Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries

by Guy Winch

The treatments that follow are listed in the order in which they should be administered. Treatments A (challenging negative perceptions) and B (identifying self-defeating behaviors) are effective primarily for correcting the misperceptions loneliness causes and the self-defeating

defeating behaviors that result. Treatments C (taking the other person’s perspective) and D (deepening emotional bonds) will help strengthen relationship muscles crucial for forming new connections or deepening existing ones. Treatment E (creating opportunities for social connection) will help identify new avenues for social engagement; and Treatment F (adopting animals) discusses ways to reduce the emotional suffering loneliness inflicts and is especially suited for people with limited options to expand or improve the quality of their social connections (because of geographic isolation, health or mobility limitations, or other special circumstances).

Further, rehabilitating muscles of any kind requires repetition, practice, and patience. If we try to rush our recovery we are likely to reinjure ourselves and encounter setbacks and disappointment. And remember, not all forms of loneliness can be remedied by first aid techniques alone. At the end of the chapter, I discuss when it is recommended to consult a mental health professional.

1. Fight the Pessimism!

list. Reach out to at least one or two people a week and, when possible, initiate plans to meet. Go to websites that list meetings or activities and scroll through their categories. For example, Meetup (meetup.com) is a website that lists meetings for people with mutual interests, hobbies, passions, or careers. Even if you don’t find a specific meet-up that fits your interests, such sites are good places to get ideas for activities or hobbies that might intrigue you. Identify at least three activities or topics you might want to pursue (e.g., book clubs, adult education classes, hiking or biking groups). Search online for meetings in your area.

Take time to reflect on how you might come across to your friends, colleagues, and loved ones or when you are on a date or any other type of social engagement. Try to identify at least three behaviors (including omissions, such as not conveying interest), even if they seem entirely justified and even if they seem relatively minor, that might be pushing other people away.

The following three errors are the most important to keep in mind, as they represent our most frequent oversights. 1. Failing to Engage Our Perspective-Taking Muscles When We Should

3. We Consider the Wrong Information

strengthening weak relationship muscles, improving social interactions, and enhancing relationships. Secondary benefits: Reduces emotional suffering.

Treatment E: Create Opportunities for Social Connection

TREATMENT SUMMARY: CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIAL CONNECTION Dosage: Administer full treatment as needed and repeat as necessary. Effective for: Reducing emotional suffering and increasing opportunities for social interaction. Secondary benefits: Strengthens weak relationship muscles.

LOSS AND TRAUMA

TREATMENT SUMMARY: SOOTHE YOUR EMOTIONAL PAIN YOUR WAY Dosage: Administer as soon after the events as possible. Make sure to communicate your preferences with regard to discussing your feelings and experiences to those around you. Effective for: Managing and reducing emotional pain.

than they had been previously?

realized my purpose in life is: TREATMENT SUMMARY:

Unhealthy relational guilt typically manifests in three primary forms, all of which inflict similar psychological wounds: unresolved guilt, which is the most common and often the most damaging, survivor guilt, and separation guilt (or the closely related disloyalty guilt).

Go through your description and take out any qualifiers or excuses. For example, “She claimed she was insulted” should read, “She felt insulted.” Items such as “He did the same thing to me once” or “She made it into a bigger deal than it was” should be omitted entirely. Summarize the harm the other person sustained both tangibly and emotionally. For example, if you criticized a fellow employee unfairly and that person was fired as a result, you should mention aspects such as his or her economic hardship, the time and effort the person will need to invest in order to find another job, the blow to the individual’s self-esteem, and his or her feelings of embarrassment, resentment, and demoralization. Go through your above description of harm and make sure it is as realistic and as accurate as possible. It is important not to

emotional distress during an already difficult time. Since they never realized she had stolen any money to begin with, her solution was to increase her babysitting shifts and sneak the cash back into her mother’s wallet as she earned it. Keep in mind that most teens who steal money from their parents’ wallets feel no guilt whatsoever, let alone put themselves on a work detail reparations program.

TREATMENT SUMMARY: FORGIVE YOURSELF Dosage: Administer this treatment fully if you are unable to administer Treatment A for whatever reason or if you’ve administered Treatment A but were not successful in eliciting authentic forgiveness. Effective for: Reducing guilt and self-condemnation.

EXERCISE FOR SUFFERERS OF SURVIVOR GUILT The following writing exercise includes sentiments expressed by people who suffered from survivor guilt but found ways to manage and overcome it. Write a brief paragraph about how relevant sentiments might apply to your own circumstance. Morris was seventy-two when he lost his wife of fifty-one years to a heart attack. “I realized it was unfair of me to mourn for so long. She would have wanted me to enjoy the life I had left.”

of home-schooled

Sit or lie comfortably, close your eyes, and recall the opening snapshot of the scene or the experience in question. Zoom out so you see yourself within the scene, or if the scene involved two locations (e.g., if you were on the phone) imagine a split screen so you see both yourself and the other person or locale. Once you see yourself within the scene, zoom out even further so you can watch the scene unfold from an even greater distance. Allow the scene to unfold as you observe it from afar, as if you were a stranger who happened to pass by as it occurred. Make sure to use this same perspective every time you find yourself thinking about the events in question.

Treatment B: Look at the Birdie! Distract Yourself from Emotional Pain Even once our urge to ruminate is weaker, cutting off a ruminative train of thought once it begins is still quite challenging. The main reason we tend to indulge the urge to ruminate even once we’re fully aware of how damaging it can be is that we often catch ourselves ruminating only once our emotions are already churning. Trying to simply suppress our ruminative thoughts is not only difficult, it is inadvisable too. Decades of research on thought suppression demonstrates that nothing compels us to think of something more than trying desperately not to think of it. In now-classic experiments, people were instructed to see if they

EXERCISE FOR IDENTIFYING POTENTIAL DISTRACTIONS Complete this writing exercise for each topic or experience about which you tend to ruminate unproductively. List the places and situations in which you tend to ruminate most often. For each place and situation, list as many distractions as possible of both short durations (e.g., a game of Sudoku or supermarket layouts) and longer ones (e.g., a cardiovascular workout or catching a movie).

you chose. Remember, our thinking is not as clear as it could be when we’re in the midst of an intense rumination.

The most effective strategy for regulating emotions such as anger involves reframing the event in our minds so that we change its meaning to one that is less infuriating.

Identify the opportunities. Today, many companies insist their managers reframe areas of weakness as “opportunities” when giving employees

Embrace the learning moment. There is usually much we can learn from the situations that elicit our ruminations. Identifying mistakes we’ve made and ones we wish to avoid in the future, viewing negative situations as strategic puzzles that require creative solutions, learning who we can count on and who we cannot, and discovering our strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities can provide valuable lessons that will boost our confidence

and spare us future heartache and emotional distress. View the offending person as needing spiritual help. Those of us with strong religious beliefs can reframe many situations as ones in which the person who caused us emotional distress is in obvious need of spiritual help. As such they deserve not our anger but our prayers. A series of recent studies examined the power of prayer to alleviate anger (using sound scientific principles and blind peer-review processes) and found that it can be an effective way to regulate our emotions, as long as the nature of our prayer is positive. Tempting as it may be to do so, praying that the person who angered us gets hit by a Mack truck will not make us less angry, as it is the spiritual equivalent of shooting a couch pillow. A secular version of this approach (albeit an untested one scientifically)

would be to view the offending person as someone who might be troubled and in need of psycholo...

TREATMENT SUMMARY: REFRAME THE ANGER Dosage: Apply to situations, memories, or events that elicit anger or sadness and are the subject of repeated ruminations. Write down the reframed formulations you construct so you can revisit them whenever the rumination occurs. Effective for: Reducing anger and anger-focused ruminations (as well as the intensity of other emotionally painful ruminations...

How much time has passed since the event in question? Obviously some life events are extremely traumatic and they might dominate our thoughts and feelings for months and years. However, most of our ruminations do not fall in this category and we should be aware that people expect us to recover within a certain time frame. For example, a general rule of thumb for breakups is that it takes one to two months for every year of a relationship to recover. If we were in a relationship for three years, we should begin to recover from the initial surge of intense ruminations about how and why the breakup happened within three to six months and we should think twice about continuing to discuss the how and why aspect of things with our friends if the topic still dominates our discussions a year later.

TREATMENT SUMMARY: GO EASY ON YOUR FRIENDS Dosage: Apply periodically to evaluate the health of your supportive relationships. Take action to repair any relationship damage when necessary. Effective for: Evaluating and repairing strained relationships. When to Consult a Mental

Failure is a great teacher. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he invented the lightbulb and he viewed each failure as a learning experience. In his words, “I haven’t failed once. I’ve learned ten thousand things that don’t work.” Failure always tells us something about what we need to change in our preparation or execution of the task. What should you do differently next time? Failure provides new opportunities. Henry Ford’s first two car companies failed. Had they succeeded he

might never have tried company number three, which was when he hit on the idea of assembly line manufacturing and became one of the richest men of his time. What opportunities might your failure possibly present?

time she swam over eighty miles before painful Portuguese man-of-war stings forced her doctors to pull her from the water. Diana quickly announced she would not try the swim again. But once her exhaustion and initial disappointment wore off she realized that her two attempts had only made her stronger and more likely to succeed if she tried again. She made another attempt in August 2012 and although she swam farther than she had in her previous efforts, dangerous squalls forced her out of the water before completing her quest. We all get demoralized when we fail. But bouncing back from our failure and learning from the experience will always make us stronger and more likely to succeed in the future. In what ways might your failure make you stronger?

Some failures are also successes. I’ve always wondered how the runner-up

up in the Miss Universe pageant feels once she’s had some time to reflect and pick out the confetti from her hair. Does she feel proud to have represented her country so well, or does she feel devastated about coming so close and not winning? It’s crushing when our amateur sports team loses the playoff game but does that nullify the accomplishment of getting to the playoffs in the first place? Sure, it’s disappointing we didn’t get the job ...

Success is not always necessary. Recent studies have begun to illuminate a surprising aspect about failure: many of the benefits we hope to reap by pursuing our goals are not necessarily dependent on our ability to complete them. In most situations, making steady progress toward our goals contributes more toward our sustained happiness and self-fulfillment than actually reaching them.

EXERCISE FOR ADOPTING SELF-COMPASSION

about herself. Make sure to express kindness, understanding, and concern about the experience she went through and how she felt as a result, and remind her of why she is worthy of compassion and support. Now describe your own experience and your feelings about the event again, but this time, try to be as objective and understanding as you can about what happened and

about how you felt. Make sure not to sound judgmental or negative. For example, you might note that your date never called you back, as that is factual, but not that your date thought you were a loser, because that is judgmental and nonfactual. Or that you made mistakes during a presentation, but not that your colleagues disrespect you as a result, because, regardless of how you perceived their reactions, when our self-esteem is low we tend to misinterpret people’s facial expressions too negatively.

TREATMENT SUMMARY: SELF-COMPASSION Dosage: Apply the treatment over three days and repeat regularly until the principles of self-comp...

Exercise for Building Willpower Use your nondominant hand for as many tasks as possible every day between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. for four to eight weeks (the longer the better). Adjust these hours accordingly if your schedule requires (e.g., if you work the night shift or if you only wake up around noon). Include tasks such as brushing your teeth, opening doors, using a computer mouse or trackball,