By Guy Winch
My Personal Takeaways →Guy Winch frames common emotional pain as everyday injuries that need immediate care, not neglect. The book gives practical first-aid treatments for rejection, loneliness, failure, guilt, rumination, and low self-esteem so small wounds do not become deeper, longer-term psychological damage.
The core argument is that we treat physical injuries quickly and automatically but leave psychological wounds to fester — often making them worse through self-criticism, avoidance, and rumination. Read this if you want concrete tools for the emotional bruises that most people suffer in silence. Implement it by learning one technique per chapter — the self-compassion practice for failure, the distraction technique for rejection pain, the meaning-making exercise for loss — and applying it the next time you encounter each wound.
By Guy Winch
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 prospect or whenever our boss yells at us.
But while every household has a medicine cabinet full of bandages, ointments, and pain relievers for treating basic physical maladies, we have no such medicine cabinet for the minor psychological injuries we sustain in daily life.
Indeed, many of the diagnosable psychological 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 failure 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 severity of any that do arise.
Of course, when the psychological injury is serious, emotional first aid treatments should not replace seeing a mental health professional any more than having a well-stocked medicine cabinet abolishes the need for physicians and hospitals.
It’s time we practiced mental health hygiene just as we do dental and physical hygiene.
(The Emotional Cuts and Scrapes of Daily Life)
Rejections elicit emotional pain so sharp it affects our thinking, floods us with anger, erodes our confidence and self-esteem, and destabilizes our fundamental feeling of belonging.
Indeed, what separates rejection from almost every other negative emotion we encounter in life is the magnitude of the pain it elicits. We often describe the emotional pain we experience after a significant rejection as analogous to being punched in the stomach or stabbed in the chest.
One of the reasons rejection is often so devastating is that our reason, logic, and common sense are usually ineffective when it comes to mitigating the pain we feel.
Rejections often trigger anger and aggressive impulses that cause us to feel a powerful urge to lash out, especially at those who rejected us, but in a pinch, innocent bystanders will do.
Studies of school shootings, including the 1999 Columbine tragedy, found that thirteen of fifteen incidents involved perpetrators who had experienced significant interpersonal rejection and ostracism from schoolmates. In many cases, shooters specifically targeted students who had bullied, teased, or rejected them in the past, often seeking them out first.
We often compound our rejection experiences by becoming extremely self-critical, essentially kicking ourselves when we’re already down.
We all have a tendency to take rejections too personally and to draw conclusions about our shortcomings when there is little evidence that such assumptions are warranted.
The most frequent reasons we get turned down as romantic prospects (or as job applicants) are because of a lack of general chemistry, because we don’t match the person’s or company’s specific needs at that time, or because we don’t fit the narrow definition of who they’re looking for, not because of any critical missteps we might have made nor because we have any fatal character flaws.
Treatment A: Argue with Self-Criticism
List (in writing) any negative or self-critical thoughts you have about the rejection. Use the following self-criticism “counterarguments” from a variety of rejection scenarios to formulate personalized rebuttals to each of the self-criticisms you listed. Feel free to list more than one counterargument per self-critical thought when it is relevant to do so. Whenever you have a self-critical thought, make sure to immediately articulate the relevant counterargument(s) fully and clearly in your mind.
I’ve heard countless tales of romantic rejection both from those doing the rejecting and those getting the heave-ho. People reject romantic partners and prospects for many different reasons, most of which have nothing to do with anyone’s shortcomings. Most often it is a simple matter of chemistry—either there is a spark or there isn’t.
Timing can be a crucial issue as well.
Similarly to dating, getting rejected by prospective employers has usually much less to do with any mistakes or inadequacies you displayed and more to do with your fit with the company or the job description. Some jobs listings are required to be publicized but were always meant to be filled internally, other times employers are looking for a specific skill set or background, and yet others might be required to come up with several candidates even though they already know who they plan to hire.
Treatment B: Revive Your Self-Worth
Treatment C: Replenish Feelings of Social Connection
Social support mitigates stress of all kinds but it is especially valuable in the wake of rejection.
Getting social support from our close friends and confidants following a rejection can sometimes be challenging because they are likely to underestimate the pain the rejection in question caused us.
Our need to belong has some substitutability, meaning that new relationships and memberships can psychologically replace those that have ended, especially if they provide a better fit for our personality and interests. Painful as rejections are, we can always view them as opportunities to evaluate whether the romantic partner, social circle, friend, or employer in question was a good fit for our personalities, interests, lifestyles, or careers.
Sometimes merely spending time with a group with whom we feel a strong connection can help replenish feelings of social connectedness even if few words are spoken (such as shooting hoops with our buddies or seeing a show or a movie with friends).
Social snacking can take many forms, but scientists have found that photographs of loved ones are one of the most emotionally nutritious snacks we can consume after being rejected.
Reading meaningful e-mails or letters, watching videos of loved ones, or using valued mementos of those to whom we feel most connected also have nutritional value as social snacks.
Treatment D: Desensitize Yourself
If an actor rarely auditions, getting rejected is likely to feel painful, but those who audition several times a week find it much easier to let such rejections go. The reason this happens is because of a psychological process called desensitization.
Once I accepted that I’d be getting rejected a lot, it made the idea of any one woman rejecting me seem more manageable for some strange reason.”
The most important aspect is to concentrate our efforts into a limited time frame, as spreading out the task over time dilutes it and renders it ineffective.
(Relationship Muscle Weakness)
Yet, despite this era of unprecedented global human connection, more people than ever are suffering from severe loneliness.
What determines our loneliness is not the quantity of our relationships but rather their subjective quality, the extent to which we perceive ourselves to be socially or emotionally isolated.
First, loneliness causes us to become overly critical about ourselves and those around us, and it makes us judge our existing relationships too negatively, all of which impact our interactions with others. Second, one of the more insidious effects of loneliness is that it leads us to behave in self-defeating ways that diminish the quality and quantity of our social connections even further. As a result, the very fibers that comprise our “relationship muscles”—our social and communication skills, our ability to see things from another person’s perspective, and our ability to empathize and understand how others feel—become weak and are likely to function poorly when we need them most.
Scientists found that simply asking college students to recall a time in their life when they felt lonely or socially isolated was sufficient to elicit from them a more negative assessment of their current social support systems as well as to boost their shyness, increase their social anxiety, cause a drop in their mood and self-esteem, and impair their optimism.
Many journeys into loneliness begin during periods of transition and change. College freshmen often feel extremely lonely when they first arrive at college, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, far from home, and removed from the comfort of their friendships. Divorce, separation, and bereavement, especially when they befall us unexpectedly, can leave us entirely unprepared for the palpable loneliness that accompanies such losses. When work and colleagues provide our primary source of social interaction and engagement, losing our job can mean losing our entire social support system when we most need it.
At times, the cold grip of loneliness extends far beyond the normative adjustment period. We become trapped in it, paralyzed by waves of emotional pain, defeated by feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, and overcome by the devastating emptiness of our profound social and emotional isolation. Why does this happen? What is it that prevents some of us from breaking free of the bonds of loneliness and getting our lives back on track? The answer is that in addition to painful misperceptions, loneliness also drives us into cycles of self-protection and avoidance that cause us to create self-fulfilling prophecies and to inadvertently push away the very people we hope to engage.
When we falter in our first dating efforts after a long dry spell of being alone, we rarely attribute the result to our having rusty dating skills and weak relationship muscles. Instead we take the rejection extremely personally and assume it is merely a reflection of our fundamental undesirability.
First, we must identify and change the misperceptions that lead to self-defeating behaviors.
Second, we need to strengthen and enhance our relationship muscles so that our efforts to forge new connections and deepen existing relationships will be more successful, meaningful, and satisfying. Third, we need to minimize the ongoing emotional distress loneliness causes, especially in cases in which the options for improving existing social connections and creating new ones are limited.
Treatment A: Remove Your Negatively Tinted Glasses
Although we are unlikely to prevent pessimistic scenarios from elbowing their way into our thoughts, the best way to fight our fears and pessimism is to purposefully visualize scenarios of success that are both reasonable and realistic. By picturing successful outcomes in our minds we are more likely to recognize such opportunities when they arise and to take advantage of them. For example, we could acknowledge that it is just as likely for people at the party to be friendly, welcoming, and happy to meet and chat with us. Even if we don’t meet new people, it’s just as possible we’d have a perfectly nice time catching up with the one or two folks we do know. We might even end the night by making plans to see them again in the near future.
There are always steps we can take to improve our situation. It is important to do so because taking action of any kind will make us feel better about ourselves as well as about our prospects.
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.
Treatment B: Identify Your Self-Defeating Behaviors
Other common forms of self-defeating behaviors are finding poor excuses to turn down invitations to social events, skipping spontaneous get-togethers because you’re “unprepared” either emotionally or otherwise, neglecting to convey birthday wishes or other celebratory messages to friends and colleagues, taking friendly ribbings too personally, using defensive body language (like folding your arms over your chest, standing with your hands in your pockets, exaggerated rummaging through your purse, or faking intense interest in nonexistent text messages), responding with curt or monosyllabic sentences or overtalking and hogging the conversation, neglecting to ask others about their lives and opinions, and confessing your faults and insecurities to people you’ve just met.
Once you’ve identified what you might be doing incorrectly, be extremely mindful of avoiding such behaviors in the future.
Treatment C: Take the Other Person’s Perspective
Accurately reading another person’s point of view is a vital relationship muscle. It allows us to understand their priorities and their motivations, to anticipate their behavior, and even to predict their reactions. It enhances our ability to negotiate and cooperate successfully, to strategize and problem-solve, to communicate effectively, and to access our compassion, altruism, and empathy.
In short, we should always ask ourselves how the other person’s point of view might differ from our own. We should give weight to what we know about their priorities and preferences, to the history of the relationship between us, and to the context of the current situation. Taking a few minutes to answer such questions can save hours of relationship talks to smooth over a situation that could have been prevented had we made the effort to think through the other person’s perspective ahead of time.
Treatment D: Deepen Your Emotional Bonds
The best way to assess another person’s emotional experience is to visualize yourself in his or her situation in as immersive a manner as possible. Take notice of the surrounding environment, of who else is there, the time of day, the person’s mood, and any physical pains or ills the person may be suffering from. Imagine how you come across to him or her, not how you actually feel but what you actually convey to the other person.
Context is key. Understanding someone’s feelings involves having at least a rough sense of his or her frame of mind at the time.
Having insight into another person’s feelings only matters if we can convey our understanding convincingly and compassionately. Knowing how someone feels but communicating it poorly is akin to buying him or her flowers and then leaving them on the kitchen counter. Be as descriptive as possible. The more the other person realizes you’ve put thought and effort into appreciating his or her point of view, the more impact your empathy-informed communications will have.
Treatment E: Create Opportunities for Social Connection
By having an additional agenda, we come across not as someone who is lonely, but as someone who is passionate about our hobby, devoted to our goals, or serious about our creative endeavors. Having a larger goal also helps reduce insecurity and self-consciousness because our attention is focused on the task at hand; documenting our speed dates, creating art for our portfolios, or making it through the triathlon.
For example, a recent study found that online dating is now the second most common way couples meet (being introduced by mutual friends is the most common), surpassing previous romantic venues, such as bars, clubs, and the vegetable aisle in the local supermarket on Sunday afternoons.
Another option for creating new social bonds is to volunteer. Helping others reduces feelings of loneliness, increases feelings of self-worth, and makes us feel more socially desirable to others.
By setting out to give rather than get, we can focus on the person in need instead of on ourselves, which in turn makes us feel less self-conscious, less insecure, and less vulnerable.
Treatment F: Adopt a Best Friend
(Walking on Broken Bones)
Much like broken bones that need to be set correctly, how we go about putting the pieces of our lives back together after loss or trauma makes a huge difference in how fully we recover from such events.
We have to reset our broken psychological bones—reassemble the pieces of our lives back into a well-integrated and fully functional whole. Treating the psychological wounds that loss and trauma inflict can not only accelerate our recovery but in some cases make it possible to emerge from such experiences with meaningful changes in our priorities, a deeper appreciation of our existing relationships, an enhanced sense of purpose, and greater life satisfaction—a phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth.
First, loss and trauma can create such havoc in our lives that they threaten our self-perceptions, our roles, and our very sense of identity. Second, tragic events often challenge our fundamental assumptions about the world and our place in it, such that we struggle to make sense of the events or to integrate them into the larger framework of our belief systems. Third, many of us find it difficult to remain connected to the people and activities we used to find meaningful and we might even feel as if reengaging in our lives would represent a betrayal to those we’ve lost or a discounting of the suffering we’ve experienced.
The emotional distress we experience in the first torturous days following loss or trauma can be utterly paralyzing. We might lose the ability to think straight or to perform even the most basic functions of self-care, such as eating or bathing. Engulfed in emotional pain, we often experience every detail of our lives anew as we are forced to live through a wrenching series of “firsts.” Our first meal without the person we lost, our first night alone after being victims of violent crime, our first look in the mirror after the events that altered the course of our lives.
Time is a hugely important factor in our recovery.
We might have defined ourselves by our careers and lost our jobs, we might have defined ourselves by our couplehood and lost our partner, we might have defined ourselves by our athletic ability and lost our health, or we might have defined ourselves by our parenthood and seen our last child leave home. In each of these situations we need to take the time to rediscover who we are, to search within for things we find meaningful, and to find new ways of expressing aspects of ourselves that lay dormant, buried under an avalanche of sorrow. When we fail to do so we are left with a terrible void that only amplifies the extent of our loss, fragments our basic sense of self, and sets us adrift in the stormy seas of self-doubt and self-loathing.
One of our most compelling human drives is the need to make sense of our experiences in life. We each have our own way of understanding how the world works (even if we’ve never articulated it to ourselves explicitly), and we filter most of our experiences through that lens. Our beliefs and assumptions about the world guide our actions and our decisions and they often provide us with a sense of meaning and purpose.
Whatever thoughts and perceptions we have about such things, loss and trauma can challenge our basic assumptions about the world and how it operates and cause us significant additional emotional distress as a result. Our struggle to make sense of what happened often compounds our initial shock and sends us on a desperate quest to integrate our new realities into a framework of fundamental beliefs that no longer provide us with the security they once did. Indeed, such “crises of faith” are common. We become flooded with questions and doubts and we often embark on a search for answers.
Yet, the sooner we reconstruct our worldviews in ways that integrate our experiences of the loss or trauma, the quicker the intensity and frequency of our ruminations will diminish, the better our psychological adjustment will be, and the less likely we will be to exhibit poor emotional well-being and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In time, we begin to let go of the person we’ve lost and move on, either by reengaging with the people and activities that populated our lives previously or by finding new people or experiences in which to invest our emotions and energies. But some of us become stuck. We maintain vivid representations of the person we lost, we hang on to the person’s memory, and we keep investing our emotional resources in the dead instead of the living.
Loss and trauma create four psychological wounds. They cause overwhelming emotional pain, they undermine our basic sense of identity and the roles we play in life, they destabilize our belief systems and our understanding of the world, and they challenge our ability to remain present and engaged in our most important relationships.
Treatment A (soothing emotional pain) suggests guidelines for how to manage emotional pain and discusses common fallacies that can delay our recovery. Treatment B (recovering lost aspects of “self”) is focused on reconnecting to aspects of life that might have gotten lost and reestablishing a sense of identity, and should be administered only once we’ve returned to normal functioning within the home, at work, or in school. Treatment C (finding meaning in tragedy) is focused on making sense of the events and moving closer to finding meaning and even benefit in them. Treatment C should be reviewed first and then completed only after enough time has passed for our initial emotional pain to subside and we feel emotionally strong enough to do so.
Treatment A: Soothe Your Emotional Pain Your Way
Although many of us believe it is essential to talk about traumatic events after they occur in order to minimize the risk of psychological complications, such is not the case. Indeed, a wave of recent research has demonstrated that many of our most cherished notions about coping with loss and trauma—well-known theories such as the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) and common wisdoms such as the importance of expressing our feelings and the danger of keeping them bottled up—are largely incorrect.
However, we now know much more about how memories (including traumatic ones) are actually formed in our brain. Specifically, the mere act of recalling an event changes our actual memory of it in minor ways. When we recall traumatic experiences while we’re still flooded with intense emotion, we are inadvertently cementing the link between the memory and our intense emotional reactions to it. By doing so we are making it even more likely the memory will continue to evoke intense emotions going forward. As a result, we risk getting vivid flashbacks and making the traumatic memories themselves even more psychologically central and emotionally impactful than they otherwise would be. However, that is not to say we should try to repress such memories or that we should refuse to discuss them. Indeed, most experts now believe there is no “right” way to cope with the aftermath of loss and trauma. The best each of us can do is to deal with such experiences exactly as our proclivities, personality, and worldview dictate. If we feel the need to talk, we should, and if we don’t feel the need to share our thoughts and feelings with others we should not push ourselves to do so.
Those of us who prefer to discuss our feelings and experiences might find it difficult to do so if we lack sources of social support, while those who prefer not to discuss their feelings might find it equally difficult if they find themselves surrounded by vivid reminders.
Treatment B: Recover Lost Aspects of Your “Self”
Treatment C: Find Meaning in Tragedy
Since Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, it has been accepted that finding meaning in loss and trauma is essential for coping effectively with such experiences, and thousands of studies have confirmed these assumptions. Finding meaning was a crucial factor in recovery from every kind of loss and trauma studied, from those with spinal cord injuries to bereaved parents of young children, from victims of violence and abuse to frontline veterans of wars. To recover from our tragic experience we need to set our bones correctly and put the pieces of our lives back together in ways that lend meaning and significance to the events by weaving our experiences into the larger fabric of our life stories.
Scientists who examined how people go about finding meaning in loss and trauma realized the process includes two distinct phases, sense making and benefit finding. Sense making refers to our ability to fit the events into our existing framework of assumptions and beliefs about the world so they become more comprehensible to us. We are usually able to begin making sense of tragic events within six months of experiencing them (although completing the process of sense making can sometimes take months and even years).
Benefit finding refers to our ability to wrestle whatever silver linings we can from our experiences. We might gain a greater appreciation of life and of our own strength and resilience, we might realign our priorities and identify new purpose, and we might recognize new paths that have opened before us as a result of our new realities. Benefit finding occurs only in later stages of our recovery, as it is not something most of us can or should do when still in the grips of severe emotional pain.
One of the most common ways in which people derive meaning from tragic events is by taking action in ways that are directly related to the loss or trauma they sustained. Of course, not every loss affords us these options, nor are they appropriate for everyone.
Written responses are strongly recommended. How would your life be different today if the events had not happened? In what ways could the outcome of the events have been even worse than they were? What factors prevented these worse outcomes from occurring? How grateful are you that these worse outcomes did not occur?
While identifying potential pathways for deriving benefit from tragedy can have a positive impact on our recovery it is the real-world application of these benefits that does our emotional and psychological recovery most good. Therefore, we need to find ways to put any benefits we identify into action. For example, we might come away from a tragedy with a greater appreciation of our family, but if we don’t take action based on these insights, the benefit we derive from our new perspective will be limited.
Imagine yourself ten years in the future. You have been able to achieve something meaningful and significant (not necessarily “Nobel Prize worthy” but meaningful to you). You have a quiet moment to look back and reflect about your journey and how it has led you to this current moment in (future) time. Complete the following sentences. I never imagined back then that such tragic events would lead me to (blank). What I did was significant and very meaningful to me because (blank). The first step of my journey toward the achievement was when I (blank). My achievement was possible because I changed my priorities such that [blank]. Changing my priorities led me to make the following changes in my life (blank). Along the way I realized my purpose in life is (blank).
(The Poison in Our System)
While guilt can be heroic in small doses, in larger ones, it becomes a psychological villain, poisoning both our peace of mind and our most cherished relationships. And once the toxins of unhealthy guilt are circulating in our systems, extracting the venom is no easy task.
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).
Although there are innumerable offenses that can elicit relational guilt, one of the main reasons our guilt might remain unresolved is that we’re much less skilled at rendering effective apologies than we tend to realize.
What makes survivor guilt especially hard to purge is that there are no actions for which we must atone, no relationship ruptures to mend, and no outstanding apologies to be rendered. As such, our guilt serves no relational purpose and its warning signals constitute nothing more than a deafening false alarm that poisons our quality of life.
Separation guilt involves feeling guilty about moving forward and pursuing our own life when doing so involves leaving others behind.
Disloyalty guilt arises when we feel such binding ties of loyalty to close family members or friends that pursuing our own goals or making choices that deviate from their norms and expectations makes us feel bad. We worry that our families will perceive our choices as hurtful condemnations of their own values and as betrayals of family loyalty.
The reason it is urgent to treat unresolved or excessive guilt is that such feelings often intensify and devolve into remorse and shame. Once that happens, we begin to condemn not just our actions but our entire selves, leading to self-loathing, low self-esteem, and depression.
Things that used to bring us pleasure, joy, or excitement lose their appeal, not because we no longer enjoy them, but because we no longer permit ourselves to do so.
By making others aware of our emotional distress, we redistribute the emotional (or physical) pain our “victims” felt, even the score with them, and hopefully restore our standing in our social circle, family, or community.
The ongoing toxicity of our unresolved guilt in such situations can damage our relationships even more substantially than our original offense did.
The main reason we seek to induce guilt in others is to influence their decisions and behavior. But guilt trips have a boomerang effect we rarely consider in that, along with guilt, they also induce resentment. In one survey, 33 percent of people indicated they felt resentful toward those who make them feel guilty while only 2 percent of guilt inducers mentioned resentment as a potential consequence of their guilt-inducing efforts.
Treatment A: Learn the Recipe for an Effective Apology
Further complicating matters, both psychologically and communication-wise, when our apologies are perceived as insincere they can actually backfire and make a situation worse, spreading even more poison into an already toxic interpersonal dynamic.
Fortunately, relationship experts and researchers have finally begun to investigate the specific ingredients that make apologies effective and more likely to elicit authentic forgiveness from the offended party.
Most of us conceive of apologies as including three basic ingredients: (1) a statement of regret for what happened; (2) a clear “I’m sorry” statement; and (3) a request for forgiveness—all of which must be delivered with sincerity.
Scientists have discovered three additional components that also play a vital role in an apology’s effectiveness: validating the other person’s feelings, offering atonement, and acknowledging we violated expectations.
We generally find it hard to forgive people who hurt, angered, or disappointed us unless we believe they really “get” how they made us feel. But if their apology demonstrates a clear understanding of the emotional pain they caused us and if they take full responsibility for doing so, we feel substantial emotional relief and have a much easier time letting go of our resentment because we feel like our feelings have been validated. Emotional validation is a powerful tool when used correctly, and a great toxin remover when used in apologies. Consequently, we need to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and understand the specific consequences of our actions, how the person was affected by them, and the feelings they caused. Validating the person’s emotions by conveying we “get” how he or she feels does not imply we meant for the person to feel that way. Doing so merely acknowledges the person felt wronged, regardless of our intentions.
Emotional validation is something we all seek and crave far more than we realize. One of the reasons so many of us feel compelled to discuss our feelings with others when we feel upset, angry, frustrated, disappointed, or hurt is that we hope to get things off our chest and ease our internal distress by doing so. However, in order to feel true relief, we need them to “get it,” to understand what happened to us and why we feel the way we do. We need them to validate our feelings by conveying that understanding along with a generous dollop of empathy.
There are five steps to offering authentic emotional validation. The most important factor is accuracy. The more accurate we are when conveying our understanding of the wronged person’s feelings, the more relationship poison we remove by doing so. Let the other person complete his or her narrative about what happened so you have all the facts. Convey your understanding of what happened to this person from his or her perspective (whether you agree with that perspective or not and even if that perspective is obviously skewed). Convey your understanding of how the person felt as a result of what happened (from his or her perspective). Acknowledge that his or her feelings are reasonable (which, given that person’s perspective, they are). Convey empathy and remorse for the person’s emotional state.
Although it might not always be relevant, necessary, or possible to do so, making offers to compensate or atone for our actions in some way can be extremely meaningful to the offended party, even if he or she turns down the offers we make. By conveying our recognition that there is an imbalance in the relationship and suggesting actions that can restore a sense of equity and fairness, we communicate a much deeper level of regret and remorse, as well as a strong motivation to repair the imbalance and make things right.
One huge factor that prevents us from garnering authentic forgiveness from people we’ve harmed is they don’t know whether we’ve learned our lesson. Are we changed people or are we just as likely to commit the same wrongdoing again? Therefore, we have to clearly acknowledge that our actions violated certain expectations, rules, or social norms and offer reasonable assurances that those will not be violated again in the future. Further, when possible, we should be specific and explicit about the steps we plan to take in order to make sure we avoid repeating our “offense”.
Treatment B: Forgive Yourself
Although it is always preferable to receive forgiveness from the person we’ve harmed, when we are unable to do so, the only way to ease our torment is to forgive ourselves. Self-forgiveness is a process, not a decision (granted, it is a process that starts with a decision). We first have to recognize that we’ve beaten ourselves up enough and that our excessive guilt is serving no productive purpose in our lives and then we have to make the emotional effort necessary to work through it.
Self-forgiveness requires us first to take full responsibility for our actions and give ourselves an honest and accurate accounting of the events causing our guilt.
Coming to terms with our actions and their consequences can be emotionally uncomfortable if not painful but unless we go through such self-examination any self-forgiveness we grant ourselves will not be authentic.
In order to come to peace with our actions we will need to make some form of amends or reparations for the harm we’ve caused and find ways to minimize the likelihood of committing a similar transgression in the future.
Describe your actions or inactions that led to the other person feeling harmed. Go through your description and take out any qualifiers or excuses. Summarize the harm the other person sustained both tangibly and emotionally. Go through your above description of harm and make sure it is as realistic and as accurate as possible. It is important not to give yourself too much of a pass, but you should not beat yourself into a pulp either. Now that you have an accurate and realistic description of the events and your responsibility in them, it is fair to consider extenuating circumstances. Did you intend for events to unfold as they did? If so, why? If not, what were your original intentions? What extenuating circumstances, if any, contributed to your actions or to their consequences? The idea is not to excuse your actions, but to understand the context in which they occurred so you can ultimately find ways to forgive yourself for them.
Once we’ve minimized the likelihood of committing the same transgression in the future, we need to purge our remaining guilt by atoning for our actions or making meaningful reparations. One way to do this is to strike a deal with ourselves and identify significant tasks, contributions, or commitments that would make our self-forgiveness feel well earned. Create a short ritual to mark the completion of your atonement. Or if you decide to donate time or money to a charity, find a way to note the completion of the task in some way, so as to signal to yourself that your penance is now complete.
Treatment C: Reengage in Life
Ironic as it may sound, it is easier to induce self-forgiveness when we’ve done something wrong than it is when our hands are clean and there is nothing for which we actually need to forgive ourselves. Nonetheless, while we cannot undo the suffering and loss of others, we can take steps to end our own. The best way to move past our guilt when we didn’t do anything wrong is to remind ourselves of the many reasons it is crucial we do so. The following three exercises are composed of sentiments my patients expressed over the years that allowed them to shed survivor, separation, and disloyalty guilt. Taken together, they represent powerful rationales for reengaging in life and they offer various avenues through which we can each seek to do so.
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.”
Sylvia, a breast cancer survivor, lost her best friend to the disease. “If I don’t live my life to the fullest it would be as if the cancer claimed another victim.”
Joey was a father of three who lost his wife in a car accident when she was running an errand he was supposed to do himself. “I felt dead inside for many months. But I realized I had to get out of it. Otherwise my kids would feel as though they had lost both parents.”
Jeremiah was the only member of his high school football team to get a full scholarship to a top university. He felt guilty about it for months and then spoke with his pastor. “He made me realize it would be ungrateful of me to deny the gifts and chances I was given. The best way for me to show gratitude is to take full advantage of them.”
Shandra was the sole member of her department to survive a brutal round of layoffs. “I decided I’m going to excel, advance, and get to a position of authority so I can make sure good employees don’t get fired.”
Billy is the father of a severely disabled child. “Caregiving is emotionally stressful and extremely depleting. I figured out that when I make time to do things that bring me satisfaction and, yeah, even joy, I have much more to give.”
Wanda looks after an elderly parent. “I always keep the airplane demonstrations in mind. In case of emergency, first put on your own oxygen mask and then tend to the other person. You can’t take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself.”
Marsha’s severely depressed husband would break down in tears whenever she went out with friends. “I stayed home for months until I realized that by going out and enjoying life I’m not projecting callousness, I’m modeling optimism.”
Cam and Bev felt guilty about leaving their twin toddlers with a babysitter. “They cried like they were being slaughtered the first time we left. But we realized that the more we coddled them the less resilient and the less independent they would be. Even if it hurts sometimes, we have to be able to have date nights both for our sakes and for theirs.”
Levi, an accountant, was an orthodox Jew who fell in love with and married a non-Jewish woman. His entire family felt betrayed but none more so than his father. “His feelings are understandable. But if I let him dictate how I should live my life he’d be basically leading two lives and I’d be leading none—and that isn’t fair either.”
Juan’s Catholic father refused to accept his homosexuality. “I supported my dad when he got fired from his job even though I was a kid and it made it hard on me too. Remembering that made me realize I deserve the same support from him. So instead of apologizing, I started demanding he show me respect for having the honesty to live the life I believe in.”
Lucas came from a long line of home-schooled children. When he enrolled his daughter in first grade at a private school, his mother, a home-schooling advocate, took it as a personal rejection. “It didn’t matter how much I tried to explain, she simply couldn’t get over it. But I realized I was not willing to sacrifice doing what I know is right for my child because it might hurt someone’s feelings.”
(Picking at Emotional Scabs)
When we encounter painful experiences we typically reflect on them, hoping to reach the kinds of insights and epiphanies that reduce our distress and allow us to move on. Yet for many of us who engage in this process of self-reflection, things go awry. Instead of attaining an emotional release we get caught in a vicious cycle of rumination in which we replay the same distressing scenes, memories, and feelings over and over again, feeling worse every time we do. We become like hamsters trapped in a wheel of emotional pain, running endlessly but going nowhere.
What makes rumination a form of psychological injury is that it provides no new understandings that could heal our wounds and instead serves only to pick at our scabs and infect them anew.
Specifically, rumination increases our likelihood of becoming depressed and prolongs the duration of depressive episodes when we have them; it is associated with greater risk of alcohol abuse and eating disorders, it fosters negative thinking and impaired problem solving, and it increases our psychological and physiological stress responses and puts us at greater risk for cardiovascular disease.
But when we have ruminative tendencies, revisiting the same feelings and problems over and over again, even with a therapist, only increases our drive to ruminate and makes matters worse.
Ruminating on our problems and feelings scratches at our emotional scabs and causes four primary psychological wounds: it intensifies our sadness and allows it to persist for far longer than it might have otherwise; likewise, it intensifies and prolongs our anger; it hogs substantial amounts of emotional and intellectual resources, inhibiting motivation, initiative, and our ability to focus and think productively; and our need to discuss the same events or feelings repeatedly for weeks, months, and sometimes years on end taxes the patience and compassion of our social support systems and puts our relationships at risk.
Rumination causes us to stew in our negative feelings until we become so consumed with them that we begin to see our entire lives, histories, and futures more bleakly. Our negative outlook then causes us to view our problems as less manageable, to come up with fewer solutions to them, and to avoid implementing the solutions we do find.
Intense ruminations can often make us so focused on our own emotional needs that we become blind to those of the people around us and our relationships often suffer as a result.
In order to break the self-reinforcing nature of ruminative thoughts and allow our wounds to heal we must interrupt the cycle of rumination once it gets triggered, and we should weaken the urge to ruminate at the source by diminishing the intensity of the feelings that fuel it. We must also make efforts to monitor our relationships and to ease the emotional burden we might be placing on our loved ones.
Treatment A (changing perspective) is focused on reducing the intensity of the urge that compels us to ruminate, and Treatment B (distraction from emotional pain) is focused on reducing the frequency of ruminative thoughts (which is easier to do once the urge to ruminate is less intense). Treatment C (reframing anger) targets the anger and aggressive impulses ruminations can evoke, and Treatment D (managing friendships) is useful for monitoring our relationships with those who provide emotional support.
Treatment A: Change Your Perspective
When scientists began investigating the mechanics of how we self-reflect on painful feelings and experiences in an effort to understand what distinguishes adaptive from maladaptive forms of self-reflection, one factor emerged as hugely significant—the visual perspective we use when going over painful experiences in our minds.
But when the researchers asked people to analyze a painful experience from a self-distanced perspective (a third-person perspective) and actually see themselves within the scene from the point of view of an outside observer, they found something quite remarkable. Instead of merely recounting the events and how they felt about them at the time, people tended to reconstruct their understanding of their experience and to reinterpret it in ways that promoted new insights and feelings of closure. This result was amplified even further when they suggested people employ a self-distanced perspective while reflecting not on how things happened but on why they happened. In numerous studies, subjects who were asked to analyze painful experiences this way experienced significantly less emotional pain than those using self-immersive perspectives. In addition, their blood pressure was less reactive (it rose less and it returned to normal baseline more quickly), indicating that using self-distanced perspectives lowers our stress responses and causes less activation of our cardiovascular systems. These findings held true for both depressive and anger ruminations.
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 (like 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
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.
Dozens of studies have demonstrated that distracting ourselves by engaging in tasks we find absorbing or ones that demand our concentration, such as moderate to intense cardiovascular activity, socializing, doing puzzles, or playing computer games, will disrupt a ruminative thought process. Distraction has also been found to restore the quality of our thinking and of our problem-solving abilities because once we cease ruminating, we recover our ability to apply our intellectual skills effectively rather quickly. While socializing or going to the movies can take our mind off our ruminations, it is not always practical to engage in such time-consuming activities. However, brief and less labor-intensive distractions can also be effective in cutting off ruminative thoughts.
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 (like a game of Sudoku or supermarket layouts) and longer ones (like a cardiovascular workout or catching a movie).
Treatment C: Reframe the Anger
Venting our anger by assaulting benign objects only serves to reinforce our aggressive urges in response to anger.
So how should we manage our anger? 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. Reframing requires us to switch our perspective and to perceive the situation in ways that change its meaning and, consequently, how we feel about it.
Although your ruminations are unique to your specific circumstance, certain themes and principles are common to many reframing situations. Use the following four suggestions to help identify ways to reframe your situation so that it elicits less anger (or sadness).
Find the positive intention.
Identify the opportunities.
Embrace the learning moment.
View the offending person as needing spiritual help. They deserve not our anger but our prayers.
Treatment D: Go Easy on Your Friends
How much time has passed since the event in question?
How many times have you discussed these issues with this person?
Does this person feel comfortable bringing up his or her own issues and problems?
What percentage of your communications with this person is dominated by the subject of your ruminations?
(How Emotional Chest Colds Become Psychological Pneumonias)
Failure inflicts three specific psychological wounds that require emotional first aid. It damages our self-esteem by inducing us to draw conclusions about our skills, abilities, and capacities that are highly inaccurate and distorted. It saps our confidence, motivation, and optimism, making us feel helpless and trapped. And it can trigger unconscious stresses and fears that lead us to inadvertently sabotage our future efforts.
Further, when a failure is especially significant or meaningful to us (which it often is), leaving it untreated puts us at risk for developing psychological complications such as shame, crippling helplessness, and even clinical depression.
Failure not only makes our goal loom larger, it makes us feel “smaller” as well. Failing can induce us to feel less intelligent, less attractive, less capable, less skillful, and less competent—all of which have a hugely negative impact on our confidence and on the outcome of our future efforts.
If our six-year-old failed a spelling test in school and announced, “I’m a stupid loser who can’t do anything right,” most of us would swoop in, refute every word, and forbid him to say such terrible things about himself ever again. We would have no doubt that such negative thoughts would only make him feel worse in the moment and make it harder for him to succeed in the future. Yet we frequently fail to apply the very same logic and wisdom to our own situations.
Criticizing our attributes so globally makes us hypersensitive to future failures, it can lead to deep feelings of shame, and it can threaten our entire well-being. Further, doing so prevents us from accurately assessing the causes of our failure so we can avoid similar miscalculations in the future. For example, if we blame our inability to attain personal improvement goals on our character shortcomings we are unlikely to identify and correct crucial errors in planning and strategic goal setting that are far more likely to be responsible for our failure.
Every New Year we list our resolutions with hopes of improving our lives and feeling better about ourselves, only to abandon our efforts entirely by February (and often by January 2). As a result, instead of our self-esteem being strengthened by our accomplishments, we’re left feeling weakened by failure and disappointment, which we quickly attribute to a lack of motivation or ability. We tell ourselves, “I guess I don’t want to change,” or “I’m just too lazy to do anything about my life,” and feel even worse about ourselves than we did on December 31st. What makes such conclusions unfortunate as well as inaccurate is that the primary reason we complete so few of our resolutions is because we neglect to think through how we plan to achieve them. Without a carefully crafted plan in place our resolutions are unlikely to make it out of the starting gate no matter how motivated or capable we are.
Another common New Year resolution error is goal bingeing. Having multiple goals would be less of a problem if we took the time to prioritize them according to which were most urgent or most attainable given the circumstances of our lives at the time. We also neglect to break down long-term goals into smaller and more realistic subgoals. Without doing so, many of our goals can appear daunting and overwhelming. Last, we rarely take the time to develop action plans for dealing with the obstacles, hurdles, and setbacks that might arise along the way and then we’re ill-equipped to deal with them when they do.
Failure can be very persuasive. Failure can also be very misleading.
Failing to win a national lottery rarely sends people into a depression.
The prospect of failing can be so intimidating that we make unconscious efforts to lower expectations for our success. While lowering expectations might seem like a reasonable approach, the way we go about doing so can result in our unwittingly sabotaging ourselves and bringing about the very outcome we fear.
Studies show that parents who suffer from fear of failure often transmit such fears to their children. Children pick up on their parents’ withdrawal, which triggers their own feelings of shame and teaches them that failures should be both feared and avoided.
Choking tends to happen because the stress we feel in high-pressure situations makes us overthink tasks and draw attention away from the part of our brain that executes the task automatically or fluidly.
Treatment A: Get Support and Get Real
Research has repeatedly demonstrated the most effective way to treat the psychological wounds failure inflicts is to find the positive lessons in what happened. Further, providing social and emotional support alone often makes people who experienced a failure feel worse.
Receiving concern and emotional support when we’re still reeling from a failure can actually validate our (mis)perceptions about the deficits and shortcomings in our character and abilities.
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.
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.
In what ways might your failure make you stronger?
Some failures are also successes. No matter how disappointed we feel, we should always acknowledge the ways in which we were successful even if we ultimately failed. In what ways could you view your failure as a success?
Failure makes future success more meaningful. Studies show that the harder we work, the more failures and challenges we overcome, the greater the meaning, joy, and satisfaction we derive when we eventually succeed. How much more will success mean to you now that you’ve encountered failure?
Success is not always necessary. In most situations, making steady progress toward our goals contributes more toward our sustained happiness and self-fulfillment than actually reaching them. The satisfaction, excitement, sense of pride, and personal accomplishment we feel by inching ever closer to our target combine to create a heady mix of satisfaction and joy that does wonders for our mood, motivation, and psychological well-being.
Treatment B: Focus on Factors in Your Control
Scientists taught the seniors to attribute their sedentary lifestyle not to age but to factors that were entirely in their control, such as how much walking they tended to do on a daily basis. One month later, this simple intervention led to the seniors increasing their walking by two and a half miles a week (which is hugely significant) and they reported equal improvements in their stamina and mental health.
The best way to regain a sense of control over the circumstances that led to our failure is to reexamine both our preparation (our goal planning) and our performance (how we executed our efforts) so we can identify elements that we perceived as being out of our control that could be in our control if we approached or perceived them differently.
Define your goal in as realistic and specific terms as possible.
Try to define intermediate milestones that provide a challenge but aren’t too daunting. It is best to get some successes under our belt, so we should ramp up slowly by starting with easier challenges that become (incrementally) harder. When defining our subgoals it is important to focus on variables within our control (e.g., our performance) rather than those outside our control (e.g., a specific outcome). For example, weight loss or fitness goals should focus on what we eat or how much exercise we get (as those are within our control) and not on how much weight we lose (as we cannot force our bodies to lose weight at a predetermined rate).
Set time frames for the overall and intermediate goals. Keep in mind: It is best to go through the intermediate goals on your list and indicate two time frames for each, a starting date/hour and a completion date/hour. Objective deadlines might make it necessary to create a time frame for our larger goal first and then assign time frames to each of the intermediate goals accordingly (such as when we’re training for a marathon or creating a portfolio for an upcoming job or school interview), but when possible we should set time frames for intermediate goals first, as doing so allows for more realistic and attainable schedules. Much as we did when forming our intermediate goals, making the time frames moderately challenging is the best way to maintain our interest, effort, and motivation.
List any potential detours, setbacks, or temptations that might arise.
For example, if our goal is to minimize our drinking and adopt moderation we might anticipate the need to strategize what to do during holiday parties at work but we should also consider what to do if we’re asked to attend a last-minute business dinner with clients who are wine lovers.
List the possible solutions for each of the above detours, setbacks, or temptations, including what you can do to avoid them and how you plan to implement these solutions.
Treatment C: Take Responsibility and Own the Fear
Treatment D: Distract Yourself from Performance Pressure Distractions
When stress and anxiety threaten to steal our attention we need to steal it right back.
Studies have demonstrated that whistling can prevent us from overthinking the kinds of automatic tasks we’ve done many times before and then choking as a result. The reason this works is that once we’re focused on the task at hand, whistling requires just enough additional attention to leave none left over for overthinking.
Even if we don’t realize it, anxiety can cause shallow breathing that limits the oxygen we take in and increases our sense of panic. To restore normal breathing and lower your panic you should put down your pen, look away from the exam, and focus on your breathing for one minute as you inhale and exhale to a count of three.
As you count, notice how the air feels filling your lungs and how it feels as you exhale. Roughly a minute should be sufficient to stabilize your breathing and take the edge off your anxiety.
Next, we need to redirect our attention back to the task at hand and we need to prevent our mind from worrying about how well or poorly we’re doing and the implications thereof. The best way to keep our focus on the specific steps required to answer the questions is by reasoning through them aloud. By vocalizing the questions and reasoning aloud, we use just enough attentional resources to deprive the part of our brain that wants to focus on worrying.
The best medicine in such situations is to neutralize such worries by affirming our self-worth.
If you feel you might be susceptible to such worries, take time before the exam to write a brief essay about an aspect of your character you value highly and about which you feel confident and proud. Doing so is a good investment, as it requires little time and it can make you more resilient to any irrelevant worries and anxieties a previous failure might trigger.
(Weak Emotional Immune Systems)
Studies indicate that today most of us are of two minds when it comes to our self-esteem: we feel inadequate as individuals on one hand, yet believe we’re better than “average” on the other.
How we feel about ourselves in the specific domains we consider personally meaningful or important has a big impact on our general self-worth.
Low self-esteem can inflict three types of psychological wounds: It makes us more vulnerable to many of the emotional and psychological injuries we sustain in daily life, it makes us less able to absorb positive feedback and other “emotional nutrients” when they come our way, and it makes us feel insecure, ineffective, unconfident, and disempowered.
Straightforward observations of stress hormones such as cortisol have demonstrated that people with low self-esteem generally respond to stress more poorly and maintain higher levels of cortisol in their blood than people with high self-esteem do. High cortisol levels are associated with high blood pressure, poor immune system functioning, suppressed thyroid gland function, reduced muscle and bone density, and poor cognitive performance.
Stress can substantially weaken our willpower and self-control and make us revert to automatic and old habits without even realizing it. For example, a stressful day might make a dieter leave the supermarket and drive all the way home before snapping out of his daze and realizing that instead of a salad he’d just purchased a large bucket of fried chicken.
When our self-esteem is low, we are far less likely to attribute slips in willpower to mental and emotional fatigue (which are the more likely culprits) and far more likely to assume they reflect fundamental character deficits.
Although people with high self-esteem jumped on the chance to have a laugh, people with low self-esteem agreed that watching the video would improve their mood, but they declined to do so nonetheless.
Why do positive affirmations leave so many of their users feeling worse about themselves rather than better? The answer requires a brief detour into the science of persuasion. Persuasion studies have long established that messages that fall within the boundaries of our established beliefs are persuasive to us, while those that differ too substantially from our beliefs are usually rejected altogether. If we believe we’re unattractive, we’re much more likely to accept a compliment like “You look very nice today” than “Why, your beauty is breathtaking!” Since positive affirmations are supposed to change how we feel about ourselves, whether they fall inside or outside the boundaries of our own self-concept is crucial to their effectiveness. When people with low self-esteem are exposed to positive affirmations that differ too widely from their existing self-beliefs, the affirmation is perceived as untrue and rejected in its entirety and it actually strengthens their belief that the opposite is true.
Most of us only put in as much effort as a situation requires from us. If we can “get away” with being less considerate or less reciprocal, and various other forms of “getting without giving,” many of us will, not because we’re evil, but simply because we can. If people demanded or expected more of us we would do more, but when they don’t, we don’t make the effort. This dynamic is true in practically every relationship we have. When our self-esteem is low and we expect very little of others, we are likely to get very little from them as well.
Treatment A: Adopt Self-Compassion and Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head
Imagine witnessing an emotionally abusive parent berating her child for getting a poor report card. The parent verbally attacks the child, mocks him, and mercilessly belittles him without displaying a whit of empathy, support, or compassion. Meanwhile, the child’s face registers utter devastation as he absorbs one emotional blow after another. Most of us would find such a scene extremely distressing to witness (especially those of us who grew up with such parents) and we would immediately vow never to treat our own children in such an abusive, cruel, and destructive manner. And yet when our self-esteem is low, that is exactly how we treat ourselves. We blame ourselves for our mistakes, failures, rejections, and frustrations in the most harsh and self-punitive terms. We call ourselves “losers” and “idiots,” we give ourselves stern “lectures,” and we replay the scenes in our mind while ruminating on our inadequacies and deficiencies. In other words, we treat ourselves even worse than an emotionally abusive parent would.
Purging the emotionally abusive voices in our heads and adopting kinder, more supportive ones instead is an absolute imperative.
Complete the following writing exercise three times, each time describing an event from your past (if possible, include at least one from your recent past). Try to write about one event each day so that you complete the exercise over three consecutive days.
We’ve all experienced failures, embarrassments, humiliations, or rejections that made us feel self-critical and badly about ourselves. Choose one such event and detail what actually happened and how you felt about it.
Imagine that the event happened to a dear friend or close family member who then felt terrible about herself (or himself) because of it. Describe that person’s experience of the event, how she would react and feel in the very same situation.
You hate seeing this person in emotional pain and you decide to write her a letter with the explicit purpose of making her feel better 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.
Treatment B: Identify Your Strengths and Affirm Them
A much more effective way to use affirmations is to use self-affirmations that identify and affirm valuable and important aspects of ourselves we already know to be true, such as our trustworthiness, loyalty, or work ethic (in contrast to positive affirmations, which affirm qualities we would like to possess but don’t believe we do). Reminding ourselves that we have significant worth regardless of any shortcomings we perceive in ourselves provides an immediate boost to our self-esteem and renders us less vulnerable to experiences of rejection or failure.
On the first sheet of paper, make a list of your important attributes and qualities, including any achievements you have that are significant or meaningful to you. Aim for at least ten items and preferably many more. If while brainstorming items for your list you think of responses that are negative, write them down on the second sheet of paper.
Choose one item from the first sheet of paper that is especially meaningful to you and write a brief essay (at least one paragraph) about why this specific attribute, achievement, or experience is meaningful to you and what role you hope it will play in your life.
Once you’ve completed the essay, take the second sheet of paper, crumple it into a ball, and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.
On subsequent days, choose other items from your positive attribute list and write about them, preferably each day, until you’ve completed the list. Feel free to add to your list at any time or to write about specific items several times.
Treatment C: Increase Your Tolerance for Compliments
Several studies that used subjects of all ages have demonstrated that by affirming aspects of our selves that are related to our worth as relationship partners, we can bolster our “relationship self-esteem.” Doing so renders any compliments we receive from our partners less discrepant from our current self-views and makes us less likely to reject or rebuff them.
Think back to a time your partner, family member, or friend conveyed that he or she appreciated, liked, or enjoyed something about you, such as a personal quality you have or something you did that the person felt strongly about. Describe the incident and explain what made the person feel positively about you when it occurred.
What benefits does having the attribute or behavior bring to your relationships and friendships?
What other significant or meaningful functions or roles can the attribute or behavior contribute to your life?
Treatment D: Increase Your Personal Empowerment
To have an impact on our self-esteem, feelings of personal empowerment must be supported by evidence of having actual influence in the various spheres of our lives, whether in our relationships, in our social or professional contexts, as citizens, or even as consumers.
Think about aspects of your life that tend to make you feel frustrated. Try to include situations in your community life, work life, family and personal life, social life, and life as a consumer. Describe at least three examples for each of these domains.
Rank your items according to which of them have both a high likelihood of success and manageable consequences in case of failure.
The final list represents your master plan for practicing assertive actions and attaining personal empowerment. Now that you’ve identified and prioritized your goals, it’s time to consider any additional information or specific skill sets that can help you execute them successfully and to plan your strategy accordingly.
Treatment E: Improve Your Self-Control
Although many of us assume willpower is a stable character trait or ability (i.e., we either have strong willpower or we do not), self-control actually functions more like a muscle. As such, learning how this muscle functions will allow us to use it wisely, strengthen it, and build our self-esteem as a result. The most important thing to keep in mind about our self-control muscles is that they are subject to fatigue.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of our willpower and use it to build our self-esteem we need to do three things: strengthen our basic willpower muscles, manage the energy reservoirs that fuel our self-control so they don’t get depleted, and minimize the impact of the many temptations that exist around us.
The downside of our willpower being a general muscle is that exerting willpower in one area will cause fatigue and make it harder to exert willpower in another. But this “limitation” has an upside. Exercising our willpower by practicing acts of self-control in insignificant areas will increase the strength and endurance of our willpower muscles in more meaningful and important areas as well.
One of the most essential fuels our willpower muscles require (as do many of our other muscles, both cognitive and physical) is glucose (sugars). Scientists have known for a while that when our glucose levels are low, effortful mental processes such as asserting willpower and self-control are impaired (automatic and non-effortful processes such as washing the dishes are not). In one study, people were put through effortful mental exercises to deplete their brain of glucose levels and then given a glass of lemonade. Half of them received lemonade sweetened with sugar and half got lemonade with an artificial sweetener (which tastes similar but has no glucose). After fifteen minutes (the time necessary for the drink to get absorbed into their systems) subjects who were given lemonade with real sugar recovered from their mental fatigue and were able to display significantly greater willpower than those who drank lemonade with artificial sweetener.
While we can’t lower the volume on our cravings and urgings in such situations, we can turn up the volume on our risk assessment.
Viewing slips as simple alerts that our willpower is fatigued and needs to recover (instead of as indications of failure) will allow us to acknowledge the lapse without getting further off track.
Our habits always have triggers, such as lighting up a cigarette when we have a beer, doing recreational drugs when we hang out with certain friends, or biting our fingernails when we sit on the couch to watch television. If we wish to change the habits, we have to avoid the triggers.
Mindfulness involves a form of mediation in which we observe our feelings without judging them, in essence becoming anthropologists in our own minds. We act like outside observers, noting the strength of our emotions and the sensations they create in our bodies but without dwelling on them or their implications.
Focusing on our breathing, visualizing the seismographic readout, and noting the sensations in our bodies can help us ride out the “quake” and resist acting on our cravings, urges, and impulses until they pass.
The treatments in this book (all of which are based on current research by experts in the field) represent a psychological medicine cabinet starter kit, a set of emotional balms, ointments, bandages, and painkillers that we can apply to emotional and psychological injuries when we first sustain them.
However, being a good self-practitioner means developing our own individualized set of mental-health-hygiene guidelines and you should endeavor to personalize your medicine cabinet whenever possible.
Anyone who wishes to lead an emotionally healthier and happier life need only open his or her psychological medicine cabinet and reach for the treatments within.