"What is the meaning of my existence?" —— I am a burden on my parents.

In April 2017, Afee walked into my consulting room, dressed in a red windbreaker embroidered with white cranes, brisk steps, a bright smile and 180 statures, which made it impossible to imagine the life stories she had told me.

This time, slightly different is that Afee is no longer my visitor, but my interviewee.

When she was 5 years old, her parents divorced, but one thing affected her deeply.

The thing is, one day after his parents divorced, his father was supposed to pick up Afee and leave the kindergarten. But Afee waited from 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock, and his father still didn't appear. Afee called his mother and said, "Mom, Dad doesn't want me anymore." What she meant to express at that time was probably that her father did not come to pick her up.

My mother rushed to the kindergarten after receiving the phone call. It happened that my father arrived at that time. The two men were fighting at the gate of kindergarten because of this sentence.

From that time on, Afee felt that he owed his parents. She said to herself:

"You are their burden."

So, before going to high school, the main story of her life became "how not to be a burden to parents."

Affi's father was beaten when he was four years old, and his health was not good. At that time, the doctor said that he could not live for three years. His father always gave Afee a sense of ambition, but he was in prison.

Since childhood, Afi, who wishes he would not be a burden to his parents, always feels that her father needs her support. So in the year of graduating from senior high school, she chose to go back to her hometown to work.

She thought that when she returned home, she could "save" her father's life and become a filial daughter advocated by the mainstream. From then on, her father and daughter had deep feelings, family and beauty. However, the reality of one and a half years tells her that after many years of remarriage, her father's life has nothing to do with her.

But Afee told me that she was very happy to go back, because her father's health has been bad, that year and a half of company is still important to her.

Finding out that he was staying in his hometown was no longer meaningful. He left his hometown company in a week and came alone. When she arrived, she started the work of telemarketing.

She is not good at this job, full of self-doubt and self-denial. Then she chose to resign, and she felt more and more depressed during her struggle on the survival line.

Then, with the introduction of a fellow sister, she went to a fund company to do research in the Internet industry. At that time, her monthly salary was only 2,800 yuan, and she was very anxious when she went to work every day, but she was extremely efficient when she read on the subway after work.

Later, the company sent her to go on a business trip. The voices of self negation in her mind were even stronger. There seemed to be no substance in her work. She did not have a project to do so, and felt that she was eating and dying everyday.

At this time, what lingers in her mind every day is to jump into the nearby East Lake and end her life.

She had to face her doubts day by day: "What is the meaning of my existence?"

Affi told me that one of the most influential books of this period was Hellinger's Why Has This Life Come? As the originator of the family system arrangement theory, Hellinger's book makes Afee realize that his existence has its origin and is also the product of many chances.

In the family's long vein, she is just a cross-section of the time torrent, most of which are determined by historical origins, rather than by her own existence.

She began not to blame herself so much, not to whip herself, not to believe that she had harmed her parents, but to face the family as it is.

She went to the temple of Wudang Mountains alone on Qingming Festival. Although she did not make any preparations in advance, everything went smoothly to the unthinkable: her accommodation, meals and trips were almost all solved by God's help. Because of her depressed spirit, her good friend also arrived at the time to accompany her.

Afee said that she felt lucky and suddenly felt that she would be better. There were many people in the world who helped her.

Affi told me that reading Hellinger's books and heart sutras was the beginning of self-compassion for her. In a meditation guide, Hellinger writes:

"The ups and downs of my childhood were not the fate of my self-examination. This bumpy experience may make me unable to fight, heavy, but I still respect this bumpy fate. For example, I was accepted or recognized by my father, and I accepted and recognized my fate. Then I looked at my parents with respect, and I told them:'My life came from your blood. Maybe it made me sin. Even so, it's my destiny. I accept my destiny.

Why did this life come about? Seeing her family in the historical context, seeing the family context, fearing life and accepting destiny, Afee said this was the first lesson she learned.

"Depression is the greatest strength I've learned." —— I saved my life.

In November 2016, Afee first came to me for consultation.

Just a week before consulting me, she told me that she was trying to end her life by hanging herself.

Of course, this is not the first time she wants to end her life.

The first time I wanted to end my life was in college. A Fei liked a boy from high school. When I asked him what he attracted her, ah Fei said adorably, "for the first time I found out that I could talk to people like this, he could understand me."

Affi watered the friendship with love. Even after they went to college, when a boy told Affi that a girl had confessed to him, Affi dragged his injured leg and ran to the boy's dormitory to discuss with his roommates how to get the boy to be with the girl. The girl is now the boy's wife.

I asked A Fei why she wanted to pursue other girls for her favorite boy. Ah Fei said, "at that time, I felt that I could not take care of my feelings. I could take myself as air, just by his side."

It's like when I was a kid, I could see myself as the air and take care of my parents'feelings.

But when the boys and girls were really together, she began to feel the unbearable pain. It was also at this time that she wanted to walk on the roof of the dormitory and end her life.

As it happens, when she really stands on the top of the building and thinks so, her roommate who cares about her finds something unusual. It's not easy to take care of and accompany her.

Just like she later wanted to jump to East Lake in Wuhan but had the power to go to Wudang Mountains to find answers, A Fei chose to go to a university in another city as an exchange student.

During her six months as an exchange student, she seems to have found some strength to survive: she found that not only did she do well in school, but she also had a good relationship with her classmates, and even she led a small team in a classroom project to successfully demonstrate their results.

However, after depression, she would come to her from time to time. She came to me for counseling because she often wanted to end her life.

When our consultation really began to break through, it was actually in a crisis intervention call.

At 11:40 p.m., I was ready to go to bed when I unexpectedly found a text message from Afee. The text message said that she had written a suicide note and a letter to everyone. She was afraid that she would end her life at any time. My good friend suggested that she should ask me for help. So she sent me a text message. I was very glad that I saw my cell phone before I went to bed that day. So I called her.

I can't remember what questions I asked, but Afee told me that my questions made her realize for the first time that the people in her mind she called "intellectuals", "mediators", "little girls" and "murderers" were not herself.

She told me that in the past she felt she needed to understand and tolerate them, but now she finally understood that "Tolerance is not tolerance", and that she wanted to take back what she said was the mainstay of her life.

Just as she saved her life countless times before, this time she chose not to listen to the thoughts of these voices in her brain, no longer to blindly comprehend and surrender, but to regain her sovereignty over life.

That dialogue was a turning point.

After that, she began an incredible change. At the next consultation, she began to tell me that what she wanted to do now was to "please herself" wholeheartedly.

So in addition to our consultation, she left her previous industry and work and went to a famous temple in the south for 10 days to meditate in the New Year of 2017.

During our several interviews in April 2017, I asked ah Fei what had been given to her by depression.

Afee said that since childhood, because she felt that she had caused the breakdown of her parents'relationship, she had learned to look at the world from an early age, and had a strong ability of observation and self-examination.

But these things are also a huge flow of information. Sometimes they make her overburdened and forget herself.

Whether it's forgetting to connect with yourself physically or spiritually.

She said depression was an invitation to her:

Invite her to "please herself", invite her to re-understand the past and stop belittling herself.

Invite her to see that she is not the voice in her mind, she can regain her life "master plate".

Invite her to learn the art of self-care and self-compassion, invite her to see, she can not work so hard.

Two days ago, Wu Xixuan, a postmodern psychologist in Taiwan, told the story of a patient who was known as an anxiety disorder.

"Anxiety is a valuable resource. It needs to be heard and understood. We cannot discriminate against anxiety. We come to curious anxiety. It may have its intention. We cherish the anxieties of anxiety and ask him, "what do you want me to do?"

During the consultation and interview with Afee, I learned that depression is the same.

We should also not discriminate against depression. If we do not take care of our feelings, listen to ourselves, respect our voices and aspirations, if we regard ourselves as the air to constantly meet the needs of others, then depression is a reminder of our journey of self-compassion and self-reflection.

Depression also has its hope, it wants to be seen, hope that we respect and appreciate the whole state of our lives, stop our self-criticism.

Yes, depression is our good friend. It only occurs when we are invited to enter another life state different from the present one. It only occurs when we are invited to change and integrate our lives.

"Depression, it's not a disease for me, it's not a question of whether it can be cured, and I'm not afraid of it anymore," Afee said. That's the greatest strength I've ever learned.

Seeing what life is like makes me strong —— In response to the death question

When we started consulting, Afee told me something heavy for her 27-year-old age.

In June 2015, when she was only 25 years old, she was finally told by doctors that she had thyroid cancer after many misdiagnoses in different hospitals.

Afee said it was a particularly dark time in her life.

She also remembered that during her operation, her father and stepmother came to take care of her, but her stepmother left home because she had some disagreements with her, and her father chose to stand on the stepmother's side.

Because the doctor said she needed to go home to rest in order to finish her operation, so she followed her mother to fly home to the country. Her mother's identity card was missing at the airport. She swore at the innocent people in the airport for 40 minutes.

At that moment, she said, her expectations for her parents were shattered.

She seemed to calm herself down in a moment. Looking at the mother who scolded her, she said to herself, "It's not me she scolded."

From childhood, A Fei had an idea that she could not live long enough. When I asked her where she came from, she said she thought she thought too much from her childhood and worried that she would be careful.

But when the issue of death really came to her, Afee said that death was different from what she imagined.

She once thought death might be a kind of retribution that she suppressed her feelings for a long time. Even she thought, "why do I get sick?" What did I do wrong? Such a problem.

But now she tells me that death is a kind reminder, reminding her to pay attention to herself, reminding her to value her feelings, reminding her to respond seriously to life questions like "Who am I, where am I from, where are I going?"

Afee said she used to feel like she could do something different than ordinary superhuman work. Even after thyroid surgery, she immediately took up a new job, a project manager position in a particularly busy start-up company.

But when death came to her with another friend called Depression, she realized that she was not a superman, she was just an ordinary person.

From refusing to experience her own feelings, she began to use her extraordinary ability to perceive others to herself, to perceive herself, to learn insight, to do psychological counseling, to feel her own feelings, to learn to talk to her body, to learn to stop when she was tired.

This is the closest she has ever been to her body.

Afee also said that in the past she lived in the mainstream culture, constantly pursuing material achievements, but now death seems to open the door to a new world for her: she no longer looks at life from a single perspective, but learned to use more diverse perspectives, put down her control, to feel and create real life.

From the past "enterprising" to the present "ordinary mind", this inward search is her answer to the question of death.

Now she does a job she likes very much. She says that because of the work content, the team and the sense of significance she gets are so beautiful that she even fears that she will lose these beautiful things someday.

In August 2016, she met another girl labeled "depression". After a few months with her, she found herself somewhat powerless, and even had the feeling of falling with her.

So she recommended a consultant to the girl. In fact, this is a very rare thing for her, because she used to carry all the burden on her own. When I asked her how she did it, she responded, "I can't save her, I can only accompany her."

Afee said that she also appreciated the girl's rarity more and more in the process, and that it was not easy to shine on her body. She said that it was a feeling of vitality.

"I no longer worry because I see her as she is, and do not like her," Fei described.

It was also in this relationship that she felt for the first time that she could establish a mutual trust, unconditional trust, respect each other's point of view and see each other's pain, mutual acceptance, deep and stable connection with the other's life.

The girl later left Beijing for Shanghai. Ah Fei was also very sad, but she chose to let her pursue her ideal instead of trying hard to retain it, just as death taught her to lay down her control.

Hearing this, a warm current and power rose in my heart.

Seeing life as it is, full of reverence and respect for life, learning to be merciful to oneself, and also seeing the difficulty of others, appreciating a real imperfect person and establishing a deep connection with her, those who have done so are already philosophers and artists of life!