Did You Know That Talking Is A Natural Medicine?
If we didn’t learn to speak from an early age, our brains would never develop the way they do. Indeed, we speak in order to develop other functions which are also extremely important, as social and rational animals that we are.
The links established between individuals and groups strengthen adaptive competence in the face of crises and vital transitions. Therefore, the simple act of talking and sharing our problems with others becomes a valuable tool for claiming and receiving help tailored to our needs.
Support groups: talking to heal
Support groups are made up of volunteers who share a certain type of issue, where stories and resources are exchanged. They derive from the competence model, the principles which inspire them are those of cooperation, equality and mutual aid.
In the face of difficult situations, being able to create new social bonds can substitute or compensate for the natural resources that each person possesses and which may not be functioning efficiently. Bringing in a professional generates a potential bond that can help reinforce certain aspects: indeed, it has been observed that some people obtain significant benefits simply by talking, listening and sharing their experience with people who are going through a similar situation. .
A very special dialogue is encouraged in support groups: there is room for problems, failures, worries, feelings, etc. Thus, the members of a group realize that their reactions are normal and shared by other people who are going through or have gone through a similar situation. As a result, more positive beliefs and attitudes emerge, so that the level of perceived threat is reduced.
Developing the story of a trauma is an essential element in successfully overcoming it.
Some people resort to therapy for having experienced an event or a set of events in a traumatic way, so that the event left a mark causing difficulty in their current life. It is common in these assumptions that people who have had such an experience feel unable to express the repressed event in their subliminal consciousness.
Part of therapeutic work with “traumatized people” involves expressing the event in words, constructing a narrative and integrating it into the experience within the personality. In short, it is a question of reconstructing the meaning given to the traumatic event, by making it possible to organize the concepts of the self and, consequently, the cognitive schemas.
The benefits of speaking more than one language
Speaking more than one language is not only positive when it comes to interacting with others, it also generates benefits for our mental health. Here are some of the benefits of being bilingual or multilingual:
- Improve levels of perception.
- Delay the natural deterioration of some important cognitive abilities, such as memory.
- Help treat certain ailments more quickly.
- Generate a protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease.
- Help to make more reasoned decisions and make us more agile when it comes to solving problems.
Dialogue is also internal
There is still a myth that people talking to themselves are a little bit crazy. However, deep down, we all talk to ourselves, give each other words of encouragement or we blame ourselves. So everything we say to ourselves directly affects how we act or how we feel. Just as a group can empower its members through the messages shared within it, our internal dialogues also have the power to influence our well-being.
Psychologist Rafael Santandreu, in his book The Art of Not Making Your Life Bitter , talks about how internal dialogue arises on many occasions from the need to assess what is happening to us. Thus, it will be opportune to realize the responsibility that we have on our emotions and to try to fight the phrases that we say to ourselves that are not true, such as: “Am I really still disastrous? Are we really worth nothing? ”
