One form of self-therapy: 01 (Rinsing out the poison)

(from googling)

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Self-therapy is the practice of applying psychological techniques—such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) methods—to oneself to manage mental health, emotions, and behaviors without a professional therapist. It is a proactive, self-guided approach to building emotional resilience, increasing self-awareness, and resolving personal challenges, often viewed as an advanced form of self-care.

Self-therapy involves utilizing tools and strategies to address mild to moderate issues independently. Common examples include:

Cognitive Restructuring: Identifying and challenging negative thought patterns or cognitive distortions to change emotional responses.

Journaling/Thought Records: Writing down feelings and behaviors to track triggers and patterns.

Mindfulness and Meditation: Practicing presence and accepting emotions without judgment to reduce stress.

Self-Help Resources: Using structured books, online courses, or apps to learn new coping skills.

Exposure Exercises: Gradually facing fears in a controlled, self-directed manner.

Unquote

Talking to a friend (not for the first time) about our respective fraught relationships with our mothers has made me recall a story told back in the 90s by someone about her and her siblings' relationship with their mother, and one of the ways they diluted the impact over the years.

    I'm writing this blog only as a layperson, of course, just re-telling something I've heard from someone about a technique that had worked for her and her siblings. Nowhere near recommending psychological techniques like CBT, as I'm totally unqualified.

    Let's call the person Lee Meilan.

Start of her story (in my words from what she'd told me):

    There are six of us children.  If the servant came to summon any of us to our mother's room, we'd first go and fetch the cane, without even knowing what she wanted to see us about.  Arriving at her door, we'd go down on our knees and shuffle over to her (seated in her armchair), with the cane raised above our head in both hands.  Such was our relationship with our mother.

    We never found out why she treated us like this.  Perhaps she was frustrated with her position:  being the second wife, she had no power in the household, so she took it out on us.

    My siblings have all had some form of therapy -- that is how deeply affected by our earlier days we had been.

    We'd have an annual get-together, taking turns to go to the country of whichever one of us was living in.  Our mother would come along.  We'd wait until she'd gone to bed, then gather in one room and talk about our treatment at the hands of our mother, crying as we recalled the trauma.

    Each year, we'd go through the same routine, but the feelings evoked would change with the repetitive recollection.  The same stories that had made us cry in the earlier tellings would start to make us laugh in later accounts, e.g., "Do you remember you got caned so hard on one occasion you couldn't sit down for days?" would make us cry for a few years, reducing in the emotional intensity with each year, then switch to making us laugh about it.

    After we'd got round to being able to laugh about those stories, we then invited our mother to those sessions, and were actually able to address her directly, "Do you remember you caned me so hard on one occasion I couldn't sit down for days?" -- and laugh.

End of her story (in my words)

    I can offer an explanation (as a layperson) for Lee Meilan's mother harbouring so much anger towards her children.

    Someone (let's call her Wang Donglian) told me that her mother got married off to her father during the Japanese Occupation because the grandparents were worried about her being raped by the Japanese soldiers.  They thought that the Japanese soldiers might think twice if she had a husband to protect her.  That husband turned out to be an irresponsible husband, as well as an irresponsible father to their children.

    Wang Donglian's mother never forgave her own parents for ruining her life, and took it out on her children because they bore the husband's surname.  The mother, surnamed Zhuang, once said (when they tried to protect her financial interests against one of her predatory brothers), "This is a Zhuang family matter, nothing to do with you Wang family."

    Wang Donglian said, "So, my own mother was drawing a clear line between us and her side of the family, even though half of our genes are from her.  Rejection can't get any stronger."

    Maybe Lee Meilan's mother felt the same way towards her children:  they reminded her of their father / her husband, who had perhaps not treated her well as a second wife, so she took out her frustrations on the children.

PS:  I've just realised that not all readers would know about the traditional Chinese practice of a man taking on more than one wife.  The main reason was usually that the first wife was unable to bear him any male children (for carrying on the family name/line), but it didn't always have to be this reason -- the man could just fancy a change of diet.  The first wife would retain all the power of running the household, and any children produced by the second (or even third) wife would also defer to her as if they were her children.  This would often make the second wife feel helpless, authority-wise.

Pandemonium in the classroom (Singapore)

One of the classes I was given to teach as a 19-year-old temporary teacher was a mixed (sex/gender) class of 14-year-olds, and the subject was PE (Physical Education).  

The weather in Singapore means that sports activities generally take place early in the morning or late in the afternoon, so PE for this class was at 5:30pm, the last session in their timetable before the flag-lowering ceremony at 6pm.

(With space being limited, classes were timetabled for either the morning session or the afternoon session, thus allowing the same classroom space to be used by two different grades.  You might get the morning session for one grade one year, and then the afternoon for the next grade the following year.  It did not always work on the basis of alternating the grades, I seem to remember, i.e., Primary 1 allocated the morning session, Primary 2 the afternoon, Primary 3 the morning, Primary 4 the afternoon, etc..  PE would take place when the sun was not so fierce:  before lessons started for the morning session, and after lessons ended for the afternoon session.)

I turned up one day to find that World War Three had broken out for my PE class:  most of the boys were fencing with each other using foot-long rulers, tossing rubber erasers at each other, using rubber bands to catapult some other form of missiles (balls of paper, e.g.), chasing each other round the classroom.  

Note that it was only the boys who were engaging in this disorderly behaviour, as girls (in the Singapore of my days, certainly in my family) were brought up not to behave like fishwives.

My immediate response, from my Induction (as one would call it these days), was to go straight to the Deputy Headmaster’s Office and fetch the Deputy Headmaster, Mr Wee.  (Yes, that was his real surname.)  

Mr Wee might be a LITTLE chap even more vertically challenged than I, but he had a BIG cane.  

And a very assertive manner, too, indeed, when it came to dealing with miscreant students, even those bigger in size than himself — which was not difficult (I mean for students to be bigger in size than himself, rather than not difficult for him to deal with them, which was the case, too, because of his position).  (Those were the days when authority was respected.  I don’t know what it’s like today.)

The guilty parties who’d started the pandemonium were identified by their peers (for I wasn’t there at the outset) and marched off to Mr Wee’s office.

In the meantime, I told the rest of the class to start packing up, which they should’ve done before I arrived to take them out for their PE lesson.  

Then I made them stand up, holding their school bags on their heads, and proceeded to tell them about what they’d missed out on: 

“I had come today with all sorts of new games for you to play, which you’d expressed an interest in last week, thinking we were going to have such fun.  I had expected you to be all packed and eager to go out to the fields after having been cooped up in the classroom for half a day.  Instead you were misbehaving, so you were obviously not that interested in these new games.  It’s no loss to me because I can always spend the time marking homework.  It’s your loss because you’re missing out on the fun.  Those of you who had started, or who took part in, this are also irresponsible, because you have deprived the innocent parties of a fun session.”

Then I sat down and started marking homework, all the way until the bell rang for the flag-lowering ceremony.  All this while, the students just stood there with their school bags balanced on their heads.

The following week, I turned up in class to find the students all packed and raring to go out for their PE lesson.  

No trouble ever again after that.

(Also read blog entry The disruptive student, https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/02/disruptive-student-singapore.html.)

(Singapore, 1973)

PS (29 March 2025):  I wonder if anyone reading this blog might recognise any of the students here, or even themselves?  They would now be 67!  I would love to hear from them (in the comment box below), with their contact email address for me to get in touch with them, just to see what they are like now.