the latest season of Love Is Blind dropping last week got me thinking about how the beauty of the show isn’t just watching it—it’s analyzing it with a qualified professional. And when you do it that way, there are actual benefits that go beyond entertainment value. Let me explain.

When my sister told me I had to watch Love Is Blind a couple of years ago, I scoffed. The only reality show that holds any place in my heart is MTV’s The Challenge, and that’s simply a habit at this point, something I’ve watched since high school. I’d long ago given up shows like Teen Mom and The Real Housewives because there was so little that was real about them—and the act of being on the show for extended periods of time didn’t seem to be doing the participants any favors.

But my sister understands me, and so she gave me a deadline by which to watch the first season. And once you give me a deadline, the challenge is on. So one weekend when I was down with the flu, I fired up Netflix and quickly discovered it was oddly compelling to see people form connections through a wall, then try to make those connections thrive in the real world. Although these people were in an unusual situation—and the pressure of an impending wedding upped the ante—their behaviors weren’t all that unusual.

The most entertaining part, though, was probably exchanging texts with my sister on our thoughts:

“Please tell me these people are not actually saying ‘I love you’ on their fourth day of talking to each other in a freaking pod.”

“He basically set up the situation in order to be rejected so he could prove that women won’t accept him for who he really is.”

“She did not feed her dog wine out of a wineglass. 🐶🍷🤦‍♀️”

Then, when season 4 debuted—aka the Seattle season and, despite my biases, the best one—we started doing watch parties in person, pausing the show when we needed to debrief and dissect a scene. (Much to my sister’s boyfriend’s annoyance.) “Did you notice how he said, ‘I think I’m ready to date’ instead of ‘I am ready to date,’” my psychology-major sister would ask. “He’s not ready to date.”

From there, I discovered the world of YouTube analysis of Love Is Blind. There are plenty of regular people offering their thoughts, often in humorous fashion, as well as body language analysts dissecting arguments and Myers-Briggs experts breaking down personality types. But the videos from the therapists are the ones I really started to dive into.

Seattle-based Dr. Kirk Honda is one of those LIB reactors. The therapist and professor at Antioch University is the host of the Psychology in Seattle YouTube channel and podcast, and he got into the show during the beginning of the pandemic when there was little else to do. “The premise was outrageous but somehow kind of working for these people,” he says. “But I found myself by episode 3 or 4 constantly pausing the show and turning to my wife, going, ‘They’re not doing that right, they’re sabotaging themselves, they’re misunderstanding each other. There’s this thing called attachment theory; there’s this thing called communication.”

He felt like he could use his knowledge of concepts in psychology to shed light on what was happening in these relationships, helping people recognize behaviors in themselves and others. So he rummaged in a drawer for an old Logitech camera, set it up, and started recording his off-the-cuff reactions. Within a few days, the videos had taken off, and cast members were even contacting him.

“I marvel at the instructive power that these reality shows can have,” Honda says. “As a professor, it’s one thing to explain something to a student; it’s another thing to show them.” The videos typically used for instruction have actors and often feel stilted and fake, but with LIB, these very real, modern examples of relationship dynamics illustrate all kinds of lessons.

Honda is always clear that he’s not diagnosing anyone and we’re only seeing an edited version of the events. Still, there’s plenty to observe that might ring true for viewers. “A lot of people are walking around with relational traumas that are a lot more significant than people would know,” Honda says. “As a friend, you wouldn’t necessarily know what kind of reactivity they have. When they date, that’s when traumas get triggered and you start to see that behavior on the show.”

The videos go into topics like attachment theory, narcissism, incel communities, codependency, personality disorders, love bombing, defense mechanisms, and much more. He’s often nuanced in his approach, looking to see a situation from every angle. For me, I’ve found it interesting to explore all the possibilities for why someone acts a certain way (let’s be honest, people can be mystifying sometimes), and to be more thoughtful about how I express myself, particularly in an argument.

Honda’s goal is for his videos to build people’s compassion and empathy, both for others and themselves.

“I hope they learn how to have self-compassion so that when they themselves do things that they’re ashamed of or that push others away that instead of beating themselves up and giving up or going into denial because facing it is too hard, they instead look at it and say, ‘I am like everyone else on this planet in that I have, to some degree, early childhood relational traumas that are getting triggered at times and causing perceptual and cognitive and emotional and behavioral phenomena that are well understood in the field of psychology,’” he says. “And people can say, ‘I feel like my partner is a jerkface and a narcissist’ or ‘I feel like I’m a lost cause, but there’s this dude on YouTube that keeps yammering all the time that there are some other options and maybe I should go to therapy and explore those other options.’”

Today, the Psychology in Seattle channel has 350,000 subscribers, and the 100-plus videos for the Seattle season got up to 139,000 views each.

Now, instead of feeling like I’ve fallen into a reality TV pit of time wasting, I’ll appreciate that, really, this is educational TV—at least when you have the tools to reflect on the lessons so entertainingly presented on screen.