those with your parents.
📷
Photograph of siblings. Understand more each time you listen.
So today, I’m talking about Sibling Therapy while you work on your English listening skills, with some great English vocabulary especially if you want to learn the words for family relationships in English. Great listening practice - I spell out and explain any difficult words that you may not have heard before. And if you listen several times, you’ll find that you understand more with each listen. Your brain will be doing its ‘automatic grammar learning’ too. That means your grammar is more likely to be automatically correct when you speak! So let’s get into….Sibling Therapy.
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
What happens in therapy?
One statistic I came across - in the United States alone, around 30 million people receive some type of therapy every year. So lots of people are interested in what goes on inside a therapy room. Surely it’s ‘just talking’? What is the therapist doing besides listening? Well, there are lots of different answers to that question, but let’s talk through the different approaches, different ‘ways of doing therapy’. Lots of different theories sit beneath how therapy is done. So you might have ‘Cognitive Therapy’, that’s COGNITIVE - which means ‘related to your thinking or your cognition’. You might do ‘Behavioural Therapy’, that’s BEHAVIOURAL, which means therapy that looks at your behaviour’, possibly looking at changing your behaviour. And an approach to therapy which is very well known is a combination of these two ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ or CBT. This is very popular and what you get offered on NHS in the UK. My opinion? It’s great for some things, and really doesn’t work at all for others.
Another type of therapy - if the therapist focuses just on following your emotions, your feelings and reflecting them back to you, that’s called ‘Person-Centred’ Therapy. That's just a really quick summary of some main types of therapy. And of course, what many therapies and the 'medical model' have traditionally ignored - people's 'context', CONTEXT. By ‘context’, I mean the circumstances that people are living in. So it’s important we look at that too. Often unhappiness or anxiety is all about the situation you’re in, which makes sense. I think all of these different types of therapy are useful in different ways. And I’m what is known as an ‘Integrative’ therapist - meaning I ‘integrate’, I use most of the approaches. I don’t like to belong to just one flavour, one type of therapy - that would be silly to me as they all offer something. But the type of therapy I’m about to talk about next is perhaps the one that I find helps people make the biggest change. If you know about therapy, it’s the one I’ve left out!
Classic psychodynamic therapy - a gold standard and all about relationships!
So when people think about therapy, they might think of a Dr Sigmund Freud type person, saying 'Tell me about your childhood'! And if you're doing any therapy beyond the superficial - ‘superficial’ SUPERFICIAL means ‘surface level’, ‘not very deep’ then yes, you will find yourself talk about your childhood in therapy! Childhood relationships and experiences inform the way we relate to other people now as well as 'how we relate to ourselves' - now. By that, I mean things like 'how do I handle low mood?' or how do I handle anxiety?'. So talking about 'how it was with my mother or my father when I was growing up' is something that’s done a lot in therapy. We might also talk about the other people that helped raise us - aunts, uncles, grandparents for example. And our partner, our husband or wife - all of these relationships may be influencing the present, but also in the past, they may have helped shape who we have become. Positively or negatively.
But what's been neglected, not looked as much at until fairly recently? Of course - sibling relationships. Your relationships with your brother or your sister. Think about it: these are the longest relationships most of us will have in our lifetimes, so they’re perhaps worth working on.
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Sibling relationships shape who we are
So the idea is that our siblings shape us too. And this makes sense - of course they do! But it’s been neglected in therapy until recently. Even if you’re what we call ‘an only child’ - meaning that you’re the only child that your two parents had together - even the lack of siblings shapes us. A ‘lack’ means that ‘you don’t have any’ or ‘a shortage’ of siblings. And then of course there’s the complexity of ‘joined families’, where you might have half-siblings and stepsiblings. A ‘half-sibling’ or a ‘half-sister or half-brother’ means someone who shares one parent with you. And a ‘stepsibling’, so a ‘stepsister or stepbrother - that means the child of the person who’s married to your mother or your father. So no blood relative, but they may be very much part of your life growing up, especially if you live in the same house. And again positive or negative influence is possible. Family relationships can be very complicated and even more so in ‘blended families’, that’s BLENDED. That’s where parents have new partners and additional children.
Even if you have only have full siblings from the same parents, then your position in the family, whether you’re the youngest or the eldest or in the middle - that matters too. How near you are in age or how distant in age matters. I have two sisters, but both are very much older than me - one of them I’ve never lived with. The other I shared a bedroom with when I was growing up so these relationships are different. It also matters how many children there are in a family, whether they’re boys or girls. So if you’re the youngest of five and a girl and you’ve got four brothers who’re older than you, that’s a very different experience growing up from if you are an elder sister of two sisters who’re ten years apart. And a first child often has a different experience to that of a younger child. There are many cultures in which the eldest son in a family has extra responsibility for younger siblings. And in some families the same is true for the eldest sister. There are many possible stories and combinations - as simple as ‘Were your siblings nice to you?’ Are you friends? Are you close emotionally or distant? Did you fight? Do you have similar interests or are you really different, opposite perhaps? The characters of all the people in your family - and definitely whether they had any problems when you were growing up - this all matters too. And siblings often play different roles within the family - that’s ROLES. Almost like the cast of characters in a play. Parents may say ‘Oh yes, she’s the clever one’ or ‘He’s the sporty one’ or ‘This one’s the one that cause us trouble’. Can you imagine the rivalry that this may set up between siblings?
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Sibling relationships may be the longest you have!
And according to the article I read this week, more people are asking to do therapy with their sibling in adulthood, in order to work on those relationships, particularly arguments, differences or fallings out. I did some research on Sibling Therapy and found an interesting article - the link is in the transcript. The therapist who wrote the article talks about how while your parents ‘overlap’ with you for some of your life, you siblings are likely to have a similar lifespan to yours. This means that sibling relationships are some of the longest in your life. They’re worth working on therefore and there are all kinds of situations that make this appropriate.
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In the article I read, the writer talks to a brother and sister aged 52 and 49 who had an argument one Christmas and then didn’t speak to one each other for months. This was painful for both of them, but they didn’t know how to resolve their differences until they went to Sibling Therapy. They found that to resolve their differences, sort out the problems in their relationship, it wasn’t just about discussing what was happening present day. No, they needed to go back to their experiences in the family together when they were growing up. The brother says ‘The fact that you had to go back to things [from] when you were six, seven, eight, nine years old, to get to things you're dealing with in your forties and fifties, it's pretty surprising that there's a connection. But there was." And the therapy was really useful for this brother and sister. They now understand each other far better and have a better relationship. It’s a common mistake to think that children in the same family have the same experience. It may be similar in terms of the values and the schooling and some of the things that are taught by the parents. But each child’s relationship with each parent and each sibling will be different. Well worth exploring. Having good sibling relationships really does make a different to your quality of life.
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Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
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