Stop Before Things Get Worse

Life cannot be as good as you imagine, nor as bad as you imagine.

— Guy de Maupassant

Last night I returned to Beijing. In the week I had been away, Beijing underwent a cliff-like temperature drop. The moment I stepped off the high-speed train, I felt Beijing's biting cold wave; winter had come a little early this year.

After a bit of cold wind outside the car, my throat began to hurt. Once off the train, I hurried home, took a hot shower, and was asleep before eight. I slept seven and a half hours straight, waking only at 3:30 in the morning. I felt much better; it was as if psychologically I had been separated from my hometown, and the uncomfortable mood I had felt there seemed to have vanished.

During my time back home, besides handling my cousin's funeral, I listened to relatives and friends pour out their grievances. Two of them repeatedly mentioned suicide, which terrified me. I felt myself nearly driven to distraction by these negative things, and my heart felt very uncomfortable. Perhaps the general mood is not good; there are many people around me now in negative emotional states, and they treat someone in medicine as an unpaid emotional caretaker. I can understand that. But at a moment when I had just suffered the loss of a close relative, I myself was already drained and simply could not take on so much.

Returning to Beijing and getting away from these things, my mood lightened considerably. People in medicine are easily used as dumping grounds for negative emotions; many habitually pour out their physical and psychological sufferings on us, regardless of how exhausted we are. I am also often asked, oddly, "Do doctors ever have bad moods?" The implication is that people in medicine should have no joys or sorrows.

Today, after finishing my work, I found some leisure books, climbed into bed to read, and slept when drowsy—stealing half a day's laziness. After the day passed like this, I felt even more relaxed. Recently I want to isolate myself from all negative things. Life always has some terrible moments, and if, in those terrible moments, one goes looking for more terrible things, things only get worse.

I feel that over the past week many of my behaviors have been abnormal, so I have started calling a halt to myself: I must stop absorbing negative emotions, and I must expose myself to beautiful things to neutralize the painful ones, so that I—a normal person—do not actually become mentally unhinged.

Some of the old funeral customs in my hometown were quite good. In the past, when someone in a family died, seven sevens were observed. Every seven days, the whole family would gather, invite a Daoist priest to perform rituals, burn spirit money for the deceased, and then share a meal together, remembering the departed and comforting one another. Moreover, starting from the first seven, with each observance a portion of the deceased's belongings was burned. By the end of the seven sevens, all the deceased's belongings had been burned.

Professor Fei Xiaotong said that folk customs have social functions. As an atheist, I certainly do not explain this custom from a theistic perspective. This funeral custom is actually about comforting the living: when people unite, they can warm one another and together smooth the pain of a loved one's death. Gradually burning the belongings also reduces the occasions on which seeing an object reminds one of the person; so it is a very good form of psychotherapy.

Unfortunately, this custom is dying out, which makes it hard for many people to recover quickly from the pain after a loved one's death. Over the years, while treating patients, I have also comforted their families—those of us who study cancer usually spend a long time with patients and their families, and over time we become friends. When a patient dies, the family also needs comforting.

Sometimes I think how wonderful it would be if these folk traditions were still kept. Many people would not fall ill from depression over a relative's death, and the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder would drop. After the death of a close relative, a person needs such a process of psychological comfort.

Doctors are sometimes pitiable. We too experience birth, old age, illness, and death. In the very moment we are undergoing them, far from having the leisure ordinary people have to recover from grief, we must keep encountering disease and death, repeatedly reliving pain and rubbing salt into our own wounds. Strangers who are patients do not consider doctors' feelings; they urgently need our help.

The sociologist Hsu Cho-yun once noted that, with the changes of modern society, kinship ties around the world have weakened. Many people in their cities no longer have the vast network of relatives and friends of the past, which has made the human spiritual support system increasingly fragile. People actually need this support system; without it, we easily fall into extreme emotions from which it is hard to extricate ourselves. If we lived within a social network of relatives and friends, when grieving we could spend the hardest days together with them.

Today, many people must endure alone after a loved one dies. Some may find a psychotherapist to talk with; some tough it out on their own; some rely on books or religion. The healing function our old social system possessed is decaying, and people must find new ways to ease their inner pain. Though it is ultimately time that liberates us from suffering, with the right methods—for instance, when our family used to unite and perform the seven sevens for the deceased—the duration and intensity of our pain could be greatly reduced.

As part of the biological world, human beings cannot avoid suffering. The claim that one can completely and thoroughly rise above suffering through some belief always strikes me as boasting. When such people lose their dearest, I suspect they too cannot escape pain; after all, humans are emotional creatures. But if one wallows in pain and does not come out of it, that is a real problem. Learning to handle pain is one of the required courses of our lives.

In the book Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the author introduces over a hundred small methods for reducing pain, many of which work. Perhaps in this new era, detached from the old social network, we do need to learn such methods. Society is changing, and our ways of coping with pain must change too. But the underlying principle remains: the key is to call a halt to yourself in time before pain, and to know how to stop before things get worse. Otherwise, the next person to have a mental breakdown will be ourselves.