Mental health content excerpt

It never means the complete absence of negative emotions, staying positive 24 hours a day, and there is no universal "health standard". All judgments must be comprehensively evaluated based on the individual's specific situation, cultural background, and personal growth trajectory. The core thing is your flexibility to coexist with negative states, not the existence of the negative state itself.

Last week I received a visitor from an Internet operation. The first thing he said when he walked in was "I think I'm depressed. I have to sit in the hallway and cry for half an hour every day when I get home from get off work." Looking through her schedule, she found that she had completed three online projects in the past 21 days. She only took half a day off on weekends. Even when her cat was sick, she asked a friend to take her to the hospital. I told her that this was not a psychological problem, but that a normal person would collapse after spinning for so long. She should sleep for three days before talking about anything else. She was stunned at the time and said that she had read a lot of popular science and said that "long-term low mood is a sign of depression" and she thought she had to take medicine.

Oh, by the way, I first heard this sentence from a supervisor who has been in the industry for 30 years. I copied it directly on the title page of the excerpt at the time: "Don't just label people as mentally ill. First, check whether his recent life is a human life. ”

The logic of adjusting mental health among different schools is actually quite different. No one is higher or lower, it all depends on who is suitable. Psychoanalytically oriented counselors are more inclined to dig into the root causes behind emotions. For example, if you always lose your temper for no reason in an intimate relationship, it may be that the unprocessed trauma in your childhood attachment relationship has been triggered. You must first find out the knot before you can straighten it out. ； Positive psychology-oriented counselors don’t like to dwell on the past, but pay more attention to the resources you can mobilize in the present. Even if you do have childhood trauma, are there any small things that can make you happy for even 5 minutes now? Seize those 5 minutes of happiness first, and then slowly expand it outwards. I have seen cases in which psychoanalysis was used to resolve years of emotional distress, and I have also seen mothers who quickly recovered from postpartum depression by using small exercises in positive psychology. There is no need to argue about which method is more "advanced".

I have excerpted the conclusion of a paper on emotion research before, saying that people who can accurately distinguish their own emotions have 32% higher psychological flexibility than people who can only say "I am not happy." To be honest, I felt this very deeply when I was working on a case. A little boy who was a sophomore in high school came to me and said over and over again, "I'm just annoyed, I can't do anything." After chatting for more than 40 minutes, I finally unraveled his emotions bit by bit: he was annoyed because his mother secretly looked through his chat history, he was annoyed because he failed the math week exam and was afraid that his father would tell him, and he was a little jealous that his deskmate won the information competition award, and he was not shortlisted after half a year of preparation. After he explained these emotions clearly one by one, he leaned on the sofa and breathed a sigh of relief and said, "It turns out I'm not inexplicably annoyed."

You see, the granularity of emotions is like opening a blind box. If you always cover it and dare not look at it, you will never know what is inside, and you will always feel that it is some kind of scourge.

There is a lot of quarrel on the Internet right now about "should we reconcile with our original family?" I have recorded two completely different views in my excerpt. Some schools believe that they must reach reconciliation with their original family in order to break out of past behavioral patterns and gain true freedom. ； But most of us who handle cases on the front line have a consensus: if the harm caused to you by your family of origin has reached the level of stress, it is completely okay not to reconcile, and there is no shame in not forgiving. I have really seen too many people force themselves to "shake hands and make peace" with their parents who have hurt them, and in the end they twist themselves into a knot, which makes them more painful than before. Not treating "reconciliation" as a KPI that must be completed, and being able to live your own life far away from it, is a very healthy state in itself.

Psychological elasticity is a mysterious thing, and it is simple and simple. It is like a rubber band in your hand. It is good if it can be stretched and retracted. There is no need to pursue it to be neatly stretched forever. I also wrote down a little tip from a family therapist in my excerpt. If you are emotionally overwhelmed right now, don’t hold on to “digesting your emotions.” Find an empty room with no one around, and pour out all the curse words and anger you want to express in front of an empty chair. You don’t have to think about logic or right or wrong. After you say it, turn around and leave. You don’t have to look back to “collect your emotions.” A personal test is 10 times more effective than holding it in your heart and repeatedly internalizing it. Don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet that “just one hour of mindfulness every day means you love yourself.” If you are so busy that you touch fish for five minutes while squatting on the toilet or stare out the window for a while, that is also a way to take care of yourself. There is no distinction between high and low.

These are just random thoughts that I jot down when I go to supervise and take on cases, and there is no systematic principle. After all, there is no standard answer to mental health. What you feel comfortable with is more effective than all universal standards.