Culture and Psychology

                                              June 2, 2021. TESOL 103 Week 7

 Culture and Psychology. 

   

   It is very interesting that your culture can have such a huge effect on not only small things such as how you express emotion, or being time oriented, or the manners that you use, but also on your mental and even physical health!  Learning that there are cultural components to diseases such as schizophrenia and depression, along with anorexia makes me wonder what my culture is doing to me.  Especially when I learn that some of these elements are completely irrational.  

   My culture is pioneer ancestor LDS.  This means I was raised, as were my parents, and their parents,  in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The teachings are divine:  love each other, treat your siblings as you would want to be treated, forgive, obey, be kind and be happy.  The culture has both good and harder!  One irrational part of the culture is the expectation to be perfect--now!  Jesus said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."  Which is a lofty goal and a good thing to strive towards.  Although the meaning of the word 'perfect' has changed over time from meaning 'finished'  or 'complete', to now meaning without mistakes.  It is irrational to expect to be perfect now, when making mistakes and over-coming them is one of the ways to learn and grow.  But what is irrational and what IS are often two different things.

    There is a culture to "do it all".  This expectation is to be able to do all things and not have to choose between better and best--or even between like and like!  This is irrational, but is often admired, and many times subconsciously prevalent.  Even when we know better than to expect such unreasonable standards of ourselves, we still have a knowledge-action gap!  There is a saying that "95% of decisions are based on feelings" and we just feel that we should be able to do it all!  And this expectation puts a lot of stress on people.  Stress is a factor in heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, depression, gastrointestinal problems, obesity, and asthma. 

   The teachings of the Church do not agree with this type of culture.  It tells us in the Book of Mormon that "all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength."  (Mosiah 4:27). But our culture seems to say if some is good, a lot has to be better! This is often not true.  My grand-daughter loves stuffed animals.  She thinks they are pretty on her bed.  But she has collected so many of them that you can now no longer see the cute quilt, or the pillows or even her when she is in the bed.  She has too many stuffed animals!  

I will try to choose to live the teachings and not parts of the culture of my church.  I do not want to be buried in stuffed animals!