The Little Girl Crying on the Back of the Electric Scooter
I am full of polar opposites: despair and hope, love and hate, coldness and warmth, stillness and motion, inferiority and confidence — too many to list. It is like the drop of a bungee jump, switching freely from one mode to another. I am a pacifist and will not come into conflict with others unless it is absolutely unavoidable; but once a bottom line is crossed, I frighten even myself, and destruction becomes a matter of justice — I will make the other party pay the price for the transgression.
— Self-report of a patient with a mental illness on Zhihu
During adolescence people are supposed to build emotional bonds with others, but most of my adolescent energy was spent fighting physical and mental illness and pain — (missing the best time to form such bonds).
— Words said to me by a female medical worker who has long suffered from a psychosomatic illness
On Sunday, after working in my vegetable plot and heading home, I encountered a mother and daughter on the road. The mother was riding an electric scooter, taking her daughter to an English class. The girl was about ten years old, and the mother quizzed her on English vocabulary along the way. When the daughter misremembered a word, the mother exploded, scolding her for being careless and for failing to live up to her parents' expectations. The poor girl looked wretched and did not dare utter a sound.
The mother's emotions were simply exploding. The girl had probably endured this many times and did not dare resist — because any resistance would surely only escalate the mother's raging. Even though she was trembling with fear, her mother's mood kept escalating, until the scolding reduced the little girl to tears.
I was riding my bicycle not far behind them, and after the mother's outburst I heard endless nagging and reproaches: accusing the girl of not working hard, telling her how terrible her future would be if she did not try harder. The mother probably believed this would motivate the girl to study.
As we waited together at a red light near Sihai Bridge, I really wanted to talk to this mother, to persuade her not to treat her daughter this way. But I knew she could not listen to anyone at that moment, and that a single word of persuasion would change nothing about how she treated her daughter — so I chose to stay silent.
Yet three days have passed since that Sunday, and my heart still cannot fully settle. I keep feeling guilty toward this little girl, thinking I should have spoken to her mother, even knowing it would do little good. Because I have treated so many patients with bipolar disorder, depression, and personality disorders and am familiar with their life histories, I feel deeply for this girl. If she continues to endure such psychological abuse from her mother, she will very likely, once past adolescence, be tormented by extremely painful psychological or psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder, lose the will to live, or even take her own life.
Her studies must also be a struggle, because her mother does not know that when this child sits in the classroom, her heart is often overwhelmed by uncontrollable pain and despair, unable to calm down or concentrate.
Let us call this little girl Susu. I can imagine that at many moments, whenever Susu recalls her mother's various unspeakable insults, she feels shame, inferiority, anger, and pain from the bottom of her heart. She cannot feel her mother's love — or rather, the way the person who should love her most expresses love feels like a knife stabbing into her, causing her agony.
This makes Susu lose faith in everyone. She dares not trust anyone, because even her closest mother hurts her without restraint; she therefore fears all the more that others will hurt her even worse. Susu is also extremely sensitive. Others feel she is overly thin-skinned: a casual remark that is not at all an accusation or criticism can trigger a strong reaction from her. Sometimes Susu curls up in a corner, melancholy and withdrawn; at other times she flies into a rage, lashing out at people who mean her no harm, leaving them bewildered, unable to imagine how they could have offended this young woman.
On Zhihu, many bipolar and borderline patients are filled with hatred toward their parents, intensely wishing their parents would die in an accident; some of these patients even go so far as to kill a parent. For example, the Peking University student Wu Xieyu, who murdered his mother, resembles a patient with borderline personality disorder comorbid with bipolar disorder. It grieves me that under Chinese law he was ultimately sentenced to death; in truth, what he deserved more was compassion and forgiveness.
Based on my understanding of such patients, I can even predict the rocky emotional life that lies ahead for Susu. Like any other girl, she longs for love; she is easily moved by a small kindness from a man or woman, and hopes to form the deepest bond with him or her. Once a friendship or romantic relationship is established, Susu becomes extraordinarily possessive: she wants the other person to have eyes only for her, rejects their contact with anyone else, and is tormented by anxiety of gain and loss.
Usually, in the first month or two, the relationship is intensely sweet. Susu exhausts her wits trying to make the other person happy, while deep down believing this person to be her savior. But this idealization phase does not last long. Once it passes, Susu easily senses, in the other person's every word, deed, or even glance, a danger of being rejected.
This terrifies Susu. Her mother's harsh reproaches and insults have already created a conditioned reflex that flashes back repeatedly in her subconscious. Susu may even experience physical discomfort: from tension and panic, some muscle of hers often stiffens and aches, and she may have splitting headaches. She falls into extreme fear, feeling that she is about to be severely hurt. To avoid being hurt, she may weep or scream, become unreasonably angry, push away her friend or lover, accuse them, and hurl at them the same kind of unspeakable abuse her mother once hurled at her.
The relationship may then rupture. When the friend or lover leaves Susu, she realizes her overreaction; whether or not she knows she has misread the other person, she may beg forgiveness desperately, hoping to win them back. She may also self-harm or attempt suicide, or wail alone. This process repeats throughout her life: she begins a relationship, then ends it in pain. The painful experiences bottled up inside her accumulate; whenever she looks back, she sobs uncontrollably.
Sometimes Susu thinks: I am a disaster, I drag everyone down, I am nothing, I am not worth anyone's love, my mother's criticisms of me are all correct, I am mediocre and useless, ugly, hateful in character, I really should die. At other times Susu thinks: you all misunderstand me and hurt me, you all deserve to die, you cannot see my good qualities, you do not deserve to associate with me.
Susu is skilled at spotting other people's flaws and can always pick fault with them, finding them intolerable. Her emotions are unlike those of a normal person, quickly returning to a baseline. Over time, Susu herself knows that her emotions, affects, and cognition are all disturbed, and she fears contact with others. But like everyone else, Susu is a social animal; if she has no human contact for too long, she feels emptiness and experiences another kind of fear. In the end, only numbness can keep her mind from feeling so heavy.
Sometimes Susu relieves the lingering anguish in her heart through self-harm. When she cuts her wrist with a small knife and watches the blood flow out, the pain in her heart is soothed, leaving tracks of scars on her wrists. In summer she does not dare wear short sleeves, afraid people will see these traces of self-harm.
Susu longs so much for someone to rescue her, for someone who, without her saying a word, would know everything she feels. But Susu's feelings change from moment to moment, and even she cannot capture them. She always hopes to build deep emotional bonds by pleasing others, so she sometimes calls herself a people-pleasing personality. She is generous in giving: she has sex with men she has only just met, because she longs for emotional connection and is willing to gratify those who show her favor, believing he may be the light in her life that can illuminate her.
For that person's sake, Susu can renounce her own self, defining herself entirely according to that person's needs. At first, Susu's lover feels he has found a soulmate: everything he thinks is captured by Susu, who is thoughtful and attentive, fully satisfying his emotional needs. But as the relationship deepens, Susu's other side emerges: she is sensitive and suspicious, often erupting in rage or turning coldly distant.
Every one of Susu's boyfriends has had the same experience of her: gentle yet furious, tolerant yet critical, considerate yet heartless, so capricious and unpredictable. The longer they date, the more her boyfriends dare not provoke her, speaking cautiously in her presence. Yet even so, the sharp Susu still catches unfriendly signals in their eyes and gestures.
Sometimes Susu knows these so-called unfriendly signals are feelings she has magnified out of proportion to reality; sometimes she does not. Childhood memories are too painful; she is terrified of malice in the world and has grown accustomed to assuming the worst of others, telling herself in her subconscious that she must protect herself well. As soon as any relationship lets Susu sniff out danger, she severs it first and flees, to avoid being hurt.
These repeated experiences make Susu feel utterly alone in the world, that no one will ever truly love her, that people will always accuse, criticize, and misjudge her, that family or intimate partners will sooner or later abandon her. Susu also knows she is ill, yet she rejects help from doctors or psychotherapists, feeling that they too are full of malicious judgment toward her.
Susu is a person without an emotional skin: her feelings are intense, coming in a flash that eight horses could not pull back. She also engages in all kinds of impulsive behavior — binge eating, dangerous driving, drug use, impulsive sex, reckless spending — and then bitterly regrets it afterward. But the next time her heart is gripped by panic, she still cannot control these behaviors.
Only a few people like Susu ever meet someone warm, stable, and calm who truly becomes, as Susu hoped, a light in their life and heals them. Such people are understanding, broad-minded, and compassionate; they can sense the deep pain inside people like Susu and soothe them during emotional swings, giving them peace.
A partner who repeatedly offers this kind of holding attitude can eventually melt Susu's long-frozen heart and help her gradually normalize. But such people are extraordinarily rare, while people like Susu are countless; it is therefore very hard for Susu and those like her to find their ideal partner in the vast sea of humanity. Even if they meet such a person, it is rarely at the right time.
Yet the repeated rupture of relationships eventually forces Susu's mind to mature. She begins to recognize that she is overly sensitive, suspicious, and overreactive, and tries slowly to control herself or to reduce contact with others. Susu easily falls into all sorts of hardship: poverty and illness together, isolated and unsupported, with few friends or relatives able to help. When hit by a major setback, Susu is at high risk of suicide.
I hope the girl I saw is not the Susu I described; I hope her life goes far more smoothly. I hope even more that every sector of society will take mental health seriously. The mother I saw is clearly also a woman with poor mental health; she is struggling to raise her daughter, not deliberately wanting to hurt her, but because her own parents raised and hurt her in exactly this way, or because some misfortune turned her into this. She is powerless to change herself and needs long-term psychotherapy.
After reaching middle age I began to realize that doing public education to society, preventing more people from developing incurable psychosomatic illnesses, seems to have greater social meaning than treating patients one by one in the clinic. Because in real life I have encountered too many cancer patients like my mother and too many mentally ill patients like Susu, whose physical and mental suffering could have been avoided. Regrettably, our traditional lifestyles, dietary habits, and child-rearing practices contain so many benighted inertial factors that they manufacture a vast burden of psychosomatic disease.
If there is a parent in your life like Susu's mother, I hope you can be braver than I was, communicate with them more in daily life, soothe their exploding emotions, and save their children. I am a coward and not worth emulating. If you are such a parent, I hope you will go to a mental health center to see a psychotherapist, correct some of your behaviors, and stop manufacturing tragedies in your offspring. Believe me: you are the one who is sick and needs treatment, not your child.
Let us work together to reduce the suffering in this world!