Is There Something to Be Said in His or Her Defense?

Only by letting go of hatred can body and mind possibly heal.

—Epigraph

It is no exaggeration to say that I hear patients bursting into tears almost every day. Whenever someone wants to have a good cry in front of me, I silently watch and patiently listen. Crying is a way in which a person spontaneously opens his heart. As a physician, I must help the patient or the patient's family member lay down the huge pressure in their heart. If we show extreme impatience when a patient cries, the patient will automatically close his heart again and go on living under enormous psychological pressure.

Today, a patient on a video call with me wept about how unfortunate she was: her family had isolated her emotionally and mistreated her, so that at a young age she developed breast cancer. She felt unspeakable hatred toward them, yet had no way to break away from the family entirely and survive on her own; when ill, she also needed their financial and emotional support.

Her breast cancer is estrogen-dependent. Estrogen not only easily induces breast cancer but is also one of the culprits behind a person's bad moods. She may not realize that her frequent state of mental collapse has a biological cause—overactive estrogen secretion. There is a professional medical term for the characteristic of patients like her: emotional irritability. In severe cases it can progress to unipolar or bipolar affective disorder—what we commonly call depression or manic-depression. For this kind of breast-cancer patient, castration therapy is relatively effective because it reduces estrogen secretion.

But cognitive therapy is equally important: the patient herself must realize that her emotional problems do not come from the outside but are influenced by her own endocrine system. Abroad, such patients are usually treated collaboratively by professional psychological counselors and oncologists, but domestically this may at present be a luxury; after all, we are a developing country and do not have such good medical conditions.

I listened very patiently to all her weeping, letting her pour it all out, and expressed deep sympathy for what she had been through. At the same time, I spent several dozen minutes explaining to her the enormous damaging effect of over-secreted estrogen on mood, telling her the biological reason women become emotionally excitable during their menstrual period, and explaining how the breast ducts continuously proliferate under estrogen stimulation. I then introduced her to several classic works on depression and books such as Endocrinology and Prevention and Treatment of Breast Diseases, suggesting she read them if she was willing. I also told her that in Inner Mongolia there are Mongolian medicine practitioners who specifically provide mind-body therapies for cancer patients, and that she might look into them; perhaps in those mind-body therapy apps she could gain something.

Because the conversation was well conducted, the patient was relatively receptive to some of my suggestions. But I am very experienced in this, and I know that such receptivity is usually not stable. Right now, after a good cry, her emotions have steadied and she is receptive to my advice; the next moment, when her emotions are again in a state of wild agitation, she will once more be tormented in pain.

The depression patient I have helped the longest will, this coming June, have been with me for seven years. Over these seven years her condition has fluctuated; she has several times lost hope in me, and in between sought help from professional psychiatrists at a mental health center. But in the end, it was probably my relatively deep humanistic literacy that attracted her, leading her again and again to seek my help.

A few years ago I discussed with her setting aside every Sunday as a "day of forgiveness," on which she reminds herself to forgive everything. On that day she stops looking for faults in others and instead learns to find what is pardonable in them, forgives them, and releases the resentment in her own heart. It must be said that her overall condition has improved considerably over these seven years, though it would be wrong to say I have successfully freed her from depression.

I shared this method with today's patient, while also telling her that today I myself was in the "razor-blade throat" stage of a suspected second COVID infection and that speaking was actually very hard. But when she was on the verge of collapse, I was still willing to endure the pain of a throat cut by blades to soothe her emotions. Hearing this, the patient looked somewhat embarrassed, expressed deep thanks for my effort, said she would seriously consider my advice, and would also set aside every Sunday as her own day of forgiveness. I promised that in the first two or three months, every Sunday I would check in with her, remind her that there is such a day of forgiveness each week, and help her build the habit. I also prescribed Gancao Dazao Tang (Licorice, Wheat and Jujube Decoction) and Danzhuru Tang (Liquorice and Bamboo Shavings Decoction), asking her to try treating her case according to the TCM pattern of "women's zang-vexation" to see whether it helps.

Turning a person's perspective around and changing a person's cognition is an extremely difficult thing. Forgiveness is the hardest thing in this world: it is hard not only for others to forgive, but for me myself, forgiving others at any moment is also no easy matter.

But anger and hatred are the root of many diseases; I have felt this deeply recently. A relative of mine was placed on criminal prosecution because of petitioning, and feelings of anger and hatred once tormented me terribly. My submandibular lymph nodes swelled up; for over a month my sleep quality was poor, I lost several jin in weight, my immunity dropped sharply, and toothache, a bad cold and tonsillitis attacked together—a lot of ailments, and I suffered greatly.

In the end I decided to forgive everything. When I decided to forgive everything, my sleep improved considerably and my physical condition also began to recover gradually. From childhood my parents repeatedly admonished me: spend the first half of the night thinking of yourself and the second half thinking of others; that way we will not become selfish, prejudiced and narrow-minded. We must learn to stand in others' shoes and look at them; we must learn to stand in a bystander's shoes and look at ourselves and our own relatives. All worldly grievances have causes and effects; not every fault belongs to others, and we ourselves may have many faults. When we hurl daggers at people, we should not complain if they return spears at us.

Is there something to be said in his or her defense? The moment we raise this question, hatred and anger have already begun to gradually dissolve. Toxic stress is to a large extent brought about by adversarial interpersonal relationships; being in adversarial relationships long-term will surely destroy physical and mental health. In an adversarial relationship, all parties bear some responsibility. Of course, some professions must constantly be in adversarial relationships—for example, the police, who must often confront parties involved and their families. That is why I have come across quite a few middle-aged and young police officers suffering from cancers such as lymphoma and thyroid cancer; this is the occupational misfortune of that line of work, and it is deeply pitiable.

For ordinary people, adversarial relationships such as marital conflict, conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and strained parent-child relationships have the greatest impact on health. At the workplace, being in long-term opposition with colleagues also has a major impact on physical and mental health. We often hear that the people closest to us hurt us most; actually this is simply because they have more opportunities to interact with us and are more likely to be in an adversarial state with us. To be healthy and in a good mood, we must try to avoid falling into such adversarial relationships.

This requires us to be broad-minded and willing to forgive others. Whether others deserve forgiveness is not really important; what matters is that we ourselves are willing to tolerate them and willing to forgive them. Chinese medicine places special emphasis on the fact that the seven emotions and six desires can cause disease; modern medicine also recognizes that human illness is a product of combined biological, social and psychological factors. Once ill, blaming heaven and earth only worsens our disease; releasing resentment is the only way to save ourselves.