When doing psychological outpatient or expert outpatient, I often feel powerless, because many friends have been experiencing the torture of illness, and I have been doing my best to help you, and I have found three words here: First, accept the psychological problems, and live positively with your psychological problems; second, open up your heart, and look for “amateur psychiatrists” around you; third, understand others, and be a good “amateur psychiatrist” by yourself. “Understand others and be a good “amateur psychiatrist” yourself. Pain is just a sign of psychological problems, and facing them head on is the only way to reduce them. First of all, I would like to emphasize one thing: never think that your problems are unique, and never think that you are the most unfortunate. In fact, almost everyone I’ve talked to in depth, including my close family and friends, has a variety of psychological problems to a greater or lesser extent. In fact, we all live with psychological problems. The difference is that some people are trapped in their psychological problems and become more and more depressed, while others manage to live positively with their psychological problems. For example, the mathematician Nas (the prototype of the hero in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”) suffered from schizophrenia when he was young and was never completely cured. Hallucinations and delusions haunted him all the time, but he lived with the symptoms, thought about them, and eventually won the Nobel Prize. To distinguish between pain and problems, we can find ways to alleviate the pain, but more importantly, we need to have the courage to face the problems. Too much pain is often due to the lack of understanding of why the pain, and too much pain leads directly to our avoidance of pain, fear of pain …… Finally, we ignore the problem itself, desperate to eliminate the pain, and therefore a series of psychological problems. To live with psychological problems, we must first change some habitual misconceptions, understand the relationship between pain and problems. Misunderstanding one: “I am the most unfortunate under the sky” “I blush when I talk to the opposite sex. Every time I face the opposite sex I feel my face burning and have to run away. I see everyone else is so calm, why am I the only one who looks like this?” “Stuttering is killing me. I have tried everything to cure my stuttering and still nothing works. Because of my stuttering, I have been repeatedly embarrassed, and every time I have wanted to die. When I see other people speak fluently, I am envious and jealous, why are they so comfortable and I am so unfortunate?” “I am a university student, I broke a little finger in an accident when I was a child, and since then I have a particularly low self-esteem and feel that I am a disabled person. In college, I was so worried that people would see my disability that I always put my hands in my pockets. Every time I had to pull my hand out, my heart would thump …… my whole life was ruined on this little finger.” “I fell out of love and felt like the most unfortunate person in the world when I watched other people walking around in pairs.” …… Everyone has psychological problems of varying degrees of severity, and everyone has a large number of “fellow travelers” with psychological problems. However, people often fail to see this, thinking that their own suffering is unique, always lamenting “why am I the unfortunate one?”, infinitely expanding their own problems and treating them as the most important thing in their lives, and using all their resources to correct them. The reason for this is that people with mental problems think that their problems are a monster and do not dare to expose them, but at the same time they close themselves off from their problems. Over time, they feel that they are the unique and most unfortunate person in the world. This is true of stutterers. Many stutterers see themselves as the most unfortunate people at first, but once they come into contact with the stuttering community and realize that there are actually so many people as unfortunate as they are, their pain is cut in half. The same is true of people with various social phobias. People with blush phobia think that they are the only ones under the sun who blush when they see people; people with staring phobia think that they are the only ones under the sun who have “dirty eyes” and are afraid to look at people. …… But in fact, there are many people who suffer from these problems. Psychotherapists in the treatment of social phobia patients, the first step is often to show them other people’s cases, and when they realize that there are so many people and he has the same problem, the pain will be reduced by half. No matter how weird the psychological problem is, you can basically find a large number of similar, no one is “the most unfortunate person under the sky”, there is always someone else as unfortunate as you or even more unfortunate. There is always someone else who is just as unfortunate as you are, or even more so. The saying that “our happiness is based on the suffering of others” makes sense from this point of view. The most unfortunate person will always feel like finding a relative when he or she discovers someone who is equally unfortunate. Misconception No. 2: “Suffering is all because of the present” Negative emotions such as fear, panic, anger, anxiety, sadness, etc. arise, and we sink deeper into them, unable to extricate ourselves. At this time, it is good to think about the “why”. A 27-year-old girl wrote that she had only been in love once, and after the breakup, she never dared to fall in love again because “I am afraid of losing, afraid of the feeling of sitting on a cloud but suddenly falling to the bottom, very afraid.” Countless people break up in love, but most people later start a new relationship, why is the girl “very afraid” and do not dare to fall in love again? Generally speaking, this can be traced back to childhood. Most of the girls who are afraid to fall in love again suffered from severe separation anxiety in their childhood. For example, their parents left them for a long time when they were very young. Or even, one parent left and never came back. This severe separation anxiety eventually turned into an unconsciousness, buried deep in her heart, and the breakup reawakened her unconsciousness, once again inducing her severe separation anxiety. Thus, she preferred to be numb rather than have another intimate relationship. Much of the pain of dying in a relationship is related to childhood separation anxiety. When in pain, instead of just wallowing in it, or looking for stimulation to minimize or numb your pain, think, “Why am I in so much pain, and what childhood experience am I repeating?” A pair of sisters attend the same college. The younger sister fell out of love and slit her wrists, and the older sister vowed never to fall in love again. She really stuck it out and is still single in her 40s. Analyzing this on the surface, the sister probably hated that man, and all men, because she felt so guilty while identifying with her sister and hating her as a sister. However, if you go back to childhood, you can understand what really happened: their dad failed their mom, divorced her after having a third party, and left them too. At that time, one of them was 4 years old, and the other 2 years old, it is a critical period to establish a sense of security, their father’s departure caused them serious separation anxiety, and they sowed suspicion and anger towards men early on. The younger sister is younger and more predominantly generates low self-esteem, the older sister is two years older and more predominantly generates hate. A lot of people break up in relationships, but the reason why the younger sister slit her wrists and killed herself was because the breakup evoked feelings of despair caused by her dad leaving when she was 2 years old. The reason why my sister hates all men is not only because of what happened to her sister, but also because of the hatred for men that has been buried in her heart for a long time, and what happened to my sister only reaffirms that this hatred is “justified”. The 27 year old girl and the sisters, for them, their logic seems to make sense, because the experience of adulthood repeats the catastrophe of childhood. However, if they had thought about where their fear and anger came from, they would have realized that their fear and anger were based on limited life experiences and were not reasonable. Misunderstanding No. 3: “Reduce suffering by all means” Confucius said that there are four levels of human cognitive ability, “Those who are born to know are superior; those who learn to know are inferior; those who are trapped and learn are inferior; those who are trapped and don’t learn are inferior; those who are trapped and don’t learn are inferior.” In the past, I think his words are very beautiful, very reasonable, but in my limited 31 years of life, so far, I have not yet encountered a real “born to know”, I know of the masters of psychology, are “stuck to learn”. For example, Rogers, a master of humanistic psychology, is considered by the psychotherapy community as the most contributing psychotherapist because of his concepts of patient-centered therapy, empathy, and unconditional positive regard, and his discussion of the doctor-patient relationship is even more brilliant, and the relationship has also become the essence of his therapeutic theory. However, Rogers had been very autistic before he became a psychologist, and his wife was his first real friend. He agonized over this, thought hard about relationships, and eventually found the true meaning of love, “Love is deep understanding and acceptance. Since then, he has been able to understand and accept people better than most people. Another example is the Japanese psychologist Morita Masuma, who proposed the Morita therapy of “letting nature take its course and doing what is right”, which has become a very popular and effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social phobia and other mental illnesses, and who himself was a serious neurotic when he was studying in the university. For example, Freud, the master of psychoanalysis, put forward the Oedipus complex, childhood trauma and the unconscious and so on to become the key to understanding human nature, and he himself is precisely a child with a serious Oedipus complex. Another example is Ping Yi, a famous stuttering correction expert in China, who himself used to be a severe stutterer. He developed a set of effective treatment methods while practicing self-therapy. There are countless examples like these, which constantly subvert my superstitious belief in Confucius’ tetralogy. Now, I am even more convinced of the American psychologist Pike’s statement that “the tendency to avoid problems and their inherent emotional pain is the primary cause of all mental illness”. We want to escape from pain, but the problems behind the pain are part of us, inseparable, and cannot be escaped at all. The so-called avoidance is nothing more than applying all kinds of self-deception to distort our perception of the problem and thus reduce our suffering. We think we can’t see them anymore, but in fact they are still our tails that we can’t get rid of. And those who face their pain and the problems behind it head-on, every pain promotes their growth. Dr. Chen Zhiyan says that pain is a signal and an opportunity. Pain tells us, “It’s time for you to change,” and those who are brave enough to face their pain head-on are also the most likely to seize this opportunity to generate growth in their humanity. It is important to remember that simply avoiding pain will inevitably lead to self-deception. Facing the problem itself head-on will lead you to the path of growth. Misperception No. 4: “I can control everything about myself” We often think that we can control everything about ourselves, and this misperception is the direct cause of problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, and stuttering. A young man writes: “I am an ordinary man who has been out in the community for six years, but I have always wished that I could do something extraordinary! Although I am in a decent position now, I want more! I also have a certain understanding of myself. Summarizing the years that I have gone through, I realized that I am still immature in terms of my personality! The main problem is that many times I can’t concentrate my will to think about what I want to think about, I tend to wander off while thinking, and in this way I am inefficient, and I would like to ask you for advice: how can I concentrate my will to think about things?” A young mother writes: “I love my child very much, but I once actually entertained the thought of strangling him. My God, how could I think that, I must have been crazy. So I tried desperately to suppress the thought, but it’s coming out more and more often now. I’m afraid to hold my baby now, for fear that I won’t be able to control myself.” The young man and the mom had somewhat similar problems in that they both thought they were in control of everything they did. When the young man occasionally wanders off, he thinks it will seriously affect his pursuits. The young mom thinks that if she loves her child, she should never think about strangling her child. They are all thinking in absolutes. People often make this mistake because they fail to realize that we can only control our conscious mind at best, but the conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg of mental energy, and a great deal of subconsciousness lies in the bottom of the mind, which we cannot directly control. It is a given that they will surface from time to time. The fact that we don’t want them to appear is nothing more than an unrealistic request. The thing about the subconscious mind is that if we try to control it the more we try to control it, the less we can control it and the more frequent its activity will be. For example, the unconscious thought of the young mother desperately trying to suppress the thought of strangling her child will appear more and more frequently. One’s potential is unlimited, but the scope of one’s direct control by one’s consciousness is very limited. We have to recognize this clearly, not always cross with the subconscious mind, and not have to get serious over occasional problems such as wandering off and bad thoughts. Otherwise, they can become real problems. Misconception #5: “I’m OK without it” Often times, when we focus everything on a problem, that problem becomes a scapegoat for our refusal to grow. For example, the college student who broke his little finger mentioned earlier ended up asserting that “his life is ruined on this little finger”. Is this really the case? We can make the most basic assumption that if he had this little finger, then everything would have been OK in his life? Obviously, the answer is no. A college student, who lost his hearing in one ear before the college entrance examination, this did not prevent him from getting into a prestigious university. However, after entering the university, he realized that because of his hearing defect, he could not comfortably socialize with people in public. So he started to keep himself to himself. Soon, he fell in love with a girl, who was also nice to him, but he thought that his ear defect made him unworthy of her, so he ran away from his feelings again and again. Because of the constant repetition of emotional trauma, he eventually suffered from severe depression and escaped into the online world, playing video games all day long. At that time, he thought that without this ear problem, his world would be a completely different one. However, his ear was later cured, and at this time he realized that he still faced many problems, he was still depressed, he was still self-absorbed …… Finally, he realized that the ear problem was just a “scapegoat”, and that growing up requires courage, but he lacked the courage to grow up. But he lacked the courage to grow. So the ear became a natural reason for him to find himself lazy. When the ear is healed, he will only have one less physical defect, but the other problems will remain unresolved. Some boys scapegoat their shortness and refuse to grow up; some girls scapegoat their ugliness and refuse to grow up. They blame all their problems on their own defects and often fantasize that “if …… everything is OK”. However, some of the same short boys and ugly girls have the courage to live and live a very successful life. Some tall and handsome boys and some beautiful girls find a variety of scapegoats and refuse to grow. What flaw do you care most about in yourself? Think about it. Has it become your scapegoat? Find your “therapist” Parents, spouse, friends …… We always seem to come face to face with life’s difficulties at this or the next bend in the road. Yet we also always seem to find a way to balance our psyches in the midst of it and then move on with our lives as we choose. Sometimes this is down to time, sometimes it’s down to us finding our own outlet. In fact, not only in difficult situations, but even in the face of a calm day, we still need our own outlet, something to talk about. The therapist is the one who will make an impact on you in a subtle way. He or she listens carefully to your description of your difficulties or needs, and offers suggestions that are like a beacon of light, guiding you to find your way out of the maze that is your life. Even if you don’t need answers, you simply need someone who is willing to let you vent your emotions, you will feel relieved after confiding in him/her as a therapist. But the lack of realistic channels makes it almost a luxury for everyone to have a therapist. Looking at our lives, most of us don’t have a regular therapist, but many of us have found alternative ways to let people around us be our “therapists”. Parents Mona has gotten used to telling her parents what’s on her mind. Her parents are very open-minded and rarely intervene in her decisions, even if they don’t agree with her ideas. Mengmeng says, “I have a lot of friends, but I can’t just dump all my ‘psychological garbage’ on others. Besides, we’re all of similar age and have similar annoyances.” So, Mengmeng feels most comfortable talking to her parents, after all, they are the ones who can tolerate her the most. Comment: Many people in life are not able to tell their parents what’s on their mind like Mengmeng, because the generation gap is still very common. Even though our parents have more life experience than we do, their ideas of solving problems and the concepts they recognize are always different from ours, and often we have to leave with a bellyful of dogma. Moreover, we are often afraid that our parents will worry about us. Lovers From classmates to lovers, and his wife has known him for 10 years, Yu Chen feels that his wife has been his family and friends. Almost every day they tell each other interesting things they met during the day. When he was unhappy, he was more than willing to whine in front of his wife. He felt that a man always had to maintain his image in front of others, and he didn’t have to be so forced in front of his wife. Even if his wife is sometimes tired of his complaints and ignores him, he is still willing to say to her. Comment: Many people will think that Yu Chen is lucky because his lover is the closest person to him. However, it is often precisely because of the closeness that can cause communication barriers. Not as sweet and sweet as when you are in love, entering the stage of an old married couple, you may find it difficult to describe to him (her) your weak and disordered state of mind, perhaps because the distance is too close to get along with each other for too long, each other has lost interest in exploring the secrets of each other’s hearts. Also, being too busy, not in the mood, and not being able to talk about certain things can be an obstacle to talking. Friends Yue Yue said that her biggest achievement in college is that she has met her best friend, Ye Zi Ye. Their personalities complement each other. Yue is pessimistic and sensitive, while Ye is strong, optimistic and insightful. Whenever she encounters a knot in her heart that she can’t untie, she always confides in Ye. Nowadays, although the two are separated from each other, they still talk on the phone almost every day. Comment: Friends are the harbor where we are most likely to find comfort and the people we most often turn to for help. However, sometimes we eat and chat with our friends every day just for fun, and suddenly talk about any in-depth topics for fear of scaring them. Sometimes it’s God’s unkindness that sends the friends around us that we can make friends with to a different place. In fact, we can’t allow ourselves to complain to our friends about what’s going on in our lives, and if we don’t stop talking about it, our friends will sooner or later get tired of the endless gossip. Strangers Yi has a lot of online friends that she has never met before, and many of them are very close. She is never afraid to mention anything to them, perhaps because the onlooker is clear, from them, every time she can always more or less collect some objective opinions. However, she said she could never and would never want to meet with these online friends. She would rather believe that they do not exist in reality. Comment: There is often no psychological burden in talking to strangers, and the fact that we don’t know each other has the advantage that we no longer need to maintain the positive image we have worked so hard to maintain, and we can talk openly and without fear. However, we often see that many people can not grasp the scale of such a good, to make themselves into a modern “Mrs. Xianglin”. Children and pets Winter has a silly little dog. Since this puppy, Dong’er has developed the habit of talking to it, especially when she is not happy. Winter says she thinks the puppy understands her. Sometimes, when she was in tears, the puppy would lick his hand. After confiding with the puppy, she will feel much more relaxed. Point: Children and pets are both weak. In addition to winning in competition, the realization of personal value comes to some extent from the feeling of being needed. The fact that a child or a pet is your psychiatrist does not mean that you will confide in him/her, you just get the feeling of being needed in the process of spending time with him/her, thus relieving your mental stress. But at the same time, using your pet or child as an object to confide in is prone to self-pity. Probably, no one and no thing can be a perfect “psychiatrist” for you and me, they all have such and such unsatisfactory points. But they can be therapeutic with their understanding and love.