self-healing psychology

It never teaches you how to "eliminate negative emotions", nor does it force you to "forgive those who have hurt you", nor does it ask you to become a "perfect person" who has no temper and is always peaceful. Its essence is to teach you how to coexist peacefully with the "bad" parts of yourself, so that you can live a good life even with wounds.

A while ago, I met a 29-year-old girl who works as an Internet operator. She suffered from insomnia for three months in a row. At night, she couldn't help but go over old accounts of being fostered by her parents in a relative's house when she was a child. She cried until her eyes were swollen. She previously posted a lot of self-healing posts on the Internet, forcing herself to write three gratitude journal entries every day, and went to a mindfulness meditation camp on weekends, but her condition only got worse. Every time she wrote a gratitude journal, she scolded herself in her mind: "Everyone can come out of this, so why are you so pretentious? ”When I was meditating, my mind was filled with anxiety about not completing the KPIs. When it was over, I blamed myself for not being focused enough, which doubled my internal friction.

This is also the biggest misunderstanding that most people have about self-healing: they regard it as a "correction" process, and think that only by clearing away all the "bad habits" and "bad emotions" in the body and becoming a "normal" person can the healing be considered successful. However, the views of different schools of psychology on this matter are actually very different, and can even be said to be completely opposite.

People who follow the psychoanalytic route will pay more attention to "tracing the origin". To put it bluntly, it is to help you figure out "why you are like this." For example, you always get angry because your partner replies to messages half an hour late. It’s not that you have a bad temper, but it may be that the child who waited for his parents for three hours and no one came to pick him up suddenly woke up at that moment. This kind of thinking has been criticized a lot in the past two years. Many people say that this is "blaming the original family", as if all the troubles can be blamed on the parents and that's it. But to be honest, the meaning of traceability is never to let you find someone to settle the score with, but to help you dig out the "emotional switch" hidden in your subconscious. Next time it pops up, you can recognize it instead of being led by it.

Cognitive-behavioral counselors don’t like to talk too much about your childhood, so they will first give you a tool that you can use directly. For example, if you are so anxious that you can't breathe right now, do the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method: count 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 sounds you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. I once had a visitor whose hands were so shaky that he couldn't hold a pen as soon as he arrived for an interview. Later, he secretly did this every time he waited: counting the green plants in front of him, the clock on the wall, the water dispenser at the door, the registration form on the table, the candidate sitting opposite him, touching the resume in his hand, the fabric of his pants, The chair under your butt, the keys in your pocket, listen to the sound of the air conditioner, the sound of others flipping resumes, the footsteps in the corridor, smell the citrus perfume and disinfectant sprayed by the girl next to you, and finally lick your lips to taste the sweetness of the lemon tea you just drank. After doing one set, your hands will be steady. For them, it doesn't matter if you can't figure out the reason. Stabilizing your current emotions and living a normal life first are more important than anything else.

Humanistic thinking is looser and even a bit "Buddhist". They won't even ask you to "get better." They just say: You are fine just the way you are. If you feel sad, feel sad. If you don't want to move, don't move. As long as you don't hurt yourself, all states are allowed. My entrepreneurial project failed in the past two years, and I lost hundreds of thousands. During that time, I hid at home every day without even wanting to close the curtains. I forced myself to cheer up and submit my resume at first, but ended up sitting in front of the computer for three hours without being able to type a single word. Later, I simply gave up and threw away any plans to cheer myself up. I just did one thing every day: playing with Lego. I worked on the 2,000-piece Saturn V for a whole week until my fingertips blistered. But during the process, I didn’t have to think about how much money I owed or how to explain it to my family. I just kept an eye on whether the parts in my hand were correct. On the day I finished the fight, I stood in front of the table and watched it for ten minutes. Suddenly I cried. After crying, I wiped my face, turned around, and turned on the computer to edit my resume. Looking back now, none of the "healing methods" used that week were useful. Just allowing yourself to be useless was 100 times more effective than forcing myself.

There are two opinions that are very quarrelsome on the Internet right now. One is that "healing without digging up the family of origin is just treating the symptoms rather than the root cause." The other is that "always bringing up the past is hypocritical, and living in the present is the right thing to do." In fact, both are correct, and neither is correct. If you are so emotionally broken that you are about to self-harm and can't even eat, don't dig up any childhood trauma. Do grounding techniques to stabilize your emotions first, and survive first. ； Once your condition is stable and you want to figure out why you keep falling into the same pit, it's not too late to go back to the past. There is no universal process, whatever works for you is right.

Oh, by the way, there is another pitfall that I must remind you to avoid: don’t believe those nonsense about “healing the family of origin in 21 days” and “getting out of depression in 7 days”. There is never any progress bar for self-healing. If you can eat three good meals today and not lose your temper, you have already won. ； If you don’t want to get up tomorrow, just stay in bed and watch dramas all day, which is not a loss. If your condition is so bad that you can't sleep well and have no interest in anything for more than two weeks, don't force yourself to carry it on yourself. See a professional counselor or go to the psychiatry department of the hospital. Self-healing is the icing on the cake, not a life-saving medicine.

After all, those unprocessed emotions are like broken glass in your pocket. You keep covering it, thinking that it will be fine if you can't see it, but if you take a step forward, it will prick you. Self-healing is not about throwing away the glass - after all, what happened happened, and you can't erase the memory - but to wrap it up in a soft cloth and put it back at the bottom of your pocket. The next time you touch it, you know it's there, but it won't hurt you again. That's enough.