Stop torturing yourself and allow the past to pass

Speaking of self-care, actually for those of you who are strong in self-torture, it's sometimes difficult to be kind to yourself, so let's talk about self-torture, and how to do self-care in response to self-torture.

Scientific research has shown that more childhood adversity is associated with higher rates of physical and mental problems in adulthood, so people generally want to escape the negative effects of childhood adversity and the self-inflicted effects it causes, if only for the sake of a longer and healthier life.

In principle, getting rid of your negative early experiences and ending the cycle of self-torture isn't complicated. In some ways, it doesn't even require you to do anything. If you look closely at your own life, you will find that for most of us, as long as you do nothing, it will break on its own. For example, if you don't show up for work, you will lose your job. If you don't clean and maintain, your house will be a mess sooner or later. If you ignore your girlfriend, your relationship will soon fall apart... In other words, it's natural that things fall apart over time, and if you don't take care of them, most things that are objectively there will fall apart sooner or later, including your early life and its effect on you.

However, the reality we experience is clearly contrary to this pattern. Many people are influenced by their early experiences, and the strong negative experiences are particularly impressive and can continue to affect people's lives. This is mainly because we can't really do nothing.

What does that mean? In fact, we are often compelled, even eager, to repeat our early experiences, reinforcing and sustaining them in the process, so that they are difficult to pass away naturally.

In many people with severe long-term psychological trauma, there is a phenomenon called compulsive repetition. These people will constantly seek out the same people as their former perpetrator and put themselves in similar high-stakes situations, causing them to mentally and practically relive their traumatic experiences. In the average person, this repetition may not necessarily play out in real life, but rather in the form of a little mental theater in which earlier negative experiences are repeated. You may repeat in your head your mother's usual criticisms of you, comment on everything in your father's way, interpret every interaction with authority figures as a mirror image of a confrontation with your elementary school teacher, and so on.

This is actually an instinctive problem solving mechanism in humans. When we have a difficult problem, you may go back and forth, and even lie in bed, ready to go to sleep, thinking, how can we solve this problem? You might also print out the wrong question and redo it. Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing when you're torturing yourself, and I'm not saying that it's wrong for you to do it over and over again, but my point is that if you have a problem with the way you're doing it, no matter how many times you're doing it, you're just adding to your anger and anxiety that you can't solve it, and that's not helpful. In fact, that problem only occupies a very small dimension in your long life, and even has become your past forever. What you need to do now is to stop redoing it, that's all.

But we can't control our desire to do it over and over again, and this "do-over" becomes the source of your current self-torture, and it's also the true entry point of your self-care. You don't have to or can't take back or change the past, but you can end the replaying of the past within you, allow it to truly be the past, end the torture, and set yourself free.

Everyone grows up with difficult experiences and self-torture in different ways, but there are some relatively universal ways you can try to care for yourself.

If you want to improve the problem of self-torture, first of all, you need to understand how you torture yourself. It's usually not too hard. You just sit back and think about what's wrong with you. For better people suffers, their mind will generally have a description of how bad, and a complete description of the argument, and one must contain some of his personal "quality" at the core of the paper, such as he could feel "is not a good man," "do not" "alive" is a waste of resources and so on.

If a person is less self-torturing, he should still be able to find some patterns for self-torturing by thinking about what he used to say to himself when he was feeling down or having a bad day, or what his parents used to say to him, "It's all your fault," "Look at other people's kids," "Why are you so weak compared to other people," etc.

Whatever comes to your mind, get a piece of paper and write it down, especially if it points to your personal values, qualities, or meaning, such as feeling unworthy, unworthy, or unworthy. As for your creative ideas and arguments for the topic, write them or not. Those arguments are, after all, just your ideas for solving the problem in the past, and the most important thing in this case is the problem itself that you are trying to solve over and over again.

When you have all your questions written down, you can put them on the table. My expectation is that your topic should be no more than a few hundred words. If it's a few dozen words, even better. If it's a one-sentence description of yourself in ten words or less, as in the example I gave above, then you've definitely got the central idea of your self-torture.

Some people look at these themes and immediately begin to work on themselves, either in a black spiral or in a tubular vision. Stop! Make sure you stop here. Just stop. I asked you to lay out the theme of self-torture, not so that you could rehash old ideas, but to make one thing clear to you: you are now the one doing the problem, not the problem.

The question is on the table right now. Whether it's "I'm worthless" or "my life has no meaning," it's just a problem in your life. It's not you, it's not you. Your only problem is that you're stuck on the question and can't turn the next page of the paper.

This is a very important step. Maybe you can figure it out right away, maybe you can't figure it out right now, but at least you can remember the idea that all your self-torture might be a problem that you haven't solved yet, that's all. Don't worry. If you understand more or less, you can move on to step two.

The second step is also simple. Admit it: I'm stuck. I've really been working on this problem for years and I just can't solve it. I'm stuck. It's that simple.

You may think this step is a little funny, but it makes a lot of sense. Because the reason you keep repeating the same thinking and steps is that you think you can solve this problem, you can solve it, even you think your thinking is completely correct, you just have to work a little harder, a little more seriously, and a little more drilling, you can solve it! And as a result, you can't find your own answer and way out.

You must have had this experience when you go to school, when you can't solve a certain problem, when you run to the outstanding students and say "I can't figure out this problem," you suddenly come to the train of thought! This is because when you admit that you can't do it, you let go of the original idea and there is room in your mind for new ideas.

Of course, there is no "quick fix" to self-torture, but only if you admit that you are stuck and that the solutions to some of your current personal problems are ineffective and unworkable do you have a chance of finding a path that is not self-torture.

Next, if you can, I encourage you to have some understanding and empathy for yourself in this moment. I want to tell you a fact, is that you are not alone, as long as living in this world, almost all people will get stuck, nothing more than the card big question or card small question, the specific card is which question. So, almost everyone is in a similar position to you, in some way. Of course, I don't mean that all the questions are equally difficult, but the card question is inevitable. In this respect, you are not so unique, but you are not so alone.

If you can always have an understanding and empathic attitude when you look at your questions, the magic spell of self-torture itself will have been solved by you inadvertently. Yes, you are facing a problem in your life, and even if I tell you that the problem is over, you may be tempted to do it more than once, and that's okay. Even if we go to college, we can go to elementary school problems, and there's a good chance that we don't know how to solve them, right?

But at this time, you have a different mindset, you don't think you have to solve this elementary school problem, then the self-torture at least for the moment, will stop.

You can, of course, come to my classes, read and think for yourself, and observe the wisdom that life teaches you. Try a variety of ideas, see which one you agree with and which one you disagree with, but always remember that you are working on a problem, it is not all of you, and everyone has to solve problems, that's the same for everyone.

Well, here we are, introducing some basic ideas of self-care for people who have self-torture problems. You can try them and see if they help you. Of course, if you do have a relatively long-term negative experience in your growth experience, or have had a strong psychological or physical trauma experience, I still suggest that you find a professional psychological worker to improve and solve the problem when conditions are available. But whether you have it or not, I believe that self-care will undoubtedly bring some different experiences and opportunities to your life that have been difficult, and create more space and support for your personal healing.