Cured by Watching & Talking

Even at the darkest moment,

there will always a light for you.

Even at the lowest moment of your life,

there will always a person guiding you to move forward.

Within the little psychological counseling room,

there will always a chair for you to open the window of your mind.

Among the seats within a family,

there will always a chair of love waiting for you.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Peacefulness From Your Calmness to Stop Anger

Depression: Straight a student quits from school to guard his mother at home

Helping for national university entrance examination: From one who dislikes to the one who likes to study.

Marriage: A girl who wants to get married in white dress

Schizophrenia: Driven by family systematic force

Career: SnowyGirl who draws attention of women with schemes and calculations

Stomach Trouble: Resentment to one’s birth mother

Chapter 2 Hope Gives Persistence to Let Sadness Disappear Gradually

Quitting from school due to depression: A straight a girl in school said: Mum, I have depression!

School Weariness: Mother’s momentum of death would affect the study of her child

Obesity: I would rather the dead one were me but not you!

Depression: An unforgettable pain

Backache: I let you go with my love

Asthma: A persistent illness after father’s death

Chapter 3 Defeat Fear with Volition from Courage

Social Anxiety: A child is an angel sent by Heaven to salvage parents

Marriage: How one could enter another marriage?

Help for the test to high school: The test anxiety of third year student of secondary school

Cheating: Whose marriage is not a ground covered with chicken feathers

Fear: Fear of national athlete/ divorce of parents

Chapter 4 Rebirth from Pains and Sufferings to Get Happiness and Joy

Anger: Mum, for your hug I paid a price of divorce!

Bipolar Disease: The secret of childhood nearly let me lose my life

Career: A thirty years old child without getting married and having his own family

The Feeling of Powerlessness: The person who is forgotten in one’s life

Appendix: Family Constellations

Preface

Exploring the Hiding Side

We always show our bright and graceful side to other people, and leave the pain and unbearable sadness to ourselves. Other people rarely have an opportunity to look at the side which we are constantly facing by ourselves, therefore, none really understands us. We are predestined to be lonely, but a psychological counsellor is the only person who could really help us to face the dark side of ours.

In past, we had a misconception that the dark side was just with garbage, and psychological counsellor had a nickname of the recycler of garbage. At the moment, we like to call the counsellor as the magician which could turn some rotten things into miracles, and the counsellor has never been a recycler but just a transforming station to turn the garbage into treasures.

So long as you like, we could together to begin the trip to witness the wonderful transforming process.

Counseling is a collaborating process between the counsellor and the client. Whether or not you will be cured, it depends the joint efforts—no matter how much efforts one could put in, nothing will happen single-handedly.

Every one of us is taking care of many things in our life, this was true in past, this is true at the moment and this will be true in future. We have successfully coped with many things, in the process we have developed concepts and ideas of cognition, including some harmful ones.

When we are playing with our phone, during its operation, it will produce many pieces of garbage which usually could not be seen and known to us. Undoubtedly, the existence of the garbage will affect the normal operation of our phone. In order to solve the problem, we need some professional help.

A person acts in same way. From a child to an adult, we have experienced so many things and developed so many concepts and ideas of cognition. So long as it is a cognition, then none could be sure it is completely right, or what we could see is just partial, furthermore, some cognition might not only be partial, it might also be wrong completely.

For example, when we were young, we successfully solved a quarrel between parents. In one aspect, we thought we could deal with the quarrels of parents and got some courage and confidence in the process, in another aspect, we might think we are more competent in dealing with relationships than our parents, we might even worry that what they would do if we were not at their side when they had another quarrel.

There are twenty-one stories of development, which could be taken as loving stories. If you are willing to use the stories as a series of mirrors, you would be able to shine the dark sides which are constantly with us.

From birth till the moment, everyone has experienced numerous incidents. Only through the incidents our cognition become what it is at the moment, particularly the important incidents and those harmful incidents.

Furthermore, our parents and grandparents have also developed their own cognition systems through their own experiences. Through their teaching by words and actions, their cognition silently become part of our cognition when we are growing up with them in our lives.

We develop twenty-one sets of golden sentences through the twenty-one stories. So long as you have a similar situation, you could get help for yourself through one of the sentences. Furthermore, the twenty-one stories we particularly choose represent frequent problems ordinary people will encounter at some stages in their life.

Maybe you think the sentences are too common, or you have already known them, that might demonstrate that you have not yet confronted with the hiding side in yourself.

We all know APP has its front-end and back-end, and could only contact with its front-end. In fact, we human being also have our front-end and back-end, under normal circumstance we could only see our front-end. If we want to change the front-end, we have to operate at the back-end. For students in psychology, they all know that consciousness corresponds to the front-end, and subconsciousness corresponds to the back-end, and what we are hiding is inside the subconsciousness.

In fact, one’s life is just a play in which one is both a director and an actor. Many people could see his role as an actor, but could not see he is also a director; a few people could see the both roles of his, and only fewer people could see not only the both roles but also the screenplay which had already been developed at early stage of one’s life.

Though the golden sentences are quite common, they point out the possibility to us for rewriting the screenplays for our lives which were developed years ago. The sentences have been summarized from numerous cases of our psychological counseling and helped millions of clients coming out their quagmires. Though with the help of the professional, you could get maximal effects, if you put quite an effort in the process, you still could get half of the maximal effect by yourself.

You need not to talk about the sentences to another person to get maximal effect, they are just soliloquies of our hearts. Many people hold a misconception that ‘when one talks, one has to talk to someone’. If one does not talk to someone, then one needs not to talk at all, which actually blocks the exit channel of our inner heart and keeps many things which could not find a discharging channel in our heart. In fact, everyone has a lot of things in one’s heart, for those things one just needs to talk but not communicate. To communicate, one needs another person, but for talking, one could do it by oneself. People pay high attention to the communication between two people but ignore the importance of the soliloquy.

The function of communication is to achieve harmony with other people, the function of soliloquy is to achieve internal harmony within oneself. To everyone, it is quite beneficial to one’s body and mind if one talks to oneself when one is alone.

When you plan to use the golden sentences, you need to pay attention to the following things:

Unless you have already become a professional, otherwise you cannot guide any other people (including your parents, partner and children) to utilize the sentences;

If you really want to help someone, you could send this book as a gift to him/her, that is all what you can do.

When you try to do the soliloquy, you have to ensure you are alone and at the same time turn off all the instant communication tools.

Choose the golden sentences based on your actual situation, forget those sentences which are unrelated to you.

You need not to worry about so-called loss of control of your emotion. When you are alone, it really does not matter whether you lose control or not. When your emotion reaches its climax, it will recede naturally, that is a law of emotion regulation.

When you try to talk about the golden sentences to yourself, you should first put down your own judgement and have an attitude to give it a try.

At last, as a special remind that when you read this book, you should keep some tissues and a pillow which is within reach of your hands.

Foreword

Joy, Anger, Sadness and Fear Are Innate Instincts and Stumbling Blocks to Own Happiness

Joy, anger, sadness and fear are our inborn emotions. They take part in all the emotional reactions of sour, sweet, spicy and salty tastes in our development process, we just get used to them without realizing their potential harmfulness. In one hand, the four emotions play a quite critical role to our survival, in another hand, they could have negative impacts which couldn’t be underestimated on our life.

Many problems in our life are closely related to them, including problems of insufficient money, the bottleneck in one’s career, entanglement with one’s parents, inharmonious relationship with one’s partner, communication with one’s children and problems of one’s children such as academic stress and burnout and addiction to internet etc. As answers to these problems are hiding in the four emotions, we need to study them carefully and closely.

Many people think past is a past, but as a matter of fact, past is really not a past. Let past be a real past should be a goal to achieve in our life. This is not just a slogan but a commitment which we should do our best to achieve. The link between past and current is our emotion, particularly the four emotions.

In the world of mind, time and space are just our fantasies. Four emotions are links between past and current, current emotions inherit from past emotions. No matter where you are at the moment, there is an invisible continuity of one’s emotion.

Joy, Anger, Sadness and Fear Are Four Innate Emotions Essential to Our Survival

Due to the complexity of our life, human develop many emotions from these four basic emotions such as shame, missing, worry, envy, jealousy, hatred etc. Though we have many emotions, the four basic emotions still take critical positions in our life and have quite deep impacts on our daily life.

Before human civilization came to life, for millions of years, the essential for human life was about food, therefore, human emotion has a close relationship with foods. For survival, human have to acquire food. Once human get food, human could avoid hunger, what more important is that as a species, human could survive and prolong, thus, as people get enough food, they would jump and shout for their food, the emotion is joy.

In contrast, food is dwindling daily, or in a situation, people could not acquire food, people begin to worry or even become apprehensive, the emotion is sadness.

In nature, everything favors the powerful. If food is snapped away, people will become angry, the anger will empower people with force to take back the food which has been robbed away. If the opponents are too strong, then people have to ensure their survival first, they would become apprehensive, the worry would make people not take excessive action due to anger, just take what has already lost without incurring further loss.

In a word, when one gets one would become joyful, when one loses one would become sad, when one is angry one would take back what was belonged to them, when one is fearful, one would give up what was belonged to them.

Joy for what one gets

Joy makes it easy for getting more, if one could not control one’s desire, the joy would make one get addicted to the thing, in the end, one could not extricate oneself from the addiction.

It is unavoidable for one to have one’s likeness, which leads to one’s stubbornness and obsession, so long as one has an obsession, demons will arise from his mind, the obsession is related to self-righteousness, which is the origin of many psychological problems.

Sadness for what one loses

If one loses the person or thing one loves, one would become sad, as if part of one’s body is taken away with the person or the thing, thus, one would have a feeling that the sadness is from within oneself and one could not get out of the feeling. When one is in a sad status, one would lose interest in everything and not want anything.

To get back what one owned when one is angry

A person could be empowered by anger, the power could be used for reconstruction or destruction. When one is angry, one could attack other people, one also could attack oneself. When one attacks other people, it would break interpersonal relationship, when one attacks oneself, it would lead to self-destruction.

To abandon what one owned when one if fearful

In fact, fear could make a person become more intelligent, but excessive fear would lead a person to fear this or that and stop moving forward. Even if an opportunity shows up in front of him, he would lose the good opportunity due to his fear. For example, one is afraid of getting married due to fear of marriage; one is afraid of success, thus, as soon as the critical moment arrives, the person would either give up actively or lead various accidents to happen.

The main task of the counsellor is let people get to know the four emotions in one’s heart, through the knowledge to face the gains and losses in one’s life, in the end, one could face calmly about the gains and indifferently about the losses, and let the thing run its natural course and get what one should get in the process.

Core Logic of Psychological Counseling from Talk Therapy to Image Arrangement

This book is the first book talking about ‘image arrangement’. To you, ‘image arrangement’ is totally a new concept, nevertheless, it should be okay so long as you know that ‘image arrangement is one of methods for psychological counseling’.

If you could not understand the cases included in this book, we recommend you reading the cases for several more times, then, you will understand what is psychological counseling, how to do the counseling and how the counseling could achieve its effect.

We divide the counseling into auditory therapy and visual therapy, which is different with the ‘traditional therapy’ and ‘postmodern therapy’ held by many experts in the field, the division is quite interesting. Image arrangement belongs to visual therapy and postmodern therapy.

Traditional therapy is also called ‘therapy by talking’. Based on the name, one could get to know the therapy is carried out by talking and listening between the client and the counselor. The concept could represent what most of ordinary people think about psychological counseling.

Undoubtedly, the occurrence of visual therapy definitely broadens our view about psychological counseling. In comparison with ‘Therapy by Talking’, in ‘Visual Therapy’, the counselor not only has to listen but also observe. The ‘observation’ means to observe not only the patient but also other things.

To many people, ‘Visual Therapy’ is a new concept and a revolutionary one. But there are no fundamental differences between ‘Therapy by Talking’ and ‘Visual Therapy’, therefore, let’s first look at their common area.

Psychological counseling is based on a good relationship, under safety guaranteed environment, to promote healthy and coordinate development of personality through professional help of a counselor based on his/her training in psychology and related skills to eliminate or alleviate psychological or personality problems of the client.

In above definition, due emphasis is given to the professionals with particular knowledge and skill, which is appropriate. The problem is the definition does not involve in the core content of psychological counseling.

Then what is the core content of psychological counseling?

The difference between people is the difference in cognition. Psychological problem arises from a problematic cognition. Therefore, the core of psychological counseling is to reconstruct the cognition of the client to eliminate his/her psychological problem.

‘Therapy by Talking’ achieves the change of cognition of the client through talking. But from the aspect of the change of cognition, for many the counseling, the talking happens like parents with a child, a teacher with a student, a leader and a subordinate etc. In such fashion, the mysterious veil of the counseling is taken away, which is our main object.

Though in our daily conversation there is some component of the counseling, the difference between the one given by professional and non-professional is huge, just like the difference between a professional athlete and a non-professional one, we all know that they could not be measured in a same scale. Of course, the only exception is soccer in China.

There are a lot of skills for psychological counseling with huge difference among one another, the difference between the auditory therapy and visual therapy for psychological counseling is huge, the incompatibility could be compared with ‘the incompatibility between water and fire’.

Visual therapy emphasizes on images, auditory therapy emphasizes on language. The images and languages here belong to subconscious mind, i.e., the subconscious images and languages.

Subconsciousness must get involved in the counseling, and the change of the client often means the change of the cognition of not only the consciousness but also subconsciousness. What is subconsciousness? Jacques Lacan, French psychologist once said subconsciousness has components like a language. Bert Hellinger, German psychologist thought subconsciousness is composed of images, i.e., images of family constellations.

There is no contradiction between the concepts of language and images, they both point to subconsciousness, could