Emotional First Aid

Article by Deborah Ward, Psychotherapist
August 2009

A reality in life is that painful, embarrassing and massively unfair things happen. I do not like them as much as anyone else. They hurt and enrage me like they do you. When these things happen in life, people have a natural desire to minimise the pain. There are many strategies to try to accomplish this: some provide healing; others may give temporary relief but cause more problems further down the line; and a few others are positively unhelpful or destructive.

When these events happen, what do you do?

1. Sigh deeply and think to yourself 'what else could I expect from life?'
2. Go over what happened again and again in your head.
3. Work out who is to blame and make sure they know about it.
4. Gossip or turn people against others.
5. Withdraw your feelings and refuse to be affected by it.
6. Devise elaborate scripts about how you are actually better or superior than those idiots/fools/etc, etc.
7. Draw up the duvet.
8. Mock others or become cynical.
9. Seek comfort from substances.
10. Devise strategies to cover every conceivable contingency.
11. Hate or blame yourself.
12. Wallow in a mood.

These are some of the defences people employ. We all do these types of things at times. Depending upon our take on life, we do some more than others. That is just how we are and if you want to wallow, retreat, replay, steam, mock or whatever, go ahead and do that. It's ok. I've known respected adults who felt so low they have warmed up milk, put it in a baby's bottle and taken it to bed. That's fine too. Feel what you feel. Just don't act destructively. That never helps. And when you are tired of your usual script, come back here and we can try something new.

Still with me or back again? Tremendous. Time to apply a bit of Emotional First-Aid.

1. Let Go - The first step is to let go of the scripts that are driving your defences. But it is not so easy to let go without something new to focus on.
    
2. Innocence - What I am about to ask you to contemplate may sound a little odd at first. Bear with me. I would like you to ponder on what you understand to be Innocence and what it means.
    
3. While you think about the notion of Innocence, observe your feelings and resistances. You might experience all sorts of uncomfortable feelings. Just let them be and don't judge them. Observe them. There is much to learn about how you filter your experience of being in the world.
    
4. Be Innocent with your innocence - Innocence is being entirely honest with your emotions. It is the core of who you are before you started employing acrobatics to make the world look less painful.
    
5. Dare to See - Dare to see reality as it is, not how you have manipulated it. While you are busy with your acrobatics to twist yourself into a space that you believe might hurt less, you are giving the source of pain enormous power. You are also devoting a lot of energy to keep yourself in this awkward position. Stay here long enough and you will start to believe this is natural. It isn't. It is a delusion.
    
6. Face the Self As It Is - Take that cotton wool coating off. If it worked, you wouldn't be here looking for answers. Emotions have a message. If you are brave enough to listen to the message; really listen, then their work is done and they can move along. Your true emotions have valuable things to teach you. Embrace them.
   
   If you ignore them with your particular brand of posturing, emotions can do a variety of things. But one thing they will never do is reach healthy resolution. They remain stuck in your system like undigested food.
   
   When ignored emotions fuse with active emotions, they can become increasingly urgent and cause things like:
    
   • unwanted, persistent thoughts / mental noise
   • anxiety attacks
   • guilt and/or shame
   • accelerated addictive or extreme behaviour
   • magnified feelings and sensations
   • sense of unbearable need
   • compulsive behaviour
    
   When emotions are put into the deep freeze, other symptoms can arise including:
    
   • depression
   • isolation, making relationships difficult
   • cynicism
   • anger or hostility issues
   • phobias
   • passive aggression
   • profound sense of despair
    
   
7. Befriend your feelings, even the difficult ones. They have a message. If you failed a test, not opening the envelope with the results will not change the results. Face up to the failed test. Then you can do something productive about it.
 

8. Face the self as it is. Don't be so scared. If you were embarrassed or humiliated, then feel the humiliation and learn something from it.
   
   If something cherished has ended, experience that grief. Grief is a hallmark of having had a great gift in one's life. Accepting the grief allows you the appreciation of what was and move forward more positively.
   
   If something has been unfair, ask yourself how many times 'unfair' has worked in your favour, when you have had the break, the skill, the advantage? It is interesting how rarely I hear people cry 'unfair' when they ended up ahead.
 

9. Reach out to others. When you approach others, having taken responsibility for your true emotions, it touches others and deepens the relationship.
 

10. Practice Kindness - Sometimes it is easier to be generous with others than it is to be generous with ourselves. If you are not quite ready to let yourself off the pain hook, try lending some kindness or compassion to others. It will leave its residue with you.
 

11. And if all this is just too complicated right now, watch some comedy, talk to a friend who can listen without advising you or go do or make something.

If things are more serious and you are considering harming yourself or others, you should seek help straightaway. If you are thinking this way, you are not thinking clearly and this is not the space from which to make critical decisions.

And finally, the Buddhist teacher, Ram Dass, reflected on his many decades of self-development, noting that he still had the same neuroses. We don’t lose our edges, we just learn to manage them better — in ways that are less self-destructive and less harmful to others. “We are human beings who take form though an impetus to joy, interest, and concern.”

© 2009. The above content is legally registered copyright of Deborah Ward. If anyone would like to republish the above article, please email me your request, where it will reside and your assurance of a link back to this website, and I'll send you a short bio you can use with it for your site.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be used in place of professional diagnosis and treatment.