You become angry and frustrated easily? You experience delayed, irregular, or heavy periods? You find yourself tired and fatigued with no good reasons? In the world of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), these are signs you suffer from Liver Qi Stagnation (a root cause of your IBS). To solve the problem, you need to ‘soothe’ your Liver (a term used in TCM) and manage negative feelings so that it will help you manage your IBS.
For some of you it works to talk to a friend. However, in this post and the next one you will read three-level solutions (ranging from simple to complicated), ones that combine and mix methods of two experts from USA, and another from Japan, solutions that are built on an idea by Sigmund Freud.
Experts in this post
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of ‘Search Inside Yourself’ and Founding Patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE)
- Ryan Holiday, one of the world’s bestselling living philosophers, author of the number 1 New York Times bestseller ‘Stillness Is the Key’
- Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis
Level I: ‘Split’ yourself into two
You are sad, and with no friends to talk to? Have you tried this before? Tried what? Talk to your negative emotion, a method I learnt when doing my bachelor of education in a UK university (but I did not practise it until recently).
Simply put, treat negative feeling as another person, for example, a friend. Talk to her by asking a few questions:
- What is your name? (Yes, you may give the negative feeling a name.)
- How are you doing?
- Can you tell me what happened?
What is the point of doing this? When you talk to your negative feeling, you are doing one thing that is really important: listening to and observing yourself. In other words, you split yourself into two different persons, one observing and the other observed. In this process of splitting, you distance yourself from the emotion, a distance that helps you stay cool, a process that enables you to see yourself (as an outsider).
(A word of caution: When you talk to negative feeling, do not judge. As suggested by Tan, you simply experience it without judging it to be good or bad. Simply put, you are listening to a friend’s voice, a close friend of ‘yours’. So, don’t ever judge.)
Level II: Placing your emotions in the right place
Although level I method soothes your Liver, it has a weakness, a ‘fatal’ one: it does not solve the problem. And according to Freud, a founding father of modern Psychology, a problem not solved is still a problem and it will probably get down to the lowest layer of your mind.
Sooner or later, the problem not solved, the emotion, will get back to the surface layer of your mind!
So, what should you do? Instead of letting negative emotion stay in your mind, in whatever layer, you need to place it somewhere else. You need to understand it better, so that you understand yourself better. And if you understand yourself better, life will probably be better.
So, the question becomes: Where to put those feelings.
On paper or on electronic device, write a journal about your experience. In other words, when you are confused, jot down a few sentences (or more). When you are upset, write down something. Put simply, unload your thoughts onto a better place.
Journaling is a level-two method as it is a means, according to Holiday, you ask yourself tough questions. So regarding negative feelings, you may ask questions such as:
- Why am I so sad?
- Why do I care so much about _____________?
And a tougher but deeper question suggested by Holiday is:
‘How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?’
Stillness Is the Key
By unloading emotion and examining it in a deeper way, you observe yourself from a longer distance than level-one methods. In doing so you not only reflect on the emotion, but also on who you are.
