Episode: 145 — "Learn How to Live Life Right" · Full Episode #145
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Dr. Thuraya Shamy (د. ثريا الشامي) is a Libyan counsellor and therapist. She is the youngest of ten children — and the fourteenth child of her father overall, counting from earlier marriages — and her clinical practice has been shaped by the long arc of a large family and the early-life losses inside it. She is one of the few Libyan therapists with a public profile, and she has used that profile to argue, against significant cultural resistance, that ordinary Libyans need access to psychological care and have the right to talk about it openly.
The central biographical material is a single day on which she lost her father and her husband. They died on the same day. A week later, the country went to war. The compression of those events — personal bereavement, marital bereavement, national rupture — sits at the core of her account, both clinically and personally. She has spent the years since constructing a practice that can hold what cannot be processed in real time.
See: Father and Husband
Every three months Shamy disappears. She takes three days alone, completely uninterrupted, with no clinical work, no family contact, no engagements. The discipline is presented as non-negotiable. The clinical reasoning is straightforward — a therapist who is full of other people's material is a therapist whose own signal becomes inaudible. The three days are the recalibration. Without them, she said, the work erodes.
A live-streamed cyberbullying episode targeting her went viral on Libyan social media. The conversation took the case as an example of a particular pattern — the punishment of women who speak publicly about psychological care, especially when the language they use cuts across religious or tribal frames. Her response, in the episode, was not retaliatory. The reflection she offered was on what the episode revealed about the audience that piled on, and the cohort of Libyan women who saw the attack and quietly took notes.
A practice she returned to throughout the conversation: visit your inner child. The phrase functions in her clinical vocabulary as an instruction to spend deliberate time with the version of yourself who experienced what you are now living through as an adult. She framed it not as self-soothing but as data collection — the inner child holds the original information about why a particular trigger lands in a particular way, and adult patterns are decoded from there.
She cited a Confucian triad — seriousness, kindness, gravity — as the operating posture she has tried to maintain across the loss, the public attacks and the work. The triad is offered as a way of holding the shape of a person without collapsing under what has happened to them. Seriousness without coldness. Kindness without softness. Gravity without theatre.
"Visit your inner child." (EP 145)
"Seriousness, kindness, gravity." — cited from Confucius (EP 145)