Morita therapy, also known as "Zen therapy" and "fundamental nature therapy," was created around 1921 by Japanese psychiatrist Morita Masuma (1874-1938). Although this psychotherapeutic method was influenced by the psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and therapy popular in the West at the time, the basic idea was derived from the wisdom of Mahayana Buddhism and traditional Japanese culture, especially the Zen ideology and culture, which had a particularly profound influence on this treatment method, and Morita's therapy can be regarded as a product of the East Asian culture that has Mahayana Buddhism and Zen as the ideological source.
The birth of Morita therapy
In 1874, Morita Masuma was born in Chikao Prefecture, Japan, along with Freud Sigmud (1856-1939), Adler Alfred (1870-1937), and C.G. Jung (1875-1937), so it is not by chance that Morita's therapy was influenced by psychoanalysis and psychiatric treatment. It is no accident that Morita therapy was influenced by psychoanalysis and psychiatric treatment.
Mr. Morita Masuma's school career was not very smooth, due to arrhythmia and typhoid fever, which made the five years of high school last eight years. In 1898, when he was enrolled in the medical school of the University of Tokyo, he was diagnosed as "weak spirit" and foot odor, but during the final examination, he read and studied hard regardless of the circumstances, and all the uncomfortable symptoms unexpectedly disappeared, and his examination results were also very good. From this physical and mental experience, he realized that the general view of neurasthenia at that time was that "neurasthenia is caused by nerve fatigue and should be rested more" was incorrect.
He entered psychiatry before graduating from medical school and worked as the director of occupational therapy at Nestor Duck Hospital. Morita had used hypnosis to treat psychosis but could not be cured. Instead, he cured a psychotic patient with "no treatment, just put him to work cleaning". This prompted Morita to start organizing his thoughts, and the Morita Method was born.
Morita's view of human nature
Human beings are constantly changing. Human life, at its best, is a process of flow and change, and if I can let the stream of my experience carry me forward, floating and sinking in it, and at the same time try to understand its fluidity and complexity, then there is no fixed point at which I can remain. When I can be in such a process, it is clear that I will not have a closed system of beliefs, but will be guided by the process of understanding and interpreting the experience. So life is always in the process of formation. Therefore, the study of psychological problems must be sought in the gap between the outside world and the self, and must be grasped in the flow of change. And consciousness is nothing but a state, a natural phenomenon.
Phenomenon is existence. Morita believed that human existence is the phenomenon of every moment in the flow of constant change, with absolute significance, that is, the phenomenon is existence (K.F. Liu, Min. 75). He often used "the truth is true", "obey nature", etc., is the natural phenomena of our body and mind, the body that the phenomenon (color) that is real (empty), as the truth to bear.
Mental opposition and reconciliation. Morita believes that all cosmic phenomena are based on relativity, regulation, and equilibrium, and that psychological phenomena are also in a constant process of change in order to maintain equilibrium and produce a direction that is adapted to self-preservation. Normal people in general have a better ability to flow naturally through the changes in both, and to channel disturbing feelings into a constructive direction.
Moral and ethical views. Neurotic patients are often rational conceptualists or idealists, and therefore tend to ignore the natural fluidity of life, but to add value judgments of good and evil, bitterness and happiness to the ever-changing phenomena of life, adding to their inner struggles and contradictions (Fu Wei-hsun, Min. 82). Morita emphasizes that there is no absolute ethical or moral viewpoint, but only the truth, and that one must be able to tolerate all the opposites in the flow of the psyche.
The desire to live. According to Morita, the life of a human being is a process in which the desire to live and the terror of death confront each other, undergoing various changes and growing stronger and stronger. The desire for life ranges from the biological level to the spiritual level of the pursuit of the meaning or value of life, while the fear of death is the opposite, and there is no fear of death without the desire for sound.
Morita's Neuroticism
Morita's therapeutic approach emphasizes the present and current attitudes toward human beings, believing that Western psychoanalytic theories do not contribute to a complete resolution of the psychopathology of the Orient. In particular, Morita believed that Floyd's term neurosis was not very applicable, because most of the mentally abnormal (Japanese) people basically belonged to what he described as "neuroticism". Morita's neurosis refers to people who are unable to recognize or accept the natural phenomena that bring them anxiety or threat, and who try to eliminate them. A major feature of this theory is the emphasis on the individual's innate qualities. He believed that neuroticism occurs as a result of three major factors: 1. personality traits (tendency to fear illness), 2. chance (contributing factors to the onset of the illness), and 3. etiology (the interaction of the psyche to influence the development of the symptoms).
Morita classified neuroticism into three types: general neuroticism, episodic neuroticism, and obsessive-compulsive conceptual disorder, according to the complexity of the psychological mechanisms by which neuroticism occurs.
I. Ordinary Neuroticism
This is what people call "neurasthenia", also known as "psychosis". It is caused by excessive worry about one's own health and leads to subjective and psychological symptoms such as headaches, vomiting sensations, and insomnia.
Two, episodic neurosis
Also known as "anxiety neurosis". The symptoms are fear and anxiety manifested outwardly, resulting in a disorder of the body's nervous system, such as palpitations, dyspnea, and so on.
Three, obsessive-compulsive disorder
With the heart of the disease I deliberately remove a particular concept in the consciousness, caused by the inner Kudzu, constitute obsessive-compulsive disorder. The main obsessive-compulsive disorders are: fear of people (excessive concern about what other people think of me, and the conflicting emotions of deliberately maintaining a good attitude), fear of distractions (when thinking, attempting to exclude thoughts other than the purpose of the thought, but on the contrary, the more attention is paid to the existence of distractions), and other fear of murder, fear of closure, and fear of impurity, and so on.
Steps of Morita's therapy
Morita believes that the best way to treat neuroticism is to realize psychotherapy in a loving and accepting family atmosphere. The steps of implementation are as follows:
I. Bedding Therapy
This period lasts about 4 to 7 days, during which the patient is completely isolated and lies on the bed all day long, except for eating and defecating. The purpose is to observe the patient's mental state, in order to make a diagnosis of the subsidy. Moreover, keeping quiet can regulate physical and mental fatigue and allow the patient to face mental anguish and distress, and quickly remove it, in order to experience the state of mind that Morita called "anguish is relief".
Second, mild occupational therapy period
This stage also adopts isolation therapy. During the day, you do light work outdoors as much as possible; in the evening, you work in the work room at night, such as sharpening toothpicks, gluing paper bags, etc. Recently, you often focus on creative activities such as carving. During the homework period, the patient is required to keep a diary after dinner every day to understand his physical and mental condition and to criticize him as a means of psychotherapy. The main goal of this phase is to enable the patient to face the unpleasant physical sensations or obsessive concepts, and to make the patient's body and mind feel bored in the beginning, in order to promote the patient's desire for spontaneous activities.
Third, heavy work therapy period
This stage is based on the patient's physical and mental state to give appropriate work, such as sawing, chopping wood and so on. The focus of this phase is to develop patience for the work, to build up confidence, so that the patient is willing to experience things that he or she was not interested in doing in the past, or things that he or she could not do because of anticipatory feelings of anxiety. This experience will result in the patient being able to face many pains and overcome many difficulties to promote the spontaneous activity of the mind and body, at which time, mental mobility has begun to be restored.
Fourth, the complexity of real life
Through reading, the patient is prompted to realize the innocence of the mind, his own personality; that is to say, the patient is helped to grow into a person who does not have to use his own will to negate all kinds of naturally occurring emotions or concepts.
Conclusion
Morita therapy not only provides a new vision of psychotherapy, but also helps the general public to establish a more sound attitude toward life and death, to create value in life and to affirm the meaning of life in the course of a very limited and short life.
Theoretical basis
1, basic concepts
① Neuroticism and neuroticism
The term "neuroticism" was proposed by Morita Masuma based on his special view of the nature of neurosis such as neurasthenia. It is a condition in which the patient has a symptom that he or she subjectively perceives as having an adverse effect on normal life, and therefore the patient has a strong desire to get rid of the symptom and a tendency to work actively to overcome it. Morita Masuma believes that neurotic symptoms are purely subjective rather than objective. Neurotic symptoms are the result of a mental interaction between a suspicious quality and the process of mental activity that it triggers. Therefore, Morita does not regard "neuroticism" as a disease.
The term "neuroticism" was coined by Takehisa Takara, a student of Masuma Morita and another representative of Morita's therapy.
Takara Takeshisa believed that: Neuroticism is a part of neurosis, a neurosis with neurotic symptoms, and that it is impossible to cure all neuroses with Morita therapy, and that only neuroticism is a true indication for Morita therapy.
②Suspicious qualities
The so-called suspicious qualities are a kind of mental predisposition, or quality. Morita believes that there are inward and outward mental tendencies. People's healthy spiritual life is formed by the coordinated activity of this inwardness and outwardness. If there is a major bias in one's spiritual activity, a distinct spiritual inclination will gradually develop.
The quality of suspicion is a mental tendency to worry about illness. People with the quality of suspicion are introverted in their mental activities, have strong introspection, are very sensitive to their own mental and physical activities and abnormalities, are bound by self-introspection, and are always worried about their own mental and physical health. Mental activity introversion, rich in self-introspection plays an important role in the spiritual life of people, is indispensable. However, excessive worry about one's own condition and excessive self-concern will have a negative effect and form a hypochondriac quality. The theory of Morita therapy believes that the quality of suspicion is the basis for the occurrence of neurotic disorders.
3) The desire to live and the terror of death
The desire to be rich in introspection and to care about one's own physical condition is a normal expression that everyone has, and according to Morita's theory, it is a manifestation of the desire to live in human nature. The meaning of the desire for survival includes: (l) the desire to survive in good health; (2) the desire to live better and to be respected; (3) the desire for knowledge and the willingness to work hard; (4) the desire to become a great and happy person; and (5) the desire for upward mobility, among other things.
People who suffer from neuroticism are people with a strong desire to survive, but they are not born with neuroticism. Rather, as their desire for survival develops, they want to live a life beyond the norm, but due to some kind of opportunity that induces their hypochondriacal experience, their mental energy is no longer directed toward the outside world but entirely toward their own mind and body.
The excessive desire to live is accompanied by a fear of death. This terror of death is often associated with such mental activities as fear of failure, fear of disease, and fear of restlessness. The desire for life is too strong, there are more than ordinary requirements for themselves or things, will be afraid of failing to meet their own desires and produce the terror of death. At this time, if there is some kind of triggering opportunity, such as feeling the heart beat, it is possible to mistake the original normal range of physiological phenomena for pathology (such as tachycardia). The result of the effort to exclude this pathology is that the degree of concern for the outside world begins to decline, and the mental activity turns completely inward, plunging into the internal conflict of the spirit and leading to the emergence of neurotic symptoms.
It can be said, therefore, that the excessive desire to live is accompanied by the terror of death, which leads to the inwardness of mental activity, the formation of hypochondriacal qualities, which become the basis for the development of neurotic disorders.
4 Adaptation anxiety and mental interaction
Morita therapy believes that people in the natural world, people in human society, there is bound to be some kind of anxiety, that is, whether they can survive in the ever-changing environment, their own physical and mental condition to adapt to the outside world, such a problem. This kind of uneasiness often occurs in a person's life, and is called "adaptation uneasiness".
The more introverted people are prone to maladjustment because they have a strong tendency toward introspection and lack confidence in their own mental and physical abilities to do what they do. This is not the case with more extroverted people, who are hopeful about everything. Adjustment disturbance is most likely to occur around the time of puberty in terms of age. This has to do with the fact that adolescent individuals have an increased sense of self, the growth of their own desires and a lack of practical experience in adapting well to changes in the outside world.
Takehisa Takara believes that although anxiety, worry, and pain are unpleasant, they are essential protective mechanisms for our survival as human beings. For example, without the feeling of pain, people may lose their vigilance against trauma. He further points out that if people think about these unpleasant, but at the same time essential protective mechanisms should not exist, attempts to deny these psychological phenomena that should be there, which will inevitably make the beginning of a normal psychological reverse effect, resulting in intrapsychic conflict, and ultimately the formation of neurotic symptoms.
Everyone feels uneasy when there is a change in the environment. However, people with hypochondriacal qualities, or people who reject the adaptation to the feeling of uneasiness, pay more attention to the uneasiness, due to the influence of mental interaction, so that their feelings and attention to the mutual reinforcement of the development of chronic neuroticism from uneasiness is more likely.
The so-called mental interaction "means that because of a certain sensation, which occasionally causes attention to be focused and directed to it, then this sensation becomes sharpened, and this sharpened sensation in turn attracts more and more attention to be further fixed on it. In this way, sensation and attention promote each other and interact, resulting in the sensation becoming more and more powerful", and this process of mental activity is the process of mental interaction.
So, if the quality of suspicion plays a decisive role in the onset of neuroticism, mental interaction can be said to play a decisive role in the development of neurotic symptoms.
5 Mental antagonism
If the onset of neuroticism is related to the quality of suspicion and the development of its symptoms is related to mental interactions, then the root cause of the distress that its symptoms bring to neurotic patients is related to the intensification of mental antagonism caused by contradictions in thought.
Morita believes that there is a phenomenon of correspondence and regulation in human mental activity, which is similar to the action of antagonistic muscles in the human body that act in opposite directions, constrain each other, and regulate each other, and is therefore called mental antagonism.
Spiritual antagonism is specifically manifested in the following: when a psychological emergence, there is often another opposite psychological emergence. For example, fear often appear not to be afraid of psychology; praised instead of the emergence of feelings of guilt. According to Morita, this kind of inhibited will is a natural phenomenon in our mental field. This antagonism in the mental realm, like the antagonism of the muscles, is not something that we can control at will.
Everyone has problems with too much or too little mental antagonism. The various afflictions of neurotic patients are also caused by the increased antagonism between desires and inhibitions. For example: the stronger the desire to succeed in life, the stronger the fear of death that may fail; desperately want to strengthen the desire for life and exclude the fear of death, in order to negate the possibility of failure to think of all sorts of ways, but instead of causing the antagonism of the force and the counterforce are increased accordingly, coupled with the influence of the thought contradiction, the individual will feel more and more distressed. The so-called thought contradiction is my desire for 'wish it were so', 'must be so' thought and the actual situation of the expected results of the opposite, and thus the contradiction occurs.
In summary, the mechanism of neuroticism in Morita therapy can be summarized as follows: neurotic symptoms are formed through mental interactions due to the presence of hypochondriacal qualities and under the influence of accidental triggers. The root cause of neuroticism is the strengthening of mental antagonism caused by the desire to control objective reality with subjective wishes.
2. Pathogenesis of neuroticism
① Flow chart of pathogenesis
Neuroticism is a state of fixation of attention, which is a state in which normal psychological and physiological phenomena are attracted to attention due to the patient's misunderstanding of human nature, and through mental interactions, the attention is fixated on these psychological and physiological phenomena, which leads to abnormal distress and other symptoms. This can be represented by a flowchart:
With episodic events
Suspicious qualities (Morita neurosis) ------------------------------------------ Certain normal sensations
Or none Mental interactions
Or experiences --------------- ---------------------- Attention ----------------- Attention Fixation (Symptoms)
Psychic Antagonism
② The Subjectivity of Neurotic Symptoms
Morita believes that neurotic symptoms, in the absence of physical and mental fatigue, debility, and other complications, originally belong to the subjective realm of self-knowledge. subjective category, something that is self-perceived, rather than an objective product. Takara Takehisa also points out that patients with neurotic disorders are often unable to deal calmly and objectively with things that concern them. With symptoms in particular, the patient is dominated by a sense of inferiority, which, combined with restlessness, tends to lead to clearly faulty judgments.
Patients with neuroticism have an excessive desire for life and an overpowering fear of death, and therefore regard otherwise normal phenomena (such as other people's coughs and conversations) as abnormal manifestations (as sarcasm or bad-mouthing of themselves). This kind of subjective judgment is not based on objective facts, but the patient is firmly believe in this, into the unresolved thought contradiction, that is, the subjective performance of its symptoms.
The subjectivity of neurotic symptoms is also manifested in the lack of objective physiological basis for their symptoms. For example, venereal disease terror patients insist that they suffer from venereal disease, although several times the blood test results are negative, but by the domination of its subjective consciousness, can not accept the fact that the objective test. The neurotic patient is extremely distressed by the presence of his symptoms, but he does not know that this distress is his subjective fabrication. The root cause of the distress lies in himself.
3) Mechanism of formation of different neuroses
Mr. Morita describes the process of formation of symptoms of three types of neuroses.
Ordinary neurosis (including hypochondriasis, depressive neurosis, and neurasthenia) is due to the mental fixation on some sense of abnormality, which is increasingly aggravated by errors in daily life and in the disposition of its symptoms. It is also noted that the symptoms of neurasthenia inevitably disappear along with the process of physical and mental fatigue or recovery from illness. The symptoms are complicated and severe only when they are governed by a suspicious conception and the main energy is fixed on the morbid sensation. The stronger the quality of suspicion, the more likely the symptoms will be severe. Even if the fatigue is recovered or the body recovers from the disease, some people feel that the symptoms will never disappear.
Episodic neuroticism (panic attacks, chronic anxiety disorder), the essence of the attack is a kind of horror feeling, terror is the anticipation of their own disaster will occur, or premonition of the danger that is the body of the feelings generated. Terror is the anticipation of a disaster, or the feeling that danger is coming down on the body. When the subjective feeling of terror occurs, the physical phenomena such as increased palpitations, swelling of the mind, blood surging, and coldness of the hands and feet may also occur objectively. Subjective feelings and objective physical phenomena are the same phenomenon of the table and inside. If a person suddenly sees a heart attack, he will have a great feeling of horror, fearing that he will be like that, and if he feels the heart beating occasionally in the future, he will link it with the scene he has seen before. If the patient does not recognize the mental process before and after it, he is immediately controlled by a kind of terror; it inevitably causes the palpitations to increase, thus focusing attention on it, and it becomes more and more disturbing, producing a mental interaction that leads to increased palpitations and cardiac neurosis.
Obsessive conception disorder (obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobia) is the patient to a certain opportunity to get the feeling or sensation, suspiciously regarded as a morbid abnormality, by the resistance to it neither perceived nor thought of the mental conflict caused by mental. For example, a student who is afraid of seeing the tip of his nose and feels distressed, it is because he sees the common feeling of the general public specifically as a pathological state and forms obsessive-compulsive concepts. Thus the obsessive-compulsive conception is a conception that surfaces from time to time in the average person, but which the normal person, in the course of his daily mental activity, immediately forgets, or does not enter into his consciousness at all, and then has to meet the following newly arising stimulus. So there is no room for suspense in the mind. Instead, the patient's suspicious qualities and conflicting thoughts lead to mental conflicts, which instead intensify certain feelings and form obsessive-compulsive ideas. He also pointed out that obsessive-compulsive behavior is not like obsessive-compulsive concepts, most of which are not accompanied by the pain of mental conflict, that is not a neurotic manifestation and difficult to cure.
Operation Methods:
(1) Principles of Treatment
1. Principle of Treatment of "Following Nature"
Morita regarded following nature as the equivalent of the state of "epiphany" in Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. The so-called "epiphany" is a state in which the neurotic recognizes and experiences his or her place in nature, and experiences the futility of resisting natural realities beyond his or her control, so that he or she can have an attitude of living in harmony with natural things.
To accept the symptoms honestly and truly realize that it is futile to resist, resist or avoid, suppress, do not take the symptoms as a foreign object of their own mind and body, do not reject and resist them, and study and work with the symptoms. It should be said that "letting nature take its course" is the most basic therapeutic principle of Morita-therapy. This basic principle contains the following multi-layered meaning:
(l) To recognize the law of emotional activity in accordance with nature, and to accept the unpleasant emotions such as uneasiness:
1) To comply with the natural occurrence of emotions, and to allow the natural development of emotions. The emotional process generally constitutes a mountain-shaped curve, a rise and fall finally disappeared.
② If the emotional impulse is satisfied, the frustration can be quickly calmed and disappear.
③ Emotions gradually become dulled with the inertia of the same feeling until nothing is felt.
④ Emotions are gradually intensified when a certain stimulus continues to exist and when attention is focused on it.
5. Emotions are gradually developed through new experiences, through many repetitions, and in the gradual deepening of the experience of them.
According to Morita, emotional activity has its own laws, which are not subject to human will. If you do the opposite, you will always have a strong aversion to the fear, uneasiness, or distress that you feel, which is common to everyone, and you will always try to repress, avoid, or eliminate these emotions, for example, if you are afraid of people, or if you are distressed by the emotional fluctuations that are often caused by meeting people, especially the uneasiness or embarrassment you feel when you meet a leader or a person of the opposite sex, and you will take an attitude of repressing and confronting these emotions, which you must exclude, and you will always try to avoid them. The attitude of suppression and confrontation. They take things that are normal in themselves very seriously and resist them, and as a result, they fall into a spiral of neurosis. This in fact corresponds to the fourth and fifth of the laws of emotion described by Morita, namely, that the neurotic's experience of extreme fear of people is cultivated through repeated repetition by concentrating on the emotion that disgusts him and by constantly repressing that emotion so that it is intensified. This process violates laws 1 and 2 of emotional activity.
To change this situation, we need to make the patient recognize the law of emotional activity, accept their own emotions, not to repress and reject it, and let it die on its own. And through their own continuous efforts to cultivate a positive emotional experience.
(2) To recognize the law of mental activity in accordance with nature, and to accept all kinds of ideas and concepts that may appear in oneself.
People with neuroticism often subjectively believe that they can only have one kind of idea about something and not another, and that to have one is abnormal or immoral, i.e., that an extreme desire for perfection creates a strong sense of inferiority. The result is as Takara Takeshisa says: "If someone is trying to get rid of all evil thoughts no matter what, he or she may create the compulsion to be immodest and horrible." Neurotic patients resist this mentality; they must keep their psyche absolutely pure, with the inevitable result of psychological conflict. To change this, one should accept the fact that no one is a saint; accept the fact that each of us may have evil thoughts, jealousy, and narrow-mindedness, and realize that bad thoughts flashing in the mind are things that are bound to occur in mental activity, things that one cannot change or decide by reason and will, but whether or not to do them is something one can decide entirely. Therefore it is not necessary to fight against one's thoughts but to pay attention to the actions one takes.
In addition, in order to recognize the law of mental activity, one must also recognize the role of mental antagonism, and realize that there are two opposing psychological phenomena, the desire for life and the fear of death. Accept this psychological phenomenon, and do not have to fear for the emergence of the horror of death, to the point of desperately trying to eliminate these fearful thoughts, so that they are caught up in the intense internal conflict of the spirit. For example, the thought of possibly falling while standing on a high place is a thought that would have occurred to anyone. The neurotic thinks this is an anomaly and fights it, and the more he fights it, the more he feels the possibility of falling. The only way to change this symptom is to recognize the role of mental antagonism and to give up the mental resistance to the opposing idea, so that the internal mental conflict can be reduced or eliminated.
(3) Accept the symptom by recognizing the law of symptom formation and development in accordance with nature.
The neurotic patient originally did not have any physical or mental abnormality, but because of the existence of the quality of suspicion, a certain kind of normal sensation is regarded as abnormal, and want to exclude and control this kind of sensation, so that the attention is fixed on this kind of sensation, resulting in the effect of the attention and the sensation of the mutual reinforcement of the formation of the mental interaction. This is a secondary vicious cycle and is the main cause of the formation of symptoms and their continuation.
By recognizing this and accepting one's symptoms, on the one hand, one does not strengthen the subjective feeling of the symptom; on the other hand, by no longer rejecting the feeling, one gradually stops fixing one's attention on the symptom. By breaking the mental interaction in this way, the symptoms can be reduced or even eliminated. For example, if a person who is terrified of people blushes when he sees them, the more he is afraid of blushing, the more he pays attention to his own performance, and the more he pays attention, the more nervous he gets, which in turn makes the feeling of blushing persist. On the contrary, by accepting the symptoms of blushing and interacting with others with the attitude of "let's just blush", you will no longer pay attention to this feeling, and the blushing reaction will slowly subside.
Recognizing the pattern of symptoms also involves recognizing that symptom change is a process that takes time. It is only by recognizing this that one can insist on treating the symptoms as normal and not rejecting them as foreign to one's mind and body that one can truly eliminate the effects of mental interactions.
(4) Recognize the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and accept the objective law of things.
According to the viewpoint of Morita therapy, the reason why people suffer from neuroticism is that the quality of suspicion is the basis for the formation of symptoms, and mental interaction is the reason for the formation of symptoms, which is rooted in the contradiction of human thought. This contradiction in thought is characterized by replacing objective reality with subjective imagination and qualifying one's thoughts, feelings and behaviors with "the way it should be". Morita once pointed out, "How do people break the contradiction of thought? In a nutshell, we should give up the futile man-made schemes and obey nature. Trying to control one's emotions by artificial means is like trying to make a chicken feather fly up to the sky or a river flow against the current; not only is it impossible to do so, but it adds to one's worries. These are all things that are beyond one's ability, but if one is forced to do so, of course, the pain will be unbearable. However, what is nature? It is a natural law that summer is hot and winter is cold, and to try to make summer not hot and winter not cold, against the grain, is a poor man-made strategy. According to the law of nature, to obey it and endure it is to follow nature."
So one must recognize the truth. To recognize one's own spiritual essence is self-awareness; to acknowledge the outside world truthfully is truth (seeking truth from facts). Therefore, conformity to nature, we should pay attention to not to their own subjective ideas to set the objective things, recognize any objective things have their own laws of activity, including each person's feelings, emotions, mental activity, as well as the formation of neurotic symptoms and changes have a certain rule, which is not subjective will of the people as a transfer. Only to make the subjective thought in line with the law of objective things, in order to jump out of the thought of the strange circle of contradiction.
2. The treatment principle of "doing what is right"
Morita therapy divides things related to human beings into two categories: controllable things and uncontrollable things. The so-called controllable things are the things that can be controlled and changed by the individual through his own subjective will; while the uncontrollable things are the things that cannot be decided by the individual's subjective will.
Morita therapy requires neurotic patients to learn, through treatment, not to control the uncontrollable, such as human emotions, but also to control the controllable, such as human actions. In fact, doing what is right is action guided by the attitude of nature. Takara Takeshisa once explained, "A natural attitude does not mean that one should do nothing about one's own activities, but rather that one should listen to one's symptoms and negative emotions on the one hand, and on the other hand, one should endeavor to do what needs to be done by relying on one's own intrinsic motivation. It should be said that doing what one should do is the enrichment and supplementation of the therapeutic principle of following nature.
(1) Endure the pain and do what you have to do
Morita therapy believes that to change neurotic symptoms, on the one hand, one has to adopt a natural attitude toward the symptoms; on the other hand, one has to do what one has to do with one's original desire to live. Symptoms usually do not go away instantly, so if they are still there, you must accept them despite the pain. Direct your attention and energy to the things in your life that have a definite meaning and are productive. Trying to do what needs to be done, focusing on the action, and letting the symptoms ebb and flow will help to break down the mental interactions and gradually build up the confidence to be free from the symptoms.
Neurotic patients originally have a strong desire to live, but for the fear of death is bound, the original mental energy are invested in the focus on symptoms, which affects their normal life, work and study. The more ineffective the work and study, the more the patient's attention is fixed on the symptoms, the more the symptoms as a foreign object that must be eliminated, thus aggravating the symptoms.
Doing what you think you should do in accordance with the motivation expressed in the desire to be born will, firstly, lead the spiritual energy that has been directed to the heart to the outer world; secondly, the symptoms will be improved because the attention is no longer fixed on the symptoms; and thirdly, although there is still pain in acting on the symptoms, the action itself will bring two kinds of gains, one is that you can do what you need to do without having to wait for the symptoms to be eliminated; the other is that if you do it you will have to wait for the symptoms to be eliminated; and the other is that if you do it you will have to wait for the symptoms to be eliminated. One is that you can do what you need to do without having to wait for the symptoms to go away; and the other is that you can gain something in your work, study or life by doing it.
For example, a person who is terrified of people is afraid to see them and feels extreme fear when they do. Morita therapy requires them to live with the symptoms, it's okay to be afraid to see people, but the people they should see still need to be seen, interact with people with fear, pay attention to what they have to do without paying attention to whether or not they are afraid again, and insist on doing it, and the fear will gradually diminish. And as a result of doing this, the patient himself will realize that he has been trying to eliminate the symptoms, and wants to wait until the symptoms do not exist before contacting people, which is actually unnecessary. In the past, they have agonized over this and thought that they could not do it because they were always thinking about it in their heads and not doing it. And for what is required of the patient to do what immediately go to do what, despite the pain to adhere to, breaking the pattern of the past that spirit of the action of the bondage.