28 principles to help you escape from mental purgatory

[Jacky1980]

Mr. Zhangyi, the chief counselor in Heixi Psychological Counseling Center, once suffered from mental purgatory for years, his life was messed up and he saw no future ahead of him. To liberate himself from the pain, he began to study eastern and western philosophy and psychology including Taoism, Buddhism, Subconsciousness Theory, Hypnotism, NLP, Morita Therapy and Heixi Therapy. After many years of studying and practicing, he managed to escape from the nightmare-like life and become a psychotherapist full of confidence.

Brief Introduction of Mr.Zhangyi:
ACHE (USA) Clinical Hypnotist
Member of Hypnotism-Therapy Association of USA
Chief Counselor in Heixi Psychological Counseling Center
Registered Counselor in Chinese Labor Department


From now on, I will work as Mr. Zhangyi’s translator and translate his article on his full-recovery experience to help every one in this forum. Life is precious, we have no time to waste. Mr. Zhangyi will share his experience and method to teach you how to free yourself from neurosis such as Social Phobia. Due to the fact that the original article is in Chinese, so I will translate and post these 28 principles one by one in some days.

1. Medication will never help you out.
Medical research has made amazing progress for the past 10 years, many research findings have contributed a lot to people’s health, but would medication really make us stay away from illness? Take “toothache” as an example, when we feel toothache, we may take aspirin to relieve it temporarily, but aspirin can never completely solve the problem, which is that you have a decayed tooth. In this example, ache is the symptom on the surface, the real problem behind the symptom is “decayed tooth”, when we remove the “decayed tooth”, we will never feel the ache and we really solve the problem, if we just take medication only target at the symptom “ache” without removing the decayed tooth, we will never completely recover or free ourselves from the symptoms, so all in all, if we want to completely recover, we need to see what is really behind those symptoms.

In the case of mental health, it is the same. When we take medication to relieve our anxiety or depression, we just cover up the real reason behind the symptom, the real reason is sensitive personality, our low self-esteem, maybe medication can reduce the symptom, but it can never eradicate the root, when the effect of the medication is gone, we must take it one more time, and cover up the real cause again. Like if we just pluck the weed without removing the root, it will grow again under sunshine and water. What’s worse, medication may get you addicted, and the side effects may bring you more pain than the mental illness itself.
（to be continued)

 

[Jacky1980]

2．Why we suffer from neuroses.
The purpose of all that we are doing is to satisfy our desire, once if we fail to, we will have mental conflicts. All the mental conflicts or troubles come from the mere fact that we cannot satisfy the desire in our hearts. The diffident people feel upset because they cannot behave confidently, the weak people feel upset because they cannot behave strongly, the hesitant people feel upset because they cannot behave decisively……neuroses sufferers all have a weak heart, they are like children who have not grown up, we can not withstand any attacks from outside world. There are 2 factors leading to neuroses, inner factor and outer factor. The inner factor is personal cognition, experience and value. The outer factor is the outside environment to which the neuroses sufferers are unable to adapt themselves to.

About the inner factors:
Firstly, Neurosis is neither organic disease or psychosis, it is caused by the wrong cognition of some normal mood, like anxiety, phobia and tension. Actually they are normal parts of ourselves, but we think of these unpleasant feelings as some abnormal things and want to eliminate them.

Secondly, perfectionism, we cannot allow any defects to exist on us, if we find any, we have a great urge to eradicate them. The concept of “I should” always haunts us, in order to eradicate our bad feeling and reaction, we use whatever method we can, we become more and more self conscious.

About the outer factors:
If we carefully observe the people surrounding us, we can find that many people are under stress and pressure. Some people can withstand the attacks and recover soon after it, but some people fall down due to pressure, immersed them in anxiety or depression every day. The society is a group where people gather together to live a good life, it is created by human beings, but it is difficult for the people to adapt themselves to. We all like to have a sufficient sleep during the morning, but strict working time does not allow us to do it; we all desire to stay at home and enjoy the DVD movie, but we have to go out to work to stay alive; sometimes we find it is difficult for us to communicate with people, sometimes economic crisis worries us. So the society itself is a large anxiety provider.

Then let’s look at ourselves, every person wants to have a beautiful or handsome face, but not every one can be satisfied with the appearance. Then in terms of health, not all the people can have a strong and healthy body. Finally look at our inner world, we have innumerable defects, like weak personality, parsimony, and bad temper.

Neurosis sufferers are haunted by depression, anxiety, phobia or OCD. Actually it is the normal feeling or mood all the people will encounter, because of the wrong cognition and sensitivity, we take it as abnormal and believe we have to eliminate it in order to live perfectly. When we focus all of our mind on such originally small point, it becomes more and more powerful and uncontrollable at last.