The secret of self-healing methods

There is no "perfect self-healing formula" that can be applied to everyone. The essence of truly effective self-healing is to find a safe way for you to get along with negative emotions. The three current mainstream directions of cognitive adjustment, body release, and narrative reconstruction each have their own advantages and disadvantages. There is no need to force yourself to conform to a certain "standard process." The best method is to choose a method that is not awkward and burdensome for you.

It's interesting to say that an Internet operation visitor I just met last week had saved an entire album of mindfulness breathing and emotional regulation tutorials. He had been working on a project for 20 days and suddenly broke down in tears on the subway after get off work. After counting his third breath, his mind was filled with unfinished activity plans and he couldn't calm down at all. Later, she squatted on the steps of the subway entrance and spent 15 minutes deleting more than 300 useless screenshots and expired event documents stored in her mobile phone. After deleting, she wiped her face and suddenly felt that most of the air that was blocked in her chest was relieved.

In fact, she accidentally used the core idea of ​​​​the cognitive behavioral school: the emotion itself does not come from the event, but from your perception of the event - she subconsciously equates "the phone is full of unprocessed information" with "I have a lot of unfinished things." The process of clearing information is actually unloading the overloaded cognitive burden. Of course, this method is not suitable for everyone. I have seen many people who are unable to calmly distinguish "what is irrational cognition" when their emotions rise. They force themselves to "be more open-minded" and "stop being pretentious", which will cause secondary depression. It is equivalent to putting another layer of shackles on the already angry self, "I can't even control my emotions well, it's useless." There have been voices in the industry criticizing the method of cognitive adjustment as "too rational and inhumane", which is not unreasonable.

A colleague of mine who has been doing consulting for 8 years never sits down to sort out any cognitive logic when he suffers from anxiety and insomnia. He just wears slippers and goes downstairs, carries a garbage bag and picks up empty bottles in the community for 10 minutes, or goes home and cleans the range hood for 20 minutes. When his hands are stained with detergent foam and rub oil stains vigorously, the tightness in his shoulders and neck that has been accumulated for several days slowly loosens. This is the idea of ​​​​somatic psychology: Negative emotions never only exist in the brain. Your clenched fists, hunched shoulders, and congested chest are all storage containers of emotions. They do not need to be rationally analyzed by the brain. You can move them directly to relax your muscles, and the emotions will flow away naturally. Of course, there are a lot of controversies. Many consultants from the cognitive school think that this is "treating the symptoms but not the root cause" and evading the core issue. The next time they encounter conflicts with the same model, they will still explode. Some practitioners retort that "you can't even handle the current emotions, so how can you talk about solving long-term problems?" The two sides have been arguing for many years without a conclusion.

A while ago, a reader left me a message, saying that after she fell out of love, she did not listen to her friends' advice to "hurry up and find someone else" or "forget about it when she gets busy." Instead, she wrote 200 words a day "Records of how to be single and happy": Today I don't have to wait for others to choose the flavor when drinking milk tea. After two months of writing and looking through my previous love diary, I still find it funny how I could think of such a small thing as bringing the other person a cup of milk tea as a huge gift. This is a common method of narrative therapy: you don’t need to deny the pain of the past, just write a few more versions of the narrative line for your life, and the weight of the pain will naturally decrease. Of course, some people think that this is a "spiritual victory method" for self-comfort, which is tantamount to deliberately covering up the real problems, which is self-deception.

Harm, in fact, there is really no need to argue about right and wrong. I have seen someone force himself to follow an online tutorial to do mindfulness for one hour every day. After two weeks of doing this, his insomnia got worse. When I asked him, I found out that he was worried every day about "Is it useless if my mind wandered during my mindfulness today?" This was completely putting the cart before the horse. There are also people who follow the tutorial and write an "emotion diary", but after three days of writing it becomes even more annoying. Every time they write, they have to review the scene where they were angry at that time. This is equivalent to chewing on negative emotions three times, which is purely to find fault for themselves.

Let me tell you about a crude method that I usually use, which is a bit embarrassing to say: If I am really wronged to the point of holding it in, I will find a room with no one and act out a miserable love scene for myself. I will treat myself as the most miserable heroine in an idol drama. When I have cried enough and feel comfortable acting, I can wipe my face and wash my hands, then turn around and order takeout to do whatever I want. It's not "professional" at all to say it, but it really works better than anything else.

To put it bluntly, there are no unique secrets in self-healing that need to be revealed. Just don’t use other people’s standards and just do it yourself. Some people just want to cry, some people want to run five kilometers, and some people just want to sit on the sofa and eat three bags of potato chips and watch stupid dramas. As long as it doesn't hurt yourself or affect others, whatever makes you comfortable is the method that suits you best. After all, when getting along with yourself, "useful" is always much more important than "correct".