English Phrasal Verbs - Bottle Up, Bounce Back
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Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode. I hope you're all doing great. I hope your English learning is going well. I hope that you've learned a lot of phrasal verbs with me in these different episodes. I hope that you enjoy this format. And in today's phrasal verb episode, we're going to look at two phrasal verbs. The first one is bottle up.

And the other one is bounce back. So first, let's define these phrasal verbs and hear an example of each one. So what does bottle up mean? Bottle up means to conceal your feelings over time. So you are not expressing your feelings. You are...

suppressing them, we might say. So you're not making them known or apparent at all. You're hiding them. You're concealing them somewhere inside you, let's say, and you do this over a period of time. So for example, I could say he kept his frustration bottled up for months.

You'll often hear this used like keep something bottled up. He kept it bottled up. So you might hear it in that form. So if I say he kept his frustration bottled up for months, what I'm saying is he

He did not show his frustration at all or even make it obvious at all that he was frustrated at any moment. He just kept his frustration inside of him and didn't say anything or do anything about it. He kept it inside him for months. Okay, so that's bottle up.

How about bounce back? So bounce back means to recover and return to a normal condition after a difficult period. Okay. For example, I could say he bounced back easily after the surgery.

So in this case, he underwent surgery, which is difficult in most cases. And afterwards, he was able to recover and return to his normal self easily. He bounced back easily after the surgery. So that's bounce back.

Okay, now let me talk about a couple different things. And while I'm talking, I'm going to use these phrasal verbs over and over again so that you can hear them in different sentences. And hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll feel more comfortable understanding these phrasal verbs when they're used and possibly even using them in your own sentences. So

Let's first talk about being emotionally stable. If we think of a spectrum of emotional stability, if we think of a range of different types of people, we might think of the two ends of the spectrum being the following. Maybe one end of the spectrum is emotional.

filled with people who bottle up their feelings. They bottle up their emotions and don't express them. They try to

forget them or ignore them even sometimes, or maybe not that, but they just simply keep it inside them for a long time. They bottle up their emotions and these feelings grow stronger deep inside them.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. So some people bottle up their emotions. They don't express their emotions. And that is one end of this spectrum. The other end of the spectrum might be people who simply can't control their emotions. They react very quickly in an emotional way,

In different situations, they don't bottle up their emotions. They unleash their emotions, meaning they let them run free. So on this end of the spectrum, people run.

can't control their emotions as well as they might want to. They immediately have emotional reactions to different things, and they don't have a whole lot of control over their reactions and all of that. So I think most of us would agree that

that we don't want to be on the extreme end of this spectrum on either extreme end, right? Because if we're on one end, end where people are constantly bottling up their feelings, not expressing their emotions, if you constantly bottle things up and you don't allow yourself to just

feel and express the emotion this can lead to a lot of stress it can lead to issues in relationships because you're probably not talking about things that are important that make you feel frustrated or

angry or disrespected maybe, and you're just bottling those things up. And then your relationship suffers as a result. Uh, and you might start to feel bitter towards other people because you have these feelings inside you that you're not

able to express openly and bottling things up like this can eventually lead to violent outbursts. An outburst is like a sudden unleashing of your emotions and you just start screaming or yelling or something like that. So

This can lead to violent outbursts. When I say violent, I don't necessarily mean like you're hitting someone. Violent can also just mean really uncontrolled extreme outbursts, right? So this can happen. That's not good, obviously. So that is probably not something we want to do, right?

bottle up our emotions and just keep everything inside because of these possible consequences, right? However, the other end of the spectrum also leads to issues. If we just constantly unleash our emotions all the time,

without really thinking about it. This can lead to instability like we're just constantly in an emotional state.

We lack control if this is the case. It's like one thing happens and then we lose control and get super sad, super frustrated, super angry, whatever it is. And we don't have a lot of control over ourselves, our emotions. This can cause issues in relationships as well.

Because you might constantly fight or yell at your significant other or whatever. And sometimes...

It's just not the right place or the right time to have an emotional outburst. Like you feel an emotion and you want to express it, but it's just not the right time. You're in the middle of some type of important meeting or in a public place. And it's good to be able to hold off on that until it's the right time. And again,

That might be hard if you just have the habit of constantly unleashing your emotions at any moment. So that can also lead to issues. So we don't want to bottle everything up and just let it sit there inside of us for years. We don't want to bottle things up like that.

but we want to be able to control our emotions and not just react whenever we feel emotional and start to yell or get really sad and do this just whenever something happens. We don't want to

have that lack of control right we want to be able to control our emotions but we want to express our emotions when necessary when it's appropriate we want to have a balance

We don't want to bottle everything up and we don't want to just unleash our emotions all the time whenever we feel them. I think it's good to have a balance here. Express your emotions, but in an appropriate way when it's appropriate to do so. And finally,

I'm mostly talking about negative emotions here. Sadness, anger, grief, right? We don't want to bottle those up, but we want to express those things in words

healthy way of course when it comes to positive emotions if you're really happy it might not be a problem to express your happiness maybe there are a few contexts where you might want to be a little bit more subtle about that but I'm talking mostly about negative emotions here so I'm

I think that being emotionally stable is something that can help all of us. So now let me talk about something else. Let me talk briefly about some difficult periods that my wife and I have gone through. I'm not going to go into detail here. I'm just going to talk really briefly about them to talk about the fact that we went through

difficult times, but we were able to bounce back and continue on and improve even in some of these areas. So we have experienced some deaths in the family, and this is not something that's easy to just bounce back from soon after. When there are deaths in the family, this can often be

be a hard thing to deal with for a long time and of course it depends on how close you were to the person but I've dealt with several deaths in my family and I can say it's not easy to just bounce back

With some deaths, it's a long process, to be honest, and it takes a while before it stops feeling so hard, so difficult to

I'm sure many of you know what I'm talking about. You don't just bounce back the next day after your loved one dies. So this is something that we've been through that we've had to slowly over time, uh,

deal with and get past and start to feel okay again I don't think we should expect ourselves to bounce back quickly we need to feel these emotions and be able to grieve in

a healthy way and this is not just a one day process and then you bounce back. It's not like that. So that's one difficult thing that we've dealt with on several occasions.

Another hard period, a hard thing that we've gone through is when our dreams, our goals fail, when we don't achieve what we wanted to achieve. I've talked in different episodes about my time in film school and I've

I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was 18 and I dropped out of film school. I stopped

that program because it just wasn't for me. And honestly, I felt a little bit like a failure. I was coming back home. I didn't achieve my goal and it didn't feel good. But honestly, I think I bounced back pretty well from that. I immediately started considering a

careers, other things that I wanted to do, and I was more honest with myself and I decided on a better career after that, I think I bounced back pretty well. I didn't allow that failure to just devastate me and, uh,

depress me and I tried my best to bounce back and I did what I could to go in a different direction and succeed the second time and I think of something else that my wife and I went through not exactly a goal but going through the immigration process for my wife we made a mistake at one point and it meant that we had to

do things a different way and it kind of ruined our plans. It was really depressing and I felt really bad for my wife as well. But thankfully we bounced back. We

we eventually got through the process, thankfully. And now we don't even think about that anymore. Thank God. But at that time, it was hard to go through that. But

I think that we responded pretty well and we were able to have patience and do the whole process. Another difficult thing that my wife had to go through and bounce back from was giving birth twice, actually. It's not easy to give birth. It's a very hard physical and emotional and mental process.

process. And, uh, my wife did not have the easiest time in either of the births. They were very physically draining. They were hard, but she bounced back. I was really happy to see my wife get back to her normal condition and feeling good after a certain amount of time. Uh,

It's not like you just bounce back the next day after giving birth. Of course not. There's a recovery period. But after that period, my wife was able to get back to feeling normal again, thankfully. So she bounced back after giving birth a couple times.

And then just going through certain emotional times, going through funks, as we might say, like a weird emotional or mental period where you don't feel good.

100%. My wife and I have both gone through these funks before. I think everyone has, whether it's emotional or psychological. And we've bounced back from those. We didn't allow those to just keep us down forever.

really long time. Uh, I don't like feeling like I'm not doing well. I want to bounce back. I want to do what I can to improve my situation, my mindset, uh, the way I'm feeling. So I think that we've done a fairly good job of trying to, uh, get through those hard periods, bounce back. Uh,

and move on ahead. So that's something that I think we all deal with. We all go through funks. We all go through hard periods. And it's important to try not to let those periods keep you down for a long time. It's important to try to bounce back, maybe not instantly, but eventually we want to bounce back.

Alright, I hope that as I was talking you were able to hear these phrasal verbs over and over again. Hopefully you feel more comfortable with them now. I want to remind you that you can get my training, my listening training, my pronunciation training, and my advanced episodes. You can check all of that out by clicking on the link down below.

And the link to my U.S. Conversations podcast is also down below. This is a really fun podcast in which I talk to native speakers from around the country about different topics. It's a lot of fun and it's great practice for your listening. So check that out as well. And please give this podcast a five-star rating and write a review if you can. All right. Thanks for listening to this phrasal verb episode. And I'll talk to you in the next one.