Self-healing ability

Self-healing ability is not essentially a superpower to "completely eliminate negative emotions", but rather the ability for people to adjust their cognition independently and gradually return their mentality to normal track without completely relying on external intervention when encountering emotional lows or mild psychological trauma. It is not a natural "emotional buff" for a few people, but a skill that can be acquired by everyone through training, and there is no unified "correct training path".

Many people have a misunderstanding about this matter. They think that people with strong self-healing abilities will never collapse. This is not true at all. Last week, I sat by the window of a coffee shop for half an hour. The girl next to me cried over a work report for almost twenty minutes. Her shoulders were so sore that she spilled half a cup of coffee. After crying, she took out a small notebook with frayed edges and wrote for five minutes. After wiping her face, she ordered a piece of cheesecake. After finishing the meal, she left humming a song. You see, she can also collapse, but after the collapse, she doesn't have to wait for others to hand over tissues, she can pick up the broken emotions and put them back together.

If you talk to a psychoanalyst-oriented counselor about how to improve this ability, you will most likely get the answer "find the trigger point first". To put it bluntly, it’s not complicated. Many times, your inexplicable temper tantrums and uncontrollable breakdowns are not at all how serious the matter is at the moment, but because it pokes an old wound that has not healed in your early years: for example, if you are always anxious to the point of insomnia because your partner replies late to messages, it may not necessarily mean that the other person is really unreliable. It may be that when you were a child, your parents always failed to make appointments, and you have subconsciously bound "waiting" and "I am not important" together. As long as you can be aware of the binding behind emotions, the next time you encounter a similar scene, your first reaction will not be "he doesn't love me", but "oh, the old wounds have popped up again to increase your sense of existence", and the intensity of the emotion can be reduced by half in an instant.

But if you talk to a cognitive behavioral counselor, you will most likely feel that talking about your childhood is too strenuous, and it is more pragmatic to directly change your current thoughts. Their core logic is particularly straightforward: it’s never what happened that makes you miserable, but your interpretation of it. You were also scolded by your boss. You held the idea of ​​"I'm just a waste and can't do anything." You were able to be emoticon for three days without being able to eat. ； If you change it to "He is scolding me for the plan I made this time, and it is not me, it will be over if I change it." Then you can just turn around and order a takeaway to refuel. The emotional check-in that many people practice is essentially this logic: write three lines every time you feel emotional - what just happened? What was my first reaction? Is there any other way to interpret it? After practicing for two or three months, you will find that many of the thoughts that trap you are simply untenable.

There is also a type of mindfulness counselor who feels that the first two are too "competitive". When emotions come up, you don't have to look for reasons or force your thoughts, and just move on. I always thought this statement was too mysterious until I had a conflict with a colleague over a project last year. I was so angry that my hands were shaking. I hid in the fire escape and wanted to curse. Suddenly, I remembered the method I had seen before. I stood and felt the feeling of air being blocked in my chest. It was numb and a little stuffy. I just stared at that feeling. I neither cursed, "Why am I so useless and suffered such grievances?" Later I realized that emotions are like drafts. If you don’t stop them, they will flow by themselves. The more you push them, the harder they will bounce when they hit the wall.

Of course, don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet that “self-healing is the most advanced ability, and asking for help is fragile.” There really is a limit to this. There was a relevant survey conducted by the Department of Psychology of Beijing Normal University in 2023. Among people who suffered severe trauma such as bereavement, domestic violence, and major accidents, those who relied on self-healing alone were 47% more likely to develop PTSD than those who sought professional intervention in time. I once had a senior student who failed to start a business. He owed more than one million yuan and stayed at home for half a month. He said he would rely on self-healing to get out. He almost jumped off the building, but a friend forced him to go to long-term consultation. It took more than a year to recover. He later told me that at that time, he felt that asking for help was admitting defeat. Only now did he realize that seeking external help when he knew he couldn't handle it was part of self-healing.

I sometimes think that self-healing is like the box of throat lozenges you carry with you. If you talk too much and your throat hurts, you can immediately relieve yourself by holding one in your mouth. But if you really have tonsillitis, you can't rely on throat lozenges to cure the disease, right? Don't envy those people who seem to have great self-healing abilities. It's not that they don't feel pain, they just have tried more "throat lozenges" that suit them than you. You don’t have to imitate other people’s diary writing or cross-legged practice of mindfulness. Some people heal themselves by running five kilometers, some people heal themselves by eating a spicy hot pot, and some people heal themselves by donating all their old clothes and cleaning their home. As long as it works for you, it’s a good method.

After all, what can pull yourself out of the mud pit is never the standard answer, it is the position that is most comfortable for you.