Moritatherapy was founded in 1920 by Professor Masa Morita of Tsuei Medical University in Japan as a psychotherapeutic method of following nature and doing what is right. Over the decades, Morita’s successors have developed and refined it to become an internationally recognized and effective psychotherapy with a distinctly Eastern flavor. People with neurotic tendencies have a strong desire to live and a strong introspection, and they direct their focus to their own safety. When the focus is too much on certain internal discomfort, these discomforts will become more and more intense, forming a vicious circle. Morita therapy aims to break this mental interaction, while harmonizing the mutually antagonistic relationship between desire and repression, advocating going with nature and doing what is right.
Morita therapy is mainly applied to the treatment of neurosis, vegetative disorders and other physical and mental disorders. Morita has unique insights into the mechanism of neurosis. He believes that the basis of neurosis is neuroticism, which is characterized by introversion, strong introspection, hypochondriac tendency, sensitivity to the state of one’s own mental and physical activities and abnormalities, and excessive attention and concern for one’s own mental and physical health. They have a strong desire to survive and a strong desire to be whole. They often regard the normal physiological reactions or mild discomfort that people are used to as pathological, and become overly nervous and worried, which, over time, leads to disease and creates a vicious circle between mind and body. This makes the disease more and more serious. According to Masa Morita, “neurotic” symptoms are purely subjective, not objective. It is caused by the mental interaction in the process of mental activity triggered by the patient’s hypochondriacal quality. In other words, the suspicious quality is the basis for the development of neuroses such as neurasthenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety attacks, and various phobias. People with hypochondriac qualities have a strong bottom-up desire to be healthy, happy, and strive for upward mobility, but they are also introspective and often worry about their own health status and mental peace of life safety. They often mistake the feelings that people may have on certain occasions, such as dizziness when they overuse their brains and palpitations when they are nervous, for illness and fear and tension. The more attention is focused on these “symptoms,” the more acute the sensations become, and the more severe the “symptoms” become, creating a vicious cycle that Morita calls mental interaction. Under its influence, the patient falls into a state of internal conflict, resulting in neurosis and episodes of neurosis.
Morita himself was weak and sickly since childhood, and had obvious neurotic symptoms, including urination at the age of 12, frequent headaches, rapid heartbeat, and easy fatigue after the age of 16, as well as other neurotic symptoms. He felt that it was difficult to cope with the exams, and when he was depressed and angry, he had suicidal thoughts, so he gave up all treatment and studied hard all night long. The result was unexpected: he did very well in the exams and the symptoms that had been haunting him for years were cured by themselves. Thus, he realized that his previous illnesses were all imaginary and that there was no illness at all. Therefore, according to Morita, neurosis caused by neuroticism can be broken by the method of “listening to nature”, and the patient is instructed to change the anxious attitude of paying too much attention to the disease to the ignorant attitude of “listening to nature”, so that the emotions can be relaxed naturally and all the bad feelings can be eliminated by themselves until the disease is cured.
Morita also believes that there is an antagonistic effect of mutual regulation between flexors and extensors in human mental activity. For example, an idea, emotion or intention that arises in a certain situation will also produce the opposite idea, emotion or intention to regulate the person’s behavior. Morita calls this a mental antagonism. For example, the fearlessness that often arises when one is afraid; the feelings of guilt that arise when one is praised; the thought of disrespecting someone while thinking that the thought is wrong and denying it; the thought that saying it will bring misfortune and not thinking about it. The presence of such antagonism ensures mental stability and a constant sense of security. Therefore, any normal person will have a notion that does not correspond to his reason, but it will pass without leaving a trace. In the case of people with hypochondriac qualities and excessive antagonism, once these ideas appear, they are obstinately repeated and at the same time repeatedly controlled, forming an antagonistic opposition.
Through mental interaction, obsessive-compulsive conceptual disorder arises. In addition, according to Morita, people with suspicious qualities are “perfectionists” who often form “contradictions in thought” between what they want and what they are, between what “should be” and what “is”, and try to solve the contradictions that cannot be solved in reality, and take a subjective attitude toward objective reality, making the symptoms more and more severe.
(1) General neuroticism: neurosis, including insomnia, headache, head weight, mental confusion, abnormal sensation, excitement, fatigue, brain power, fatigue, gastrointestinal neurosis, feeling of inferiority, unnecessary worry, sexual dysfunction, vertigo, writing cramps, tinnitus, tremor, memory loss, inattention, etc.
(2) Obsessive-compulsive conceptual disorders (including phobias): including social phobia (barefaced phobia, look-at-me phobia, self-expression phobia, etc.), impurity phobia, disease phobia, incomplete phobia, school phobia, acute phobia, high place phobia, miscellaneous phobia, etc.
(3) Episodic neuroticism: palpitation attacks, anxiety attacks, dyspnea, etc.
Takahisa Takara, an expert in Morita therapy, believes that Morita therapy cannot cure all neuroses, and that only neuroticism is the true indication for Morita therapy. It can be seen that the mechanism of Morita therapy regarding the formation of neurotic symptoms can be summarized as follows: due to the presence of the quality of suspicion, neurotic symptoms are formed through mental interaction under the influence of the causative factor of chance events. The underlying cause of neurotic symptoms is the strengthening of mental antagonism caused by the desire to control objective facts with subjective wishes.
Based on the above theory, Morita proposes a targeted treatment principle and method, which focuses on cultivating the quality of suspicion, breaking the mental interaction, and eliminating the contradiction of thoughts. The principle of treatment can be summarized in two points.
1. The treatment principle of “following nature”
Morita believes that reasoning is futile in order to achieve the goal of treatment. Just as it is not possible to walk through a cemetery at night with fear even though you know that there are no ghosts, it is not possible to rely on rational understanding alone, but only on actual emotional experience that can make a difference. The more concentrated the attention is, the stronger the emotion will be; if we ignore the nature, the emotion will gradually subside; if we get used to the same feeling, the emotion will become dull; if we do not comfort the patient’s distress and worry, and let it develop to the peak, we will no longer feel distress and worry. Therefore, the patient is asked to acknowledge the reality of the symptoms in the first place, without forcing changes, and to let nature take its course.
(1) What does it mean to let nature take its course?
Morita sees it as a state of “epiphany”, which is comparable to Buddhist Zen. The “epiphany” means that the patient recognizes and experiences his or her place in the natural world, and that he or she becomes resistant to the normal things that are beyond his or her control, and as a result, he or she gets caught up in the whirlwind of nervousness. This is in accordance with the fourth and fifth of the above laws, that is, the process of concentrating on the emotion that disgusts him and constantly repressing it so that it is reinforced, and after many repetitions, he develops the experience of extreme fear of people, which is contrary to the first and second of the above laws. Therefore, to change this situation, it is necessary to make the patient recognize the law of emotional activity, accept his fear of emotion, not to repress and reject it, and let it grow on its own, and through his own continuous efforts, develop positive and healthy emotional experiences.
(2) It is necessary to recognize the laws of mental activity and accept the various thoughts and ideas that may arise in oneself.
Neurotic patients often subjectively believe that they can only have a certain idea about something and not another, and that having it is abnormal or immoral, i.e., the extreme desire for perfection creates a strong sense of inferiority. To change this, one has to accept the fact that people are not saints, the fact that each of us may have evil thoughts, jealousy, and narrow-mindedness, and realize that this is something that is inevitable in one’s spiritual activity, something that one cannot change or decide by reason and will; but whether or not to do something irrational is something that one can decide completely. Therefore, one does not have to fight against one’s own thoughts but needs to pay attention to the actions one takes. At the same time, one has to recognize the role of mental antagonism, give up psychologically the resistance to opposing ideas, realize that one has two opposing mental phenomena, the desire for life and the fear of death, and accept this mental phenomenon, without having to be afraid and uneasy for the appearance of the horror of death, and without having to spell out these fearful thoughts and put oneself into (2) To accept this psychological phenomenon and accept it without the fear of the horror of death, and without the need to remove these fearful thoughts and put oneself into intense mental conflict.
(3) To recognize the law of the formation and development of symptoms and to accept them.
The patient with neurotic disorder does not have any physical or mental abnormality, but because he has the quality of suspicion, he sees a normal feeling as abnormal and wants to reject and control this feeling, so that the attention is fixed on this feeling, resulting in the mutual reinforcement of attention and feeling, that is, the formation of mental interaction. This is a vicious circle, is the main reason for the formation of symptoms and their continuation, recognize this, take an accepting attitude toward their symptoms, on the one hand, will not strengthen the subjective feeling of symptoms; on the other hand, because no longer reject the feeling, and gradually make their attention no longer fixed on the symptoms, in this way to break the mental interaction to reduce the symptoms until eliminated. For example, the more people are afraid of blushing, the more they pay attention to their expressions, and the more they pay attention, the more nervous they are, but the more they continue to blush. On the contrary, if they accept the symptoms of blushing and go out with people with the attitude of “blushing is blushing”, they will stop paying attention to this feeling, so that the blushing reaction will slowly subside.
(4) to recognize the relationship between the subjective and objective, accept the objective laws of things.
The reason why people suffer from neuroticism, suspicious quality is the basis of the formation of symptoms, mental interaction is the cause of the formation of symptoms, and its root lies in the contradiction of human thought. This paradox is characterized by subjective imagination instead of ae objective facts to “justify” one’s thoughts, feelings and behavior. According to Morita, “How can we break the paradox of thought? In a nutshell, we should give up the futile man-made strategies and obey nature. To try to control one’s emotions by artificial means is like trying to make a chicken feather rise to the sky or to break the flow of a river. These are all things that are beyond our ability, but if we force them, we will certainly suffer. However, what is nature? It is a natural law that summer is hot and winter is cold. To make summer not hot and winter not cold, to act against it is an artificially poor strategy; to obey and endure according to the natural law is to follow nature.” In response to the contradiction in thinking, Morita proposed the idea of “truth is truth”, which means “truth is truth”, and took it as his motto. He said, “We should not deceive ourselves by mistaking emotions or imagination for facts. For whether you agree with it or not, the truth is unshakable. The truth is the truth, so one must recognize the truth. To recognize one’s spiritual essence is self-awareness; to confirm the outside world truthfully is truth.” Only by making one’s subjective thoughts conform to the laws of objective things can one jump out of the strange circle of contradictory thoughts.
2. The treatment principle of “doing what is right”
Morita therapy divides the things related to people into two categories: things that can be controlled and things that cannot be controlled. Things that can be controlled are those that can be controlled and changed by the individual’s own subjective will, while things that cannot be controlled are those that cannot be decided by the individual’s subjective will.
Morita therapy requires patients with neurotic disorders to learn to follow the attitude of nature, not to control the uncontrollable things, such as human emotions, but to pay attention to the things that can be controlled, such as human actions. In other words, “to do what is right” means to act under the guidance of a natural attitude, which is an enrichment of the principle of natural healing.
Suffering and doing what is right. Morita therapy believes that to change a patient’s symptoms, on the one hand, one must adopt a natural attitude toward the symptoms, and on the other hand, one must follow the desire to live and do what one should do. Focusing on action and letting the symptoms rise and fall will help break the mental interaction and gradually build confidence to be free from the symptoms. For example, a person who is terrified of people is afraid to meet them and feels extreme fear when they see them. Morita therapy asks the person to live with the symptoms, it is okay to be afraid of meeting people, but the person should still meet, with the fear of interacting with people, pay attention to what they want to do, and as a result of doing so, the patient himself will find that the original trying to eliminate the symptoms, want to wait for the symptoms no longer exist and then contact with people, in fact, is unnecessary, in the past for this distress, think that can not do, because the old in the mind to think and not to do. In the past, patients were distressed and thought they couldn’t do it because they kept thinking about it but didn’t do it. “Do what you have to do” requires patients to do what they have to do right away and insist on it even though it is painful.
Face reality and develop character. Ryoji Takamu, an expert in Morita therapy, says, “A person’s actions generally affect his or her character, and it is undeniable that a certain character will guide him or her to do certain things, but to see only this aspect is a one-sided understanding. Nor must we forget the objective fact that ‘our actions make our character’. It is this that is the fundamental reason why the neurotic character is tempered.”
The mental conflicts of neurotic patients often stay in the subjective world of the patients, who think and think about the things that cause their fear and anxiety, and fight and fight, but in actual life, they adopt an avoiding and perfunctory attitude towards the things that cause their suffering. In fact, the effort of individual subjective will alone cannot get rid of the affliction of neurotic symptoms, and it is only through practical action that the thinking becomes more Only through practical action can thinking become more practical and profound. It is only through practical action that thinking becomes more practical and profound. Practical action is the most direct catalyst for improving the ability to adapt to real life. For example, Ryoji Takamu said that if you want to learn to swim, you will never learn to swim unless you jump into the water, but even if you do not know how to swim at all, you can still jump into the water and then gradually learn the necessary techniques. For the same reason, people with neuroticism will do it under the guidance of others, no matter how painful it is, so that they can unknowingly get the experience of self-confidence. The only way to stop being afraid of people is to insist on contact with them and to adopt a go-getter attitude in actual touch, so that fear will decline and confidence will gradually be gained. As mentioned earlier, “doing what is necessary” helps to improve the symptoms, and one of the important points is that by directing the spiritual energy to the outside in practical life, one has to pay attention to what one is doing, which reduces the spiritual energy directed to the inside of one’s mind and body. The actual contact with the external world, in turn, helps the patient to recognize the subjective fictional nature of his or her symptoms. This process is actually the one that brings about some kind of change in the introverted personality.
”Doing what is right”, guided by a natural attitude, helps to cultivate the neurotic personality. It is not a complete change, but a rejection of different parts of the personality. In other words, the strengths of the neurotic character are promoted; conscientiousness, diligence, etc., and the sense of responsibility is discarded. It is a way to build on the strengths of the neurotic character; conscientiousness, diligence, sense of responsibility, etc., and to abandon the pathogenic aspects of the neurotic character: the extreme introspection and desire for perfection.
From this, it can be seen that to follow nature is neither to tolerate the symptoms passively nor to do nothing, but to act according to the original law of things, to exist with the symptoms, not to resist and reject them, and to live actively with the symptoms. The focus of the treatment principle of natural, for what it is, is to break the mental interaction, eliminate the contradictions of the mind and cultivate character. This live Chung therapy principle also reflects the Morita therapy on the relationship between the will, sexy, action and emotional personality, that is, the will can not change a person’s emotions, but the will can change a person’s behavior; by changing a person’s behavior to change a person’s emotions, Tao’s character.
Morita therapy treatment is divided into: inpatient treatment and outpatient treatment. For both inpatient and outpatient treatment, care should be taken to select patients who, in addition to exhibiting neurotic symptoms, have some degree of introspection, are actively working on their own symptoms, and have a strong desire to be freed from their symptoms.
1. Inpatient treatment
After determining the indications, the patient should be informed of the nature of the disease, and the psychopathology of neuroticism should be introduced to them, telling them that there is no serious disease, so as to eliminate their unnecessary worries and concerns. The inpatient treatment process is divided into four periods.
(1) Absolute bed rest period. It is usually 4-7 days. The patient lives alone in a room and is not allowed to get out of bed except for meals and toilets, and is prohibited from meeting, talking, smoking, reading, writing, etc. During this period, the patient will naturally have various thoughts, especially various worries and bitterness about the disease, which may make the pain temporarily aggravated and unbearable, and express doubts about the treatment, and a few patients even ask to discontinue the treatment and be discharged from the hospital, and when the patient has thought about all the troublesome things, there is nothing to think about anymore, and he will feel bored. Therefore, the first period is also called the boredom period. Thereafter, the patient naturally asks to get out of bed and do something, and enters the second phase.
(2) Light work period. 4-7 days. Reading and socializing are still forbidden, and bedtime is kept at 7-8 hours a day, while outdoor activities are allowed during the day. You can do some simple and monotonous work outdoors, such as sweeping the yard and cleaning the glass, and you can do calligraphy, painting, gluing paper bags and other activities indoors. Generally, from the third day onward, the patient’s workload can be gradually relaxed, and the patient is asked to start writing a diary, not allowed to write about the disease, but only what he or she has done and what he or she has experienced in a day, and the treatment provider checks the diary daily and adds comments to guide the patient to avoid paying attention to the disease and care about outside activities.
(3) Heavy work period. Generally for 4-7 days. Continue to prohibit meeting guests and entertainment, and participate in heavier physical work, such as weeding, helping cook, cleaning environmental sanitation, doing housework, carpentry work, craft work, etc. During this period, patients were allowed to read books, mainly books written by Morita on the doctrine of neurosis, but also history, biographies, and scientific readings, etc. Patients were asked to keep a treatment diary every night. Patients work together with other patients in the hospital and do not talk to each other about their illness. The purpose of this phase is to develop endurance by working hard so that the patient can experience the joy of completing the work. In the midst of this learn to ignore the symptoms and further turn the energy of mental activity to the outside world.
(4) Life exercise period, also known as the preparation period for returning to society. It usually lasts 1-2 weeks.
This period prepares the patient for discharge from the hospital, and the patient should be instructed to return to the original social environment and resume the original social role. During this period, according to the patient’s specific situation, he is allowed to return to his original unit during the day, or participate in some management work in the hospital and other more complex social activities. No matter what kind of activities he participates in, he is required to return to the ward every night and insist on keeping a diary. The purpose is to enable the patient to further experience the principle of conformity to nature in work, interpersonal interaction and social practice, and to prepare for his return to society.
The above phases are descriptions of the general treatment situation, and the course of treatment for each specific patient will also be determined by his or her condition. The treatment period will therefore vary in length, with short periods of about three weeks being sufficient and longer periods that may take 60-70 days, with the average period generally being 40-50 days.
The purpose of inpatient treatment is to give the patient a practical experience of the natural flow of the spirit and its evolution, to eliminate previous assumptions and misconceptions about the disease, and to achieve a state of mental “natural flow and non-residency”. Therefore, it is important not to explain to the patient beforehand the psychological state that may be revealed during the bed rest period. If the patient knows in advance that boredom and pessimism will arise during this period, he or she will adopt the expected attitude and the natural flow of the mind will be distorted. Of course, before using inpatient therapy, the practitioner should give the patient a general understanding of the process of Morita inpatient therapy, and the patient can make his or her own decision about whether or not to be admitted to the hospital. The stronger the patient’s desire to seek treatment, the better the treatment.
2.Outpatient treatment
Outpatient treatment must still follow the basic principles of Morita therapy. However, because outpatient treatment does not have the specific environment of inpatient treatment, it is not possible to use bed rest and make arrangements for treatment, so it has different characteristics from inpatient treatment.
Outpatient treatment is conducted mainly through one-on-one conversations between the practitioner and the patient, usually once or twice a week. The treatment provider should pay attention to empathy for the patient and establish a good therapeutic relationship. The provider should understand the patient’s reality as much as possible on the basis of the patient’s life history, and not take the symptoms as the main content of the discussion, encourage the patient to face the reality of life, give up the neurotic position of resisting the symptoms, realize that things are not shifted by their own subjective wishes, realize to accept the symptoms as they are, and not try to control them. The symptoms will change. Finally, the patient is encouraged to take responsibility for his or her own life. In therapy, the practitioner should use questions to enlighten the patient’s understanding of the problem whenever possible, rather than using too much persuasion. The key to treatment is to help the patient understand the principle of going with nature.
The key points of outpatient treatment are.
(1) Performing a detailed physical examination to rule out the possibility of serious somatic disease and to allay the patient’s concerns.
(2) Instruct the patient to accept the symptom without trying to reject it.
(3) instructing the patient not to talk about the symptoms to friends and relatives, and also instructing friends and relatives not to listen to or respond to their complaints of illness.
Our scholars have used an outpatient treatment approach to treat 16 patients with neuropathy and have achieved good results. The specific approach was 30 to 60 minutes for the initial consultation, 15 to 30 minutes for the follow-up consultation, and once a week for the first month of treatment and once every 1 to 2 weeks thereafter. The main methods of treatment were verbal instruction and diary annotations. The patient was first guided to understand the relationship between his or her symptoms and personality traits, and was informed of the factors involved in the development of the symptoms, and was asked to write down his or her understanding and experience in a daily diary. The patient was also asked to read materials related to the Morita doctrine. The experts believe that, because outpatient treatment does not allow the practitioner to personally observe the patient’s daily life and behavior, having the patient keep a diary and providing guidance through annotating the diary is a central part of treatment. The applicator should pay special attention in the treatment guidance: first, the treatment should always be directed to the patient’s personality problems and should not be entangled in his or her symptoms, which should be ignored and allowed to fade naturally; second, under the condition that the patient understands the main points of the treatment, the emphasis should be on asking him or her to experience them consciously in the practice of life.
Indications
Neuroticism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondria, anxiety disorder, depressive neurosis.
Morita psychotherapy, referred to as Morita therapy, was founded in 1919 by the late Mr. Morita Masa, a professor at Tokyo Charity Medical University in Japan, and has been used in Japan, where its value has been well proven and widely recognized, and has been widely evaluated worldwide.
The theoretical system of Morita’s doctrine is not derived from some extension of theory or laboratory findings, but from Mr. Morita’s own experience of neurosis and his many years of clinical practice. Let us first discuss Mr. Morita’s own experience of neurosis.
When he was a child, Mr. Morita suffered from “school terror” due to forced learning at home. His father was very strict with his children, especially his eldest son, Masa Morita, and he had great expectations of his son, so he taught him to write and read from an early age. When he was 10 years old, if he could not finish his books at night, his father would not let him go to bed. He was already stressed out by the amount of school work he had to do, but when he came home, his father forced him to memorize this and that, so Morita gradually became bored with studying. Every morning, he cried and cried, pestering adults and not wanting to go to school, which, in today’s terms, is “school terror.
When Mr. Morita was seven years old, his grandmother died and his mother fell into a trance and silence because of her grief, followed by the death of his grandfather the next year. At the time of his family’s successive misfortunes, Morita was immediately creeped out after occasionally seeing a colorful mural of hell in a Japanese temple. He saw the pictures of people going to hell after death, some going to the mountain of sword, some going to the pit of fire, some going to the pool of blood, and so on. These horrific scenes left a deep imprint on Morita’s young mind and kept circling in his mind, which was the source of Morita’s theory about the “horror of death.
In his book “I have a neurotic vulnerability”, Morita wrote that he was still suffering from nocturia at the age of 12, and at the age of 16, he suffered from headaches and tachycardia, and he was easily fatigued and always worried about his illness, which is called “neurotic symptoms”. When he was young, he suffered from nocturia and always slept on a straw mat in order not to wet the bedding. He replied angrily, “I don’t wet my bed at night!” This answer was a rebellion against the mockery and sarcasm of adults, but it was so hard for him that he later wrote in his book, “Don’t condemn your child’s nocturia, for the more you condemn and sarcasm, the worse it will get. I think this was my own experience. I felt inferior because I had nocturia and had a strong sense of inferiority. Later, when I heard that Mr. Ryoma Itamoto, who was very famous in the area, also had this disease as a child, I was able to console myself and feel a little better. In the fifth grade of middle school, when he was recovering from intestinal typhoid fever and learning to ride a bicycle, he suddenly developed tachycardia at night. In high school and early college, he had frequent nervous breakdowns, and the University of Tokyo Department of Internal Medicine diagnosed him with neurasthenia and beriberi, and he often took medicine to treat them. See, in this period of time what drugs are not eaten, give up all smelting treatment, regardless of all the desperate study, after the examination, achieved unexpectedly good results, somehow, foot disease and neurasthenia and other symptoms unconsciously also disappeared. These personal experiences led to the essentialism of neurosis he later advocated, including the theory of the quality of suspicion. Neuroticism is not a real weakness, but a hypothetical subjective conjecture. The instinctive desire to live is strong in neurotic people, and they are hardworking, the psychogenic nature of the symptoms, i.e., the mental interaction, and most importantly, Mr. Morita found in his own personal experience that the “mindset of giving up treatment” has a therapeutic effect on neuroticism. From the above information, it can be seen that all these elements, which became the basis of Morita’s theory, are the result of his own painful experiences. However, these experiences alone were not enough. More importantly, he had observed neurotic patients for many years, grasped the actual manifestations of their symptoms, paid close attention to their evolution, compared these observations with his own experiences, read domestic and foreign literature, and verified in practice the various treatment methods that were considered to be strong in treating neurosis at that time. Finally, Mr. Morita proposed his own unique psychotherapy by combining the effective components of the major therapeutic methods of the time, such as quiet therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and life therapy.
Morita Therapy (II)
Let’s talk about the basic theories of Morita therapy
1. Theory of suspicion quality.
Morita believes that the basis of neuroticism is a common tendency, called the quality of suspicion. The so-called suspicious quality refers to a mental tendency, which is manifested by.
(1) Mental introversion. By mental introversion, we mean that the target of activity is often confined to oneself, favoring self-introspection, paying special attention to feelings of unhappiness and abnormal diseases in the physical and mental aspects of oneself, and worrying and worrying about them, being self-centered and bound by self-introspection. Spiritual extroversion refers to the tendency of mental activities to chase reality from the outside world with a clear purpose. Sometimes the performance is frivolous, such people are enthusiastic, often due to the pursuit of career, no time to pay attention to personal physical illness, etc.. Freud also said, “people whose spirit moves inward from time to time, and thus closed inside the ego mind and body, are prone to neurosis; people whose spirit often moves outward do not get neurosis.”
(2) Hypochondria. The so-called hypochondria, meaning fear of disease, is a mental tendency to worry about illness. In fact, it is a manifestation of everyone, and people with neuroticism only have an excessive degree of it. Morita believes that neuroticism is an innate quality, a temperament that focuses on self-reflection and is prone to hypochondria.
2.Mental interaction and thought contradiction
(1) Mental interaction refers to a feeling that occasionally causes attention to focus and point to it, then the feeling will become acute, and this acute feeling will attract more attention and further fixate on the feeling, the feeling and attention interaction promote each other, resulting in the feeling more and more powerful, this mental activity process is called mental interaction. For example, in the case of neuropathic headache, due to the abnormal sensation in the head, the attention of the person will be focused on it, and the interaction between the attention and the sensation will cause more and more sensitivity. Even after the overwork or tension has long disappeared, the state of attention fixation caused by the expected terror will leave behind the painful sensation and form a habitual headache.
(2) Conflict of thought, i.e., psychological conflict, mainly refers to the conflict between what should be and what is, and is a conflict between ideal and reality. For example, if you realize that there are no ghosts in the world, but you are afraid of walking through the cemetery at night, you can’t rely on rational understanding alone, and if you try to use reason to overcome such horror, it will cause contradiction in thought, i.e. psychological conflict.
3. The desire for life and the terror of death
According to Morita, the desire for life has at least the following meanings.
(1) The desire to live in good health.
(2) The desire to live better and to be respected.
(3) The desire to learn and the willingness to work hard.
(4) The desire to become great and happy.
(5) the desire to move upward. This is a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation that all people have. But neurotic people want to achieve a perfection in their own life’s desires. This demanding idealism is another characteristic of neurotic personality, which is manifested by the fact that, while fulfilling their own life’s desires, they absolutely cannot tolerate the slightest abnormality in their mind and body, and they have a compulsive desire for perfection. The desire to overcome this anxiety and the resulting contradiction in thinking is very strong. Since the desire for life is very strong in neurotic people, the terror of death is also very strong, and the two are proportional. The terror of death includes the desire to pursue life, but also the fear of failure, the fear of disease, the fear of losing all kinds of valuable things, the fear of death, etc. Anxiety and the terror of death have the same meaning, and can be said to be a pathological concept unique to neurotic people.
4. Mental rejection
According to Morita, there is also a kind of mutual regulation of human mental activity similar to that of the geniculate muscle. For example, when we are frightened, we have the opposite mentality of not being afraid of it; when we intend to buy something, we first think about whether it is a waste or not; when we want to go out, we first review whether we forgot something in the room. This is the so-called relative concept. This correspondence effect is also a natural phenomenon in the spiritual sphere, which can ensure the safety of life and spiritual security. If the mental resistance is too weak, such as a child or an idiot, once the desire arises, it will act without any fear. In the case of neurotic people, the process of mental resistance, due to the resistance between desire and depression, often causes indecision and mental suffering, as well as the emergence of disrespectful thoughts about someone (especially, someone who is often admired) in a certain situation, and at the same time the thought that it is wrong and not their true thoughts and deny it. These thoughts, which in ordinary people are only fleeting and do not leave any traces, can appear stubbornly in people with a suspicious nature and strong mental resistance, forming a resistance opposition, and then strong conceptions can be formed through the interaction of mental branches. Morita’s basic theory of neurotic pathogenesis discussed above, in short, is that a person with a hypochondriacal quality, due to a certain opportunity (hypochondriacal experience), mistakes some natural physical and mental phenomena that are common in people, such as headache and insomnia when using the brain excessively, restraint and anxiety when interacting with people, as well as occasional distractions and stuttering, as illnesses, and focuses on them. The more acute the sensation, the more serious the “disease” will be. As a result of this mental interaction, an acute cycle of viciousness is formed, and the result becomes a neurosis of neurasthenia.
We have just talked about the basic theory of Morita therapy, next we will see which diseases Morita therapy is suitable for treating
1, general neurosis, which is commonly known as neurasthenia, including insomnia, headache, dizziness, mental confusion, abnormal sensation, excitement, fatigue, brain power, fatigue, unnecessary worries, sexual dysfunction, dizziness and tinnitus, decrepitude, memory loss, inattention, etc.
2, strong conceptual disorder, mainly including horror of people such as barefaced horror, sight horror, horror of their own performance, etc., cyclic horror, school horror, going out horror, sin horror, unknown horror, high place horror, etc.
3, episodic neurosis, such as: dyspnea attacks, anxiety attacks, etc. ……
Mr. Morita once pointed out that before treatment, it is necessary to clarify the diagnosis, clarify the essence of the disease and symptoms, pay attention to the randomization, do not mechanically adhere to a certain pattern. The basic principle of treatment: follow the nature. Following nature is the principle of Morita therapy. What does it mean to follow nature? It is the equivalent of the Zen state of “enlightenment,” where one experiences one’s place in nature and the futility and even harm of resisting a natural reality that is beyond one’s control, and where one can only conform in order to achieve an attitude of living in harmony with natural things. Shakyamuni taught that people should live in accordance with nature, and Lao Zhuang also advocated “letting nature take its course”. It seems that Morita therapy is a product of Eastern culture, and Japanese scholars believe that the home of Morita therapy is China, and some people interpret the Morita principle as “die to your heart” and “bear it. While pointing out the one-sidedness of such an understanding, Mr. Shokara Takahisa pointed out that the complete concept of “going with nature” is as follows.
(1) The patient must honestly accept the existence of the symptom and its accompanying distress and anxiety, recognizing that it is futile to resist, resist, or use any means to avoid or suppress it.
(2) Patients should rely on their existing desire to live to carry out constructive activities, i.e., accepting the status quo of symptoms without resistance while carrying out normal work and study activities. In general, the patient should not treat the symptom as a foreign object in himself, and should not reject or repress it, so that the mental interaction and mental resistance can be lifted, and the symptom can be reduced or even disappeared. Insomnia, for example, is one of the most common symptoms of neurosis and one of the causes of worsening neurological symptoms. The causes of insomnia are many, but the cause of insomnia in neurological symptoms is first of all mental interaction. Occasional insomnia cannot be avoided even by normal people, but neurotic people suffer from insomnia phobia after experiencing the pain of insomnia for the first time. After going to bed at night, worried about insomnia again, the artificial pursuit of sleep, excessive attention to their mental activities, so that the spirit of more nervous, so that the process of sleep is artificially disturbed, the result is that the more afraid the more sleep, turn on the light to see that it is late at night a few o’clock, worry about tomorrow’s work and study on more anxiety, so close your eyes to force yourself to sleep quickly. The vicious circle of anxiety and insomnia affects the normal sleep process. Some neurotic patients have the problem of intense thinking after going to bed, one thought is not resting, one thought is rising again, distracting thoughts, can not stop, distressed by it. The only way to clear these is to “listen to its nature”, first of all, do not be afraid of insomnia, and not to artificially pursue sleep, so that the spirit of natural relaxation, relaxation helps sleep, so people who are not afraid of insomnia, not long-term insomnia, strong sexual thinking, do not resist, let it “natural flow”, “nothing in mind”. If you lie down peacefully, the strong thoughts will be self-perpetuating, and you will unconsciously go to sleep.
Those with more serious illnesses and complex symptoms that interfere with the normal conduct of daily work and study need to be hospitalized and use Morita therapy, which includes.
(1) People who have poor tolerance for anxiety and psychological conflicts and resort to large amounts of alcohol and drugs to solve their problems.
(2) people with severe suppressed state, frequent suicide attempts
(3) poor control of impulsive behavior, people who have had violent, criminal, sexual deviant behavior.
(4) Various psychiatric patients.
Inpatient treatment is divided into four phases.
Phase I: Absolute bed rest period. During this period, the patient should be completely isolated, forbidden to meet, talk, read, smoke and all other activities to relieve boredom, such as singing, whistling, etc. Except for eating and defecating, the patient is ordered to lie almost absolutely still, the purpose of which is to
(1) To experience the state of mind that boredom is relief. Due to the compulsory sedation and the prohibition of all activities to relieve boredom, the patient felt very bitter and troubled, and the doctor checked the room once a day to watch the changes in the patient’s mood. When the patient talked about the distress, he told the patient to “listen to the nature” of the emotional changes, let the anxiety be anxiety, let the worry be worry, let it exist naturally, quietly endure, and in principle, the more the patient’s distress intensifies, the more the treatment purpose can be achieved. When the patient’s distress reaches its peak, it is like the “last five minutes” of an assault by a soldier, and in a very short time, the distress disappears without a trace, as if the severe pain suddenly subsides, and the spirit immediately feels refreshed. Morita names this state of mind “boredom and relief” and calls this period of time the boredom period. The purpose of this period is to allow the patient to accept the pain and develop an attitude of complete acceptance of anxiety and worry. Morita says that this is the opposite of a normal interview, and that allowing the patient to truly experience pain and accept it can lead to a higher level of spirituality and “enlightenment”.
(2) To stimulate the patient’s desire for activity. After the patient has experienced the state of mind where “boredom is relief,” he or she is free from the negative pain of the past and begins to feel bored and has a desire to engage in some active activities.
The second phase, also known as the light work phase, continues with isolation therapy and prohibits talking, playing, etc. The time spent in bed is limited to 7-8 hours. After eating, they are exposed to sunlight and air outside and can do some light work. Every day after dinner, they were asked to keep a diary. The diary is used to understand the changes in the patient’s physical and mental status and to give instructions on writing the diary. Recreational activities are still not allowed during this period. The patient’s physical discomfort and strong perceptions were treated with a “listen to nature” attitude. This period lasts from 3 to 7 days.
The third period is the heavy work period. This is a period of heavy physical work, such as sawing and chopping wood and working in the fields. The purpose of this period is to develop endurance for the work, to gain a summary, and to experience the sacredness of labor as a practice that promotes “epiphany” for 7 days.
The fourth period, the complex life practice period, begins the training to adapt to the changes in the outside world and to prepare for the return to the real life, allowing the patient to go out, to do the work with a pure and natural heart, avoiding excessive attention to the value of action and the pursuit of a perfectionist attitude. During the hospitalization period, patients are asked to keep a diary to record their changes in condition and treatment experience, and doctors provide diary guidance, aiming to guide patients to clear their previous assumptions and misunderstandings about their condition, to give up their false resistance to their condition psychologically, and to experience “letting nature take its course”.
The basic task of psychotherapy is not only to eliminate the patient’s distress, but also to help the patient grow. To become a real human being, we should learn more about human nature, and we should help others to understand their own human nature, which is useful to remove their mental suffering. Psychotherapy is to help patients understand their own humanity and accept the reality so that patients can be satisfied with their lives. In order to achieve satisfaction with life, one must live a realistic life in a realistic way, and as a result, one will be happy, which is the true meaning of psychotherapy and the true meaning of human life. Psychotherapy is fundamentally to help a person live a realistic life.