Self-healing ability

Self-healing ability is not essentially a superpower to "eliminate all negative emotions", but a trainable, non-standard "emotional rebound skill" that everyone can possess - it does not require that you never fall, but that when you fall in the mud, you can always crawl out slowly, whether by grabbing the grass roots or pulling on the corners of your own clothes.

I met a girl who works in Internet operations a while ago. Her project was canceled and was optimized. She stayed in a rental house of less than 10 square meters for a week, with takeout boxes piled at her feet. She cried until her contact lenses were dry and stuck to her eyeballs, and her friends refused to listen to her advice. I originally thought she would wait for at least half a month, but last week I saw her in her WeChat Moments, standing halfway up Xiangshan Mountain holding the grilled sausage I just bought, her hair disheveled by the wind, and her smiling eyes narrowed into slits. She wrote in the comment area that on the third day, she was lying on the sofa, touching the cat's belly, and her hands were soft and warm. She suddenly felt that "it was not impossible to survive." She got up and cooked a bowl of hot noodle soup with fried eggs. After eating the whole meal, she was mostly alive.

Regarding the effective path of self-healing, there are actually quite large differences among different schools of psychology. Psychoanalytically oriented counselors generally believe that the core of healing is "seeing the deep unmet needs": If you collapse to the point of being unable to sleep after being scolded by your leader, it may not be the seriousness of the incident itself. It is most likely the emotion of being unreasonably accused by your elders in childhood but not being caught, which is superimposed with the current grievances. Therefore, they will recommend that you keep an emotional diary, dig back along the current emotions, and find the root cause to solve most of the problems. Scholars from the cognitive-behavioral school do not agree with this logic of "digging out the past". They believe that the core of healing is to interrupt negative thinking and rumination - that is, you think over and over again such useless thoughts as "I wish I hadn't said that" and "Am I really bad?" Regardless of where the emotion comes from, you can just get up and run 3 kilometers, wash a bowl of dishes, and play with Lego for half an hour. As long as you pull out the attention trapped in the emotion, the state will naturally ease. The school of positive psychology that has become popular in the past two years is more straightforward. They believe that you don’t need to be so complicated at all, just find your own “positive anchor”, such as touching the cat’s belly, sucking a cool mint, or flipping through two pages of funny emoticons that have been saved for a long time. As long as it can make you feel a little better at the moment, the healing is complete. It's not that which one is better, it all depends on your own habits - if you like to think about things, it will be more satisfying to dig out the root causes. If you are annoyed by old scores, just interrupt the rumination. There is no need to force yourself to meet a certain set of standards.

Speaking of which, I have been in trouble before and felt that it must be done in a professional way. Until last year, when I was working on a project for more than three months, I suddenly collapsed in the stairwell of the company on the final day. I sat on the ground and couldn't stop crying. At that time, I forced myself to use cognitive behavioral methods to move. The more I wanted to stand up, the more tired I felt. Finally, I took out the mint candy in my bag and sucked one. The coolness hit my forehead. I took out my phone and scrolled through the 20-minute video of cats trampling on breasts. I wiped my face and went back to pack my things and get off work. Really, many times the wild paths you figure out on your own are 10,000 times more useful than textbooks.

Oh, by the way, many people still have a misunderstanding. They think that people with strong self-healing abilities are people who will not be sad. How can such a thing happen? I know a senior who has been doing clinical consulting for 12 years. Last year, the golden retriever that I had raised for 8 years passed away. She still didn’t recover for half a month. She would touch the dog collar hanging in the entrance twice before going out every day. She always kept half a bag of freeze-drying left for the dog in her bag. She had so many professional methods at her disposal, but she didn't force herself to get better immediately. Self-healing never means that you will become an emotionless iron man. It means that you clearly know "I am in pain now", but you are also sure that "this pain will eventually pass."

I have seen too many people looking for various "5-step self-healing methods" and "10-minute emotional regulation manuals". In fact, it is really unnecessary. The methods used by many people around me are quite outrageous to say the least: friends who are doing back-end development, every time there is a bug online and the crash occurs, they go home and dismantle the old keyboard. ； My best friend, who is a primary school teacher, felt wronged and copied the students' compositions. When she saw the children write "The wind smells like oranges, you can take a bite while running." She laughed out loud after copying two articles. ； My mother was even more outrageous. Every time after an argument with my father, she would clean the windows and make all the glass in the house bright and her anger would go away.

There is no unified standard. The little girl who was optimized last time asked me to drink coffee. She said that before she always felt that she was too fragile and would cry when something happened. Now she discovered that she can remember to cook a bowl of noodles with eggs for herself when she is about to collapse from crying, and she can touch the cat's soft belly and feel that "it seems like it can hold on any longer". This is already a very powerful ability. Yes, we are always asked to be emotionally stable and indestructible, but we don’t need to. Self-healing is not a lofty skill. It is just that when you are beaten by life and your face is bruised, you can still remember to buy yourself a sausage and notice that the sound of the wind blowing through the sycamore trees is pleasant. That is enough.