mental health quotes

It is never about "being happy forever and having no negative emotions", but rather your flexibility to coexist with all emotions - even if you fall into the mud, you can still stand up without forcing yourself to smile and say "this mud is so beautiful".

In the five years I have been working in grassroots psychological services, I have seen too many people equate "mental health" with "always positive energy" and forcefully suppress themselves to cause problems. Not long ago, I met a post-95s girl who works in operations. She saved three pages of "Daily Gratitude List" in the memo on her mobile phone. She followed the guidelines of online positive psychology and required herself to find three things worth being happy about every day. As a result, she suffered from insomnia for half a month, and her eyes were swollen like peaches when she came in: "Yesterday, I got home after working overtime and it was already 12 o'clock. I couldn't find a good thing even if I tried hard. Do I have a mental problem? ”

Regarding "should we deliberately focus on the positive?", in fact, there have been different voices in the industry. Proponents of positive psychology do believe that actively paying attention to positive experiences can improve happiness, but most psychoanalytic counselors will tell you that suppressing negative emotions is more costly—the grievances, irritability, and unwillingness you forcefully suppress will not disappear out of thin air, but will only be stored in your subconscious mind, and they will explode out of nowhere when you find a small hole. To be honest, negative emotions are like kitchen waste in your home. You keep stuffing it under the bed, and sooner or later it will get bugs. It is better to just take it out and throw it away. Even if you get your hands dirty when throwing it, it is worse than fuming the whole house and making it impossible to live in it. I didn't ask her to continue writing her gratitude list. I only asked her to write down whatever she was unhappy about next time on a piece of scratch paper, regardless of wording or swearing. Two weeks later, she came over and showed me her new memo while shaking her phone. They were all "The demand for the product has changed again today, stupid X" and "The takeout took 40 minutes, and the rice was cold. It's bad luck." She said she felt good after writing it, and she didn't have any sleep this week.

There was also a mother who came to me for parent-child consultation. She cried when she came up and said that she couldn't help but slap her rebellious son yesterday. After the slap, she regretted and slapped herself in the mouth. She said that she read online that "psychologically mature parents must be emotionally stable" and felt that she was a failure and not worthy of being a mother. When it comes to the over-hyped concept of "emotional stability", humanistic counselors are actually most disgusted with "deliberate maintenance of stability" - Rogers mentioned as early as the last century that the core element of the counseling relationship is "sincerity and consistency." I asked her to go back and apologize to her son. She didn't need to make excuses, just tell the truth, "Mom was too anxious yesterday and couldn't control her temper. She shouldn't have hit you. It's her problem." She later sent me a message, saying that her son hugged her after hearing this and said, "I shouldn't have hid my failing papers and lied to you about not passing the exam." The couple cried a lot and felt much better than the filial piety they had pretended to be like before.

Not long ago, I was having hot pot with Dr. Li, a psychiatrist who has been practicing for almost 30 years. He picked up a chopstick and casually said something that I still have in my memo. It is the most practical mental health quotation I have seen in so many years: "It is normal for people to eat whole grains and have joys, sorrows, and sorrows. You don't even dare to lose your temper. Is it any different from a car without a safety valve?" Sooner or later it will explode. ”He said that after practicing medicine for so many years, the people he has seen who are most likely to have problems are always the kind of people who always say "I'm fine" or "I'm fine" when they open their mouths. On the contrary, they complain about "today is really unlucky" every day, and basically have no serious problems.

Nowadays, there is always a debate on the Internet about whether adults should give up their emotions. The two sides are arguing fiercely. Those who support say that emotions are useless burdens, and only by getting rid of emotions can great things be accomplished. ； Opponents say that emotions are human instinct, and to give up emotions is to be numb. In fact, both sides are reasonable. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) will indeed teach you to identify irrational beliefs and avoid being led by extreme emotions to make impulsive decisions. However, counselors in existential therapy will tell you that pain, anxiety, and regret are themselves a part of life. If you reject these feelings, you are essentially rejecting a part of yourself.

I also encountered this pitfall when I first entered the industry. I always felt that to be a consultant, you must be emotionally stable at all times and not have negative emotions. As a result, I was accusing myself of anger for half a month. One day, because the delivery was late, I spoke to the rider guy in a very aggressive tone. When I hung up the phone, I was confused - the anger was not for him at all, but because I had received a suicide intervention case a few days ago. I was too stressed and had nowhere to release it. I was storing it all. Since then, I have made a rule for myself: spend 10 minutes "taking out the trash" before getting off work every day, and talk about everything that makes you unhappy, even if you curse a few words, it is better than trying to blow it up on innocent people.

Last month, a young man who failed the postgraduate entrance examination came for consultation. He sat across from me and cried for almost 40 minutes. He said that he had been preparing for two years and was 3 points short of passing the re-examination. He felt sorry for his parents and that his life was meaningless. After crying, he took out two pieces of paper to wipe his face, blew his nose, and said to me: "Sister, I feel much better after crying. I wanted to jump directly to the subway on the way here. Now I feel that it is a big deal that I have to take the exam for another year. If it is not possible, I can find a job. The sky is not falling." ”You see, this is what we call "psychological flexibility". It doesn't mean that he doesn't cry or feel uncomfortable, which means he is mentally healthy. It means that even if he is extremely uncomfortable, he can continue to move forward after crying. That is enough.

I have a lot of mental health quotations that don’t make much sense but are very useful in the memo on my phone. There are no high-level academic words. They are all accumulated through years of hard work. The most useful sentence is what my supervisor gave me when I first entered the industry: "You are a normal person first, and a consultant second. Don't force yourself to build a machine without bugs. ”

This statement applies to everyone.