Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts

298 Pages·2014·3.83 MB·English

Emotional First Aid
PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR TREATING
FAILURE, REJECTION, GUILT AND OTHER
EVERYDAY PSYCHOLOGICAL INJURIES
Guy Winch, PhD
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Copyright © 2010 Exisle Publishing Limited Page 2 of 2
This edition published 2013
Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd
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P.O. Box 60490, Titirangi, Auckland 0642, New Zealand
www.exislepublishing.com
First published by Hudson Street Press in 2013
Copyright © 2013 Guy Winch, PhD
All rights reserved. Except for short extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
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Contents
Introduction vii
1. R EJECTION: The Emotional Cuts and Scrapes of
Daily Life 3
2. LONELINESS: Relationship Muscle Weakness 37
3. LOSS AND TRAUMA: Walking on Broken Bones 75
4. GUILT: The Poison in Our System 103
5. RUMINATION: Picking at Emotional Scabs 141
6. F AILURE: How Emotional Chest Colds Become
Psychological Pneumonias 171
7. L OW SELF-ESTEEM: Weak Emotional Immune
Systems 213
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vi Contents
CONCLUSION: Create Your Personal Psychological
Medicine Cabinet 257
Acknowledgments 261
Notes 265
Index 281
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Introduction
a
sk a ten-y ear- old what you should do if you catch a cold and
the child would immediately recommend getting into bed
and drinking chicken soup. Ask what you should do if you get a
cut on your knee and the child would advocate cleaning it (or us-
ing antibacterial ointment) and bandaging it. Children also know
that if you break a bone in your leg you need to get a cast on it so
it mends correctly. If you then asked why these steps were neces-
sary they would tell you that treating such injuries helps them heal
and prevents them from getting worse, that colds can turn into
pneumonia, that cuts can become infected, and that if broken
bones heal incorrectly you’ll have trouble walking once the cast
comes off. We teach our children how to take care of their bodies
from a very young age and they usually learn such lessons well.
But ask an adult what you should do to ease the sharp pain of
rejection, the devastating ache of loneliness, or the bitter disap-
pointment of failure and the person would know little about how
to treat these common psychological injuries. Ask what you should
do to recover from low self- esteem or loss and trauma and adults
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viii Introduction
would be equally challenged. Ask how you might deal with intru-
sive ruminations or nagging guilt and you are likely to be met with
sheepish looks, feet shuffling, and a pointed effort to change the
subject.
Some might confidently suggest the best remedy is to talk
about our feelings with friends or family members, certain that no
mental health professional in his or her right mind would object to
talking about feelings. But while discussing our feelings might of-
fer relief in some situations, it can actually be damaging in others.
Pointing out these dangers usually causes another round of sheep-
ish looks, feet shuffling, and a pointed effort to change the subject.
The reason we take little to no purposeful action to treat the
psychological wounds we sustain in daily life is because we lack the
tools with which to manage such experiences. True, we could seek
the counsel of a mental health professional in such situations, but
doing so is often impractical, as most of the psychological wounds
we sustain in life are not serious enough to warrant professional
intervention. Just as we wouldn’t pitch a tent outside our family
doctor’s waiting room at the first sign of a cough or sniffle, we can’t
run to a therapist every time we get rejected by a romantic pros-
pect or whenever our boss yells at us.
But while every household has a medicine cabinet full of ban-
dages, ointments, and pain relievers for treating basic physical
maladies, we have no such medicine cabinet for the minor psycho-
logical injuries we sustain in daily life. And sustain them we do,
just as frequently as we do physical ones. Each of the psychological
wounds covered in this book is extremely common and each of
them is emotionally painful and potentially psychologically dam-
aging. Yet, until now, we’ve had no conventional means to ease the
pains, soothe the aches, and relieve the distresses of these events
despite the regularity with which they occur in our lives.
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Introduction ix
Applying emotional first aid to such injuries can prevent many
of them from affecting our mental health and emotional well-
being going forward. Indeed, many of the diagnosable psychologi-
cal conditions for which we seek professional treatment could be
prevented if we applied emotional first aid to our wounds when we
first sustained them. For example, a ruminative tendency can
quickly grow into anxiety and depression, and experiences of fail-
ure and rejection can easily lead to erosions in our self- esteem.
Treating such injuries not only accelerates their healing but also
helps prevent complications from developing and mitigates the se-
verity of any that do arise.
Of course, when the psychological injury is serious, emotional
first aid treatments should not replace seeing a mental health pro-
fessional any more than having a well-s tocked medicine cabinet
abolishes the need for physicians and hospitals. But while we know
our limitations when it comes to our physical health, the same is
not true of our mental health. Most of us can recognize when a cut
is deep enough to require stitches, we can usually tell the differ-
ence between a swollen bruise and a broken bone, and we tend to
know when we’re dehydrated to the point of needing an infusion
of plasma. But when it comes to our psychological wounds, we
lack not only the wherewithal to do anything about them but also
the ability to identify when they require professional intervention.
As a result, we often neglect our psychological wounds until they
become severe enough to impair our functioning. We would never
leave a cut on our knee unattended until it compromised our abil-
ity to walk, but we leave psychological wounds unattended all the
time, often until they literally prevent us from moving forward in
life.
This discrepancy between our general competence in treating
assaults to our physical health and our complete incompetence
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x Introduction
where our mental health is concerned is extremely unfortunate. If
no such emotional first aid techniques existed, if it were impossible
to treat these psychological wounds, this state of affairs might be
tolerable. But such is not the case. Recent progress in numerous
areas of psychological research has unveiled many treatment op-
tions for exactly the kinds of psychological injuries we sustain
most often.
Each chapter in this book describes a common and everyday
psychological injury and the various emotional first aid techniques
we can apply to ease our emotional pain and prevent the problem
from becoming worse. These science- based techniques can all be
self- administered, much as we self-a dminister first aid for our
physical ailments, and they can also be introduced to our children.
The techniques in this book represent the future staples of our psy-
chological medicine cabinets, the mental health medical kits we
can carry with us as we go through life.
During my years studying clinical psychology in graduate
school I was frequently criticized for giving my patients specific
and concrete suggestions for how they might alleviate their emo-
tional pains. “We’re here to do deep psychological work,” one su-
pervisor used to admonish me, “not to dispense psychological
aspirin— it doesn’t exist!”
But offering immediate relief and doing deep psychological
work are not mutually exclusive. I believe everyone should have
access to emotional first aid treatments, just as they should any
other treatments for dressing emotional wounds. Over the years,
I’ve made it a practice to distill innovative research findings into
practical suggestions, treatments my patients can apply to the
emotional hurts of daily living. I’ve done so for one main reason—
they work. For some years now, my patients, friends, and family
members have been urging me to collect these emotional first aid
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Introduction xi
treatments into a book. I decided to do so because it’s time we took
our mental health more seriously. It’s time we practiced mental
health hygiene just as we do dental and physical hygiene. It’s time
we all owned a psychological medicine cabinet with the emotional
equivalents of bandages, antibacterial ointments, ice packs, and
fever suppressants.
After all, once we know psychological aspirins do exist, we’d be
foolish not to use them.
How to Use This Book
The chapters in this book cover seven common psychological inju-
ries we sustain in daily life: rejection, loneliness, loss, guilt, rumi-
nation, failure, and low self-e steem. Although they were written as
stand- alone chapters I advise reading the book in its entirety. Even
if some of the chapters have no immediate relevance, knowing the
kinds of psychological injuries we might sustain in various situa-
tions will help us recognize them when we or our friends and fam-
ily members encounter them in the future.
Each chapter in this book is divided into two sections. The first
describes the specific psychological wounds each injury inflicts—
including those we often fail to recognize. For example, we might
think it obvious that loneliness causes emotional pain, but we
might not be aware that untreated loneliness has such serious im-
plications for our physical health that it can shorten our life expec-
tancy. Also less apparent is the fact that lonely people often develop
self- defeating behaviors that lead them to unconsciously push
away the very people who could alleviate their suffering.
The second section of each chapter presents the treatments
readers can apply to each of the wounds discussed in the first sec-
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