After a scarred childhood, before the age of thirty, Su Xuanhui also deeply disgusted herself, "until I saw my inner child crying, I decided to love her back." Never fight with herself again, how can she practice saying thank you to herself?
"I am very grateful for my birth, if I hadn't grown up in that environment and experience, I wouldn't be who I am now, and I wouldn't have this Su Xuanhui."
Hearing such a confession, many people may think that it is a smooth life path, but on the contrary - her parents gave birth to her in a non-marital relationship, making her a commonly known "illegitimate daughter";
I haven't seen my mother since I was born, and when I hear about it when I become an adult, it's already the news of the other party's death; After only living with my father for a year, I wandered around with different relatives, as if I never had a home.
Because he has personally walked and hurt, he has better understood the suffering of others and become a "healer of wounds", and has been working tirelessly for 20 years, writing best-selling books such as "Into the Night, Embracing You: Comforting the Lonely Self in the Dark" and "Why Don't You Love Me: Healing the Pain of a Loveless Childhood", and Facebook fans have accumulated 170,000 fans.
How did that journey of self-healing begin?
Su Xuanhui's eyes widened, and she said honestly: "Actually, the first time I saw my inner child, it was full of horror!"
Photo | Su Xuanhui Courtesy
Living in the position of the victim: why doesn't anyone love me?
She was 26 years old and working as a social worker in the hospital, and the first case she came into contact with was a teenage boy who was too late to say goodbye to his mother, lying on the bed holding his head and crying, "I felt the same sadness as him."
The moment the boy left the ward and closed the door, Su Xuanhui began to cry uncontrollably. She said goodbye to her father at a funeral home when she was 14 years old: "We only lived together for a year, and he left."
The pain caught people off guard, and no one ever told us that we could allow ourselves to grieve, hiding our depression for twelve years, and now we were finally discovered.
"Why do I comfort a case but don't know how to comfort myself?"
This forced opening experience led Su Xuanhui on the road of self-healing, "But to be honest, I was sad for the first three years, completely sad, and I couldn't do anything."
She couldn't work and disconnected her feelings, it was like walking to a cliff with nowhere to escape. "Looking back, there are only a bunch of inner children, all screaming and shouting, and they don't know what to do with themselves."
At that time, she often had a dream to move to a new rental space, and she was cleaning. The picture seems calm, but there is a room that she does not dare to open, and a person is dead in it, and the body is still inside.
"In fact, it is excessive grief, there is no hope for life, and I am like death."
Uncover yourself layer by layer, and find that there is not only sadness in your heart, but also loss, anger, frustration, despair, helplessness, anxiety, jealousy, and envy.
"Why is everyone doing so well, only I suffer here?" Living in the position of the victim, feeling that everyone is sorry for her, anger pushes away the friends around her, making her more lonely, the more resentful she is.
(Extended reading: Interview with Su Xuanhui X Zhang Xi: Everyone has wounds, and it's normal not to love yourself occasionally)
The process of breaking the cocoon is not a false force: you can grow your own strength
Until a friend sincerely told her, "If you continue to be angry, everyone will leave you." Suddenly, the anger died down, and the melancholy inside came out.
She didn't go out all day, locked herself in her home, a lonely space alone.
"At that time, there were all four emptiness, only myself, and there was no external thing to distract me, so 'she' could finally start talking to me."
That she is Su Xuanhui's inner child. At that time, she met with a bunch of children, as if she was a novice kindergarten teacher, and she didn't know how to face these soft children, "I was afraid that I would hurt them."
I kept complaining, "Why doesn't anyone love me?" She finally heard a small and fragile voice deep in her heart: "Why don't you love me?"
Su Xuanhui understood that it was she who disagreed with her the most.
Photo | Su Xuanhui Courtesy
Three years after walking through the dark night of the soul, 30-year-old Su Xuanhui decided to give the inner child a lifelong promise: "I will love you."
She no longer goes to fortune-telling, does not let others tell her the answer, she wants to find her own answer. Like Moses in the biblical story, he wandered alone in the desert wilderness for forty years when he discovered that he was not an Egyptian prince.
"When you find that the desert wilderness of life is so empty, you can calm down and think, how do I walk through this desert?" Surrender and accept that this is my life, but it doesn't mean that the end is like this.
She gave up her dream of studying abroad, was admitted to the domestic psychological counseling institute, and gradually found a anchor for herself.
"Now think about it, that is the process of dormancy and breaking the cocoon, which cannot be saved by external forces to grow complete strength."
(Same scene plus screening: Saying "I love you" to yourself is a kind of cleanup: twenty-one mirror practice, hugging the inner child)
Cards & Writing: Self-talk to say thanks
In the process of dormancy, Su Xuanhui often uses two tools to help herself: cards and writing.
Cards are like little tips in the puzzle game, small emotions you don't find, but can be honestly reflected by cards. "I used cards to talk to myself and collected more than forty decks of cards before and after."
Those self-talks, which became the inspiration of life, she wrote down in words.
Write a thousand words a day, without theme and purpose, write whatever comes to mind, share it on Facebook, and gradually get a response from readers: "I can't say it, thank you for helping me say it."
Su Xuanhui said with a smile that those words are often the "cry of the unhappy soul" of the inner child, which can hook everyone's heart, it is the collective hidden trauma of Taiwanese society, that is, in the growth experience of the "deduction philosophy", the excessive effort and flattering character cultivated make everyone have a hard time.
Most of the regrets she saw in the end-of-life ward were that they didn't know who they were and what they had.
"We have been asking for a long time, but dying is a very internal, deep process, and only we can accompany ourselves."
I hope that I can be a companion and leader, so that people can accept their own encounters and lives before the end of life, and "let all the huge sufferings finally become a small pearl and put it in everyone's pockets."
Su Xuanhui, who is nearly fifty years old, now writes a letter to herself every birthday, saying thank you and sorry, "I'm sorry, sometimes for the sake of real life, I forgot you or forced you, thank you for your support."
Just like she is actually an introvert, every time the new book promotion period is painful, but in order to promote healing, she is willing.
"After I turned thirty, I stopped fighting with myself, and all I said was thanks."
(Guess what you want to see: kidnapped by childhood wounds? 4 Steps to Healing the Inner Child from the "Attachment Relationship")
Loving oneself is a three-in-one combination of thinking, attitude and action
No longer afraid and abandoning her inner child, Su Xuanhui often imagines that she is her own parent: "Do you want to feed your child indiscriminately? Would you tell a child to go to a corner and ignore him? Would you tell the child not to sleep with you?"
Taking care of the inner child is actually to be a "functioning positive parent" and raise yourself well. Just like the English healing of healing, it is the same as the root of health and health, "The so-called healing is actually to restore health, not so mysterious and profound."
Photo by Hassan OUAJBIR on Pexels
Su Xuanhui also said that true love for oneself should be a three-in-one of thinking, attitude and action:
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Thinking: Understand that the responsibility of life is always on ourselves, we have the power to protect ourselves, and we do not have to rely on attachment to external strong people. We come into this world to create and write our own story, and you decide for yourself how the story will be played.
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Attitude: Self-acceptance and kindness. Everyone's growth process has more or less experience of being treated violently, not necessarily physically, but also subtle words and eyes. Don't be cruel to yourself, be kind to yourself.
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Action: In practice, do not do anything harmful to yourself. As mentioned earlier, imagine that you are your own parents, how to raise yourself better? Give yourself good food, exercise, routine, and honestly feel your emotions and thoughts.
In this interview, although it talked about childhood pain and inner healing, Su Xuanhui often laughed and said, the clouds were light and breezy, as if she was telling other people's stories.
That hearty laughter has power, and the inner child who was once resentful and sad has laughed happily with her.
True unity is like this, I love my inner child and tell him, "I will always be there."
Interview | Haoting
Written by Amazing