self-healing books

Self-healing books are not "chicken soup placebos for the soul", nor are they a "miraculous medicine" that can cure all emotional ailments - they are effective for 80% of the general population who are in "emotional sub-health" and have not been diagnosed with severe mental illness. If selected and used correctly, they can help people complete more than 70% of the repair of mild emotional internal friction. The premise is that you do not hold on to the expectation that "you will be fine after reading it" and use it as an "emotion manual" rather than a "first aid prescription".

Last spring, I revised three versions of my project plan, but all of them were rejected. I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. The building I rented was just in time for municipal road construction downstairs. The pile driver buzzed until two o'clock in the morning. I counted the cracks in the ceiling until three o'clock with my eyes open. A friend gave me a book "The Courage to Be Disliked". After I flipped through two pages, I threw it into the corner of my bedside table. "All worries are worries about interpersonal relationships". My back hurts when I stand talking.

At that time, I had the same idea as most people who called such books "poisonous chicken soup." It was not until later when I talked with psychological practitioners from different factions that I discovered that the controversy over such books was essentially an issue of "applicable boundaries." Dr. Zhang from the clinical psychology department of a tertiary hospital mentioned a case to me: Last year, there was a girl who had just graduated with mild anxiety. She only had occasional insomnia. She read "The Power of Now" at home and forced herself to "Don't think about the past or the future, just focus on the present." Dr. Zhang’s point of view is very clear: People who have already developed pathological symptoms must not use self-help books as a substitute for clinical treatment. Without the guidance of professionals, it is not even recommended to read such books on your own, as it is easy to suffer from "cognitive drift."

But on the other hand, research data in the field of positive psychology has given a completely different conclusion: A survey on the effectiveness of self-help books released by the American Psychological Association in 2022 shows that, in conjunction with mild psychological counseling once a week, clients who insist on reading healing books that match their own emotional problems have a recovery period that is 32% shorter than clients who only receive counseling. There are even 17% of subjects with mild social disorders who have reached the standard of clinical cure simply by insisting on reading the corresponding self-help books and completing the exercises in the book. I once met a little administrative girl who couldn't help but please everyone. She took over when her colleagues took over the blame. When the boss worked overtime, she took the initiative to stay with her. Even when the delivery guy was late, she was afraid that he would be punished and dared not complain. After she read "The Neglected Child", she sent me a message in the middle of the night. , said that she sat on the floor of the rental house and cried for half an hour. For the first time, she realized that her "sensibleness" was not innate. It was the result of her parents always ignoring her emotions when she was a child. She could only rely on being "good" in exchange for attention. The next day after crying, she asked her boss for a salary increase, and she actually got it.

It's interesting to say that last year I was shopping for books in the second-hand book market and saw a lot of self-healing books. The title pages of the books neatly read "Become a better self in 2023." However, after turning less than ten pages, there were no traces of them being touched. Many people think that these kinds of books are useless. In fact, they have confused "chicken soup articles" with "real healing reference books" from the beginning. The popular ones in the past few years, such as "If You Bloom, the Breeze Will Come" and "Be a Strong-Hearted Woman" are actually not self-healing books at all. They are emotional chicken blood at most. Real professional healing books are backed by solid research or clinical practice: "Nonviolent Communication" is written by Marshall Lu Sumburg's decades of experience in clinical communication intervention, "The Body Never Forgot" is the result of van der Kock's forty years of research in the field of trauma treatment. Even "The Courage to Be Disliked", which many people criticized as chicken soup, was written based on the core views of Adler's individual psychology and was not made up by the author.

I have two wild ways of choosing this kind of book. I have learned them through many years of pitfalls, and they are quite useful. The first is to look at the author's background. If the author's introduction doesn't even have any psychological counseling qualifications or relevant academic research background, and it's all about "emotional blogger with millions of fans" and "ten years of self-growth experience", just put it down. It's probably just chicken soup. The second is to randomly flip through the middle two or three pages. If they are all empty encouragements such as "You have to work hard" and "You are beautiful", you can also put them back. If there are specific practical exercises, such as "Next time you can't help but agree to someone else's request, stop and take three deep breaths and ask yourself, 'What do I really think now?'" This kind of thing can really be used. Oh, yes, there is another pitfall that you should not step into: don’t buy blindly following the best-selling list. If you are already depressed because of unemployment and turn to read "Alive", isn't that causing trouble for yourself? Different emotional problems correspond to different books. For people who want to please people, read "The Courage to Be Disliked" and "No More to Please." For people with trauma in their original families, read "Original Family" and "The Body Never Forgets." If you have been so anxious recently that you can't sleep, read "Self-Help for Anxiety Disorders."

Damn, don’t praise this kind of book too highly. If you are diagnosed with a mental illness such as severe depression or anxiety disorder, don't expect to get better by reading books. You should take medicine and consult. Books are at most an auxiliary tool for your recovery period. Just like if you have a fracture, you can't just read the "Guide to Rehabilitation of Fractures" and not put on a plaster, right? I still have the copy of "The Courage to Be Disliked" that I threw into the corner last year on my bookshelf. The footers are folded, and there is an annotation "Nonsense" I wrote on it at the time. I flipped through it last time when I was sorting out the bookshelf, and I laughed for a long time. In fact, there is no magic book that can transform you after reading it. It's just that when you are struggling to climb out of the emotional mud pit, it just stretches out a stick that is not so slippery. Whether you grab it or not, and which direction to climb, ultimately depends on you. In the final analysis, it is never the words in the book that can heal you, but the idea that you are willing to get better.