Transcript for:
Emotional First Aid Strategies

I'm Marie Bernard host of synchronicity talk radio for your mind body and soul join me Mondays at noon as we explore the universal energy that connects us all let's discuss our journey of self-discovery Joy presence and living with authenticity we can create positive change in the world and it starts within each one of us synchronicity talk radio for your mind body and soul Mondays at noon on CIT 101.9 FM Vancouver hello and happy New Year welcome to synchronicity talk radio for your mind body and soul I'm your host Marie Bernard thanks for being with me today and I'm really I say this every week I'm really excited about today's guest but I am I read some of his articles on psychology today and I just had to get in touch with him so today we're speaking with Dr Guy winch he is a licensed psychologist keynote and tedex speaker an author whose books have been translated into 15 languages today we're going to be talking about his book emotional first aid healing rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts he's also the author of The Squeaky will complaining the right way to get results improve your relationships and enhance your self-esteem so welcome to the show guy thank you so much for having me thanks for being with us today so I've read your book and I have to say the more I work on myself the more I have to work on myself it's getting a little frustrating um your book is tell us about who this book is for please really I wrote the book for everyone uh I wrote the book because it it it struck me that when when somebody gets a a cut or a cold or a sprain in a muscle they know exactly what to do how to evaluate how serious it is they have a medicine cabinet of ointments and pills and different things that they can use to feel better and we sustain psychological and emotional injuries in life just as often if not more often than we do physical ones you know injuries like when we experience failure or rejection or the pain of loneliness or guilt and yet when those things happen we don't have a clue about what to do we don't have a medicine cabinet we're not even aware we're injured we don't evaluate how we're doing and what way in what way it might be impacting our lives and our thinking and our Behavior so it struck me that we really need that kind of medicine cabinet for psychological injuries and that there was really sufficient science that this point to be able to compose one and that's what I wrote the book to serve as awesome so it seems like the best way to use this book is to read it cover to cover and then keep it around in your psychological medicine cabinet for reference absolutely okay and we'll talk about uh so some of the topics that you cover are rejection loneliness loss guilt rumination failure and low self-esteem and I really like how the book is laid out and one of the things that um one of the really valuable things is that you talk about what that is like we'll talk about rumination as an example and then you talk about what it does to us if we keep doing it and then you break down how to deal with that how to do the emotional first aid and then in the LA the final part of every chapter you talk about what signs might let you know that you need more help and need to see a professional absolutely because you know it struck me that you know we we're very educated in terms of our physical beings at this point in other words you don't need to explain to most people that if you don't you know take care of a cut it can become infected or what an infection even is but when it comes to the psychology of things and how our brain works we actually don't know very very basic things and by we I mean you know most people so psychologists who like me who have went to University for many many years and got an advanced degrees might but most people don't and so it was important for me to be able to Define uh what it is we're talking about how it manifests what it what it looks like what it feels like and I try to bring in a lot of stories from my private practice and from life to kind of really illustrate the ways in which these seemingly small things can play out and sometimes very big uh ways all right well I wanted to talk about the book kind of in order but last night I was finishing up the book and rumination is near the end but I'm realizing reading your book that I I I know I'm a ruminator but I think I ruminate more than I realized and because of of what you pointed out of of the impacts of rumination now I'm ruminating about how much I ruminate so can we can we go know what to be able to do to stop doing that well maybe you can give us some some tips on on how to deal with rumination and and maybe even people who are listening might not even know exactly what that means well rumination is like rooing what it really means is that when something upsetting happens you know your boss yells at you in a meeting or you know you have a big fight with a friend or or or or with a significant other or family member and you just keep replaying that scene in your head over and over again and there's and what I say when I talk about rumination is that there's you know reflecting on our experiences is a natural thing it's a good thing but there are two kinds of self-reflection there's a adaptive kind in which we're really trying to reflect in order to better understand in order to uh gain lessons from it to decide on action to see things from a different perspective we're really problem solving when we're doing all of those things and that's an Adaptive form of of uh you know self-reflection if you will and if you're doing that all is well but we sometimes get stuck and when we get stuck all we're really doing is rep playing the scene over and over again in a loop we keep just replaying that scene of our boss yelling at us and how embarrassing it was or how upsetting it was or we keep replaying the breakup talk that we had and we're just going back to it over and over and over again and when we're stuck in this way and we're just replaying things it's actually not an innocent thing it turns out it's a very harmful thing because when we use adaptive self-reflection when we're trying to problem solve there's a big emotional release that comes after that when we figured out that the boss yelled at us in the meeting cuz we actually contradicted the boss a sentence or two earlier and that annoyed the boss and so lesson learned don't contradict the boss in public then the boss won't embarrass you in public once we figured that out and had that aha moment then we can kind of Let It Go but when we're just replaying we're not letting anything go we're just stirring ourselves up over and over again and the research tells us that by doing that we're actually getting almost as upset if not as upset and sometimes more upset than we were when the original incident occurred so we're really you know I call that chapter picking at emotional scabs because that's what we're doing we're really not letting an emotional injury heal we're making it worse we're keep it we're keeping it bleeding and we're flooding our body with stress hormones each time we Replay that scene and it can become very addictive so that it just keeps popping into our minds and we indulge it so therefore this kind of brooding this kind of rumination is not an innocent thing or it's a very very common thing but it's really something we need to attend to as a very unhealthy psychologically speaking habit and so it it sounds like just with all of the issues that you cover in your book The key is if possible to catch it as early as you can before it really starts to start building neural Pathways in your brain and all that absolutely you know I had coincidentally I had a friend that I met yesterday and she was telling me that she had to run to the doctor because she had this pain in her toe and it became so bad and it swo and it swelled up so badly that you realized something was very wrong and I said what you but what was there she goes well it was a cut but I didn't realize it was getting that bad I'm like but you didn't realize that there was an infection kind of happening and that you have to like treat these things quickly and most people do realize most people if they have a cut and it starts to hurt won't just let it go until their foot swells up you know um and and so it's the same thing with psychological injuries the earlier we catch them the better we can address them and and not only that the more we address them the more emotional resilience we can build as a result because we'll feel more confident and more able to deal with these kinds of situations when they arise again and they will arise all the time thank you well it's interesting um I actually wanted to ask you speaking of rumination what is the difference between rumination and worry or are they the same um ruminating usually refers to events in the past you're usually ruminating about things that happened and worry usually refers to worrying about things that have yet to happen so that's the distinction is you're looking back in rumination you're looking forward in worry thank you for that Dr winch and I'm curious also you mentioned rumination is typically like you go over one event and in your mind now the way that I tend to ruminate it makes it you you provided a a wonderful exercise on visualization and and changing your perspective of the situation but for me what I tend to do is it won't just be one event as an example in a relationship I'll go through and add up every thing that creeped me out or everything that got my back up and I'll put so it could be uh six months of of events or five years of events that I'll have in my mind did you have any tips for someone who does that kind of ruminating yes I think it's fair to kind of ask yourself when you find yourself really doing that kind of deep exploration and obviously you're not sitting and doing that in 5 hours straight but over time but it's fair to ask yourself what am I really what's the question I'm really asking here what am I really trying to figure out in other words if you can identify what you're really trying to figure out then it can help you now say you're trying to figure out should I stay in this relationship or does this relationship make me happy even by Framing your thinking in that way I'm trying to figure out if I should stay in this relationship it will send your thinking in a different direction than just allowing your mind to freely wander into all the upsetting incidents that happened Without Really framing that as should I really stay in this relationship or do I really need to address this issue by by by putting a a a headline on what you're trying to do or a goal that you're trying to achieve um by doing all this thinking it will actually send your mind in a more productive path down a more productive path than if you just just let your mind wander idly thank you that's very helpful and I noticed you said the the goal okay should I stay in this relationship and for me I would be thinking the opposite I need to figure out if I need to leave this relationship um kind of the same question to my mind in other words should I stay or should I leave is the issue but you know does the relationship make me happy and I think with relationship since we're on that topic I think there're always because I you know a lot of my practic is couple therapy and what I say to couple a lot of the time is look there there there are two questions here number one how what's the best I can make this relationship what can I do to process with the other person the things that aren't working to try and make them better what's the best I can make it and then I can evaluate whether it's good enough but if you've been in it for a while it's worth trying to figure out can I improve the things that need Improvement can I get my partner to work with me to um to make better the things that that need Improvement or to you know to to to communicate better to to to really try and see what's the best we can make it and then you're in a much better position to evaluate whether it's uh workable for you or not thank you so much for that well right now we are speaking with guy winch he has a PHD in Clinical Psychology from NYU and we're speaking about his book emotional first aid healing rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts and we'll be back with more synchronicity in just a moment if you'd like more information about today's guests you can go to his website guy win.com gu y wi nch.com and you recently did a Ted X talk it's up on your website can you tell us what that was about yes the the tedex talk was called how to practice emotional hygiene um and and really that was about um uh I I spoke on that talk I I made the talk kind of personal and I used examples from my own life and primarily uh about my relationship with my brother I have an identical twin um and uh I I use examples from that relationship to illustrate some of the in in a way some of the psychological wounds I sustained uh myself in life and how you know at certain points I was blind to them and how I really needed to uh to to focus on improving uh my own emotional hygiene you know that I I say in the talk we 100 years ago we started practicing personal hygiene we started washing our hands and doing very very simple things and and it had a remarkable result life expectancy Rose by um by 50% in just a matter of uh decades and I think we're at the same place right now with emotional or psychological hygiene except it won't be life expectancy that can rise it will be our quality of life because there are so many ways in which we do we we have these Habits Like rumination that we just discussed which actually make us feel worse and distress us and upset us and impact our quality of life and there are so many ways in which we could actually make things better and make ourselves happier and more fulfilled except we're unaware of them we don't know we need to quote unquote wash our hands psychologically speaking but if more people knew about it if more people started practicing it then I think there could be a real significant change worldwide in people's happiness in their mental health in how we treat one another in all kinds of ways so I I think we're at that threshold the same way we were 100 years ago with personal hygiene and learning about you know handwashing and and certain things that can keep us healthy I think we're at the threshold in terms of our psychology and our minds and it would be great to cross that threshold absolutely and I I mean you you say that it would only be our quality of life but I think our our life expectancy would increase too because all throughout the book you talk about not only the the impacts on our relationships and our happiness but the physiological impact of ruminating loneliness all of those things absolutely I mean that's a very interesting thing that I found when I was doing research for the book um time and time again I found that things like rumination things like loneliness things like self-esteem have a really direct and immediate impact on our physical well-being um you know and just to speak about loneliness as an example when people start to feel lonely it immediately the minute they start to feel it it immediately suppresses the functioning of their immune system um immediately and there was one study done on College freshmen when they came in the the health services gave them flu shots and gave them a questionnaire you know and and asked them as part of the questionnaire do you do you feel lonely and they found that students were reported feeling lonely and these are incoming freshman they just left home so it's likely they would but students who felt lonely had a significantly worse reaction to the flu shots their immune system didn't handle it as well because their immune system were was suppressed and they had just been at College a number of days or weeks it was very very early on and so there are certain things you know uh we know rumination for example because people who habitually ruminate are constantly flooding their their systems uh with with stress hormones because when you start thinking about upsetting things um you know and by the way let me just say this is an interesting difference between our physical and our psychological sense if you ever broke a limb and you let's say you broke a leg and you think back to the time you broke your leg one thing I guarantee will not happen is your leg will not start to hurt from the memory but if you think back to a time that somebody broke your heart you will start to feel hurt and rejected and so psychologically we can evoke so much of our past wounds just by thinking um you know about them and when we do that we are creating stress in our systems and and and we're flooding our system with cortisol stress hormone and so people that say you have a tendency to ruminate and do that habitually are at significantly higher risk for developing cardiovascular disease because of that tendency than people who don't have a tendency to ruminate so yes there's a huge link between the psychological and the physical and improving our psychological will not just improve our quality of life as you said it will actually improve our Health and Longevity thank you for that Dr winch and it's interesting because you you talk about how loneliness is contagious yes there was an interesting study done and actually there a lot of studies done about loneliness because um you know it's one of those ignored forgotten marginalized things you know we all know about it we all know people who felt that way and many of us have felt that way I think 40 50% of us will feel that in our lifetime in a certain in certain moments and in that tedex talk I spoke about when I was a time where I was feeling extremely lonely and how it impacted me um but but but one of the things so one of the research projects were was done on a on a social network of people and what they did is they tracked people over 6 months and they tracked the lonely people and they looked at how significant and and and and connected they were within their social networks and they found that over time not only uh the stigmatism of loneliness pushed lonely people to the margins of their social networks it actually also pushed the people who were immediately around them further toward the margins as if there was something contagious as if the stigma was contagious and so there are various ways you can understand you know why that happened loneliness is a stigma we do tend to stigmatize that kind of thing I can tell you in my private practice people will admit to all kinds of things um they're not that comfortable admitting that they're lonely um it's just something that that we tend to feel you know boy that'll make me a real loser if I say that but it's something that we really do experience in a pretty frequent way way so yes loneliness and you know and for that matter you know there are other studies that show even depression and the kind of thinking that goes with it those kinds of things can be contagious a certain kind of negative mindset that is uh is common for people who are feeling lonely and for that matter for people who are feeling depressed is something we can adopt when we around people who are very negative who see the world in very negative ways who are constantly looking at how bad things are and how things will never work out and you know it can impact us that we start to see things in that way even if it's not our tendency so there are all kinds of impacts of these things some of them on us and some of them on those around us that we do have to pay attention to that's interesting I I do notice that my Outlook on a lot of things relationships anything changes when I'm around someone who's really calm centered and has high self-esteem versus someone who has a very pessimistic world view I actually noticed that impacts my own worldview it absolutely does and it's look it's one of those things and I I absolutely am not suggesting we we uh defriend or or reject friends who happen to be pessimistic or depressed or Lonely by any means but we would be wise to try and balance out the roster a little bit in other words if you don't have people in your life who tend to be uh as you said optimistic and have a positive world view and and and and you know and wake up with a smile as it were um I would seek out a couple of those people and befriend them even if it kind of goes a little bit against your grain because you probably need a few people like that in your life it's a perspective that's probably really really valuable because if we just misery loves company so if we're just going to surround ourselves by by other miserable people um we're a we're going to be really impacted by that and become even more miserable ourselves which is probably not our goal and B when we surround ourselves or when we have in our lives people who are very upbeat and optimistic it really is a little bit like a ray of sunshine which we can all use uh you know in in in in certain Doses and so I I would I'm actually for paying a little bit of attention to who we people our lives with who we surround ourselves with and and and do we need a kind of uh to to shake up a little bit and add some some positive people to that mix I'm curious if now some people because they're lonely and you you talk about how loneliness kind of is a self-perpetuating thing um for people who have trouble making deeper connections are there ways to get more social interaction with positive people at more of a surface level or like say watching a comedy show or something like that um I think uh yeah look you can watch a comedy show and and that'll improve your mood you know for the short time but um in fact there actually there's research about people who who are uh lonely and um they were given the option of watching a comedy show or to Elevate their mood and and and watching um uh something else that wouldn't Elevate their mood and they chose the thing that wouldn't Elevate their mood part of what happens to us when we're lonely is we feel really really um uh shut in and you know psychologically speaking we feel really uh uh like we we we dig in and we kind of uh you know Retreat and so we're actually very hesitant to peek our heads out and to uh take on you know positive people or positive experiences it it feels very dangerous for us to do that because it's it's it's as if you feel like you're constantly on guard for being under attack not physically but psychologically for being rejected or for being insulted and so you know just putting yourselves in those situations feels very fundamentally uh dangerous and that's why people once we start to feel lonely our tendency is to avoid those things as much as possible because our mind is telling us incorrectly mind you but our mind is telling us oh that's not going to end well yes you know you might have gotten invited to a party but your mind mind is going to tell you I'm just going to go I'm not going to know anyone no one's going to want to speak to me it'll and end up making me feel worse so why go uh or if you do force yourself to go you will then go and stand in the corner with a scowl that's so uninviting that indeed no one will then speak to you which will confirm your fear that you're undesirable so it it's really with loneliness the the the the biggest challenge I think people face and again if if people watch that talk that I gave they'll see I I face this myself and so I'm I'm well aware of the challenge but the biggest challenge people face is to really disregard what your mind is telling you because our mind is not always accurate it's often inaccurate it's often actually giving us a very erroneous uh message and so we actually have to disregard that we have to really try and go with an optimistic mindset you know I mean I say to people parties these this is not middle school so if you're at a party somebody invited you to no one's going to be blatantly rude to you there because somebody invited you these are all people who know the host and so if you just walk up to a group and say oh how do you do my name is so and so people will give you the time of day you know and so you have to be a little bit more optimistic a little bit more hopeful and and have a little bit more positive mindset and then one thing will beget the other you know once you start doing that then you'll start having successes then you'll meet one person and and and and your whole outlook can change if you take it on as a as a as a real task to to try and emerge from that state thank you and if you want to see the tedex talk on how to practice emotional hygiene you can go to Dr winch's site guy win.com now guy throughout the book um throughout all of these issues that that we deal with on a fairly frequent basis on on one level or another one extreme to another you mentioned I can't remember exactly what you called it but how we have this perception of the world and we're often unable to see beyond the the beliefs that we have like with the example with loneliness oh we think nobody likes us when really it's the things that we're doing that are making it almost impossible for people to approach us yeah I think I call it something like a self-defeating prophecy or or something like that in other words we um our we we develop certain perceptions um as a response to these kinds of emotional wounds that we sustain uh when something bad happens to us um then it impacts not only how we feel in the moment but it literally impacts how we perceive the world on the most basic level I'll give you just a very uh clear example um and that is um they is relating to failure they did one study where they took a group of people to an unmarked field that had a a uh football goal post American football goalpost and they had people kick football several times uh to try and kick it over uh the gold poost and then they had them estimate once they were done well how far away do you think that goalpost is and how high up do you think it is and the people who succeeded at the task um uh rather the people who failed at the task estimated the goalpost as being much further away and much higher up than the people who succeeded now they were all standing on the same field looking at the same thing this is not a a a vision issue their eyesight was okay it's just that the failure distorted their natural visual perception so that they thought something was further away and it's it was a symbolic study to me because it when we fail it indeed distorts our perceptions of our goals and makes us believe they are further away and further Out Of Reach than they actually are and then because we believe that then we begin behaving accordingly and we might develop all kinds of fear or failure or anxiety about success or we might give up entirely and and again one experience of failure can actually do that to us I'm not saying that's always the case but it is true that you know or for example we spoke about college freshman if a college freshman you know comes to uh to college and he gets his first midterm and fails it often times they they conclude I'm not cut out so College college is too difficult now really what they should be thinking is well this is more difficult than high school I need to change my study habits my strategies for how I'm approaching school because it's you know college is a is a much more difficult than High School in a way but a lot of times they drop out there's huge attrition rates in freshman year because people get despondent and they perceive something that theyve looked forward to for four years as something that's now impossible when that's not true that hasn't actually changed they just need to change a strategy but their perceptions are telling them oh this is not going to work and then they start acting accordingly and really self-sabotaging but they're not aware that it's their perceptions um that that really kind of did that to them so we and and again this is part of why I wrote the book we need to know that you know we we need to know um that our uh our perceptions are off if I may just just one other quick example back to loness for a minute um when when you have the flu and you're in bed for 10 days and you get up the first time or to go to the bathroom and your legs wobble it's very clear to you that your muscles became weaker because you were in bed for 10 days when when you've been lonely for a while uh and let's say you haven't been dating and then you go on a date and it goes badly you don't conclude as you should hm I'm a little rusty with my dating skills I need to practice this for a bit you conclude I'm undesirable but it's the same thing our social relationship uh muscles are like physical muscles they need to be worked out we need to practice them we need to hone them if you haven't been on a job interview in 10 years and you go on one you're probably going to mess it up because you're just not used to thinking that way and so we have to start thinking of a psychology as as and our abilities is something that we can hone that we can strengthen that we can change rather than just uh that they're speaking the truth about our situation in general because that's not the case and the fact that even one failure can distort our whole perception of either the the situation or our whole world view is just more evidence as to why everyone needs this book because you've got to nip it in the bud you have to it in the butt again one of one of the things I say that people have the hardest time with um is that you can't always believe what your mind is telling you now I don't mean for people to walk around never knowing when to believe what their inner gut feelings are telling them but there are certain situations and I lay them out in the book in which you actually should not believe what your mind is telling you and failure is one of them they did these famous experiments quite a few decades ago um but they were in in a they were about a phenomenon called learned helplessness and they gave people um a uh task that seemed simple um and uh half the people got the task as it was and half the people got the task in a way that made it impossible to complete although it seemed simple on the surface of it and so they did that with two groups of people and then they uh gave them the same task in a different version that was possible to complete for both groups and the people who were unable to complete this simple task first time around because it was actually impossible to complete also failed at it the second time around even though it was very possible to complete it was absolutely within their abilities but that first round had convinced them that they were incapable of succeeding and they believed it and once they believed they were incapable of succeeding when that task came around again even though they were perfectly capable of doing it they actually failed at it just because they believed they couldn't and that's what failure does to us it convinces us that we're incapable of things we're actually capable of it throws us off the scent it makes us focus on the wrong thing rather than focusing on what do I need to do differently what do I need to change what what do I need to tweak we're focused on self-consciously on I'm I'm a loser I'm unable why do things never work for me and that actually doesn't help you figure anything out it just makes you miserable and then more likely to fail in the future so it's really important that we understand and how these things impact our minds and our thinking and know when to disregard this Urgent Message from our gut or like in rumination sometimes the urge to ruminate and to just replay that scene once more for the thousandth time feels very urgent and very important um and it does feel very urgent it does feel very important that's still wrong you still shouldn't do it because you thought about it a thousand times already you're just stressing yourself out and making yourself miserable so knowing when to disregard the these these gut feelings these messages from our mind is a is an important piece I think of of knowing how to uh get the most out of our brains and and get the most out of our abilities and I mean I guess it's just sort of a learning process because what I've noticed I went through um I it wasn't really a relationship it was just a few dates but um it ended because I felt I I felt like he was doing things that were manipulative and the more I thought about it um I do looking back I still feel like the these were red flags but the more I thought about it the more upset I got the more I was convinced that this person was like maliciously trying to manipulate me and I realized I was writing in my journal after that this is something that's happened in the end of other relationships where when I start to see things failing and I I have this gut feeling that something's wrong I start picking up more and more evidence and it's not necessarily that it's inaccurate but I blow it to such a huge degree that I end up really stressing myself out yeah now but that's an interesting example because relationships are one of those things um that a lot of what happens is pretty straightforward and some of it is kind of ambiguous and so one of the things that are ambiguous is people's motivations and a lot of the times it can look like somebody's doing this thing that they should know upsets us but they're actually not aware that it upsets us or they're notw that they're doing it so you know without knowing the details of that my my general uh suggestions in these kinds of situations is listen to the initial look something was happening that you don't like there's no question there right so so there it's not a question that something was happening that that you didn't like the question is what what to do with it and um if you just start looking for it then you will find it because you know when when we bu when we buy a new red car of a certain make we'll suddenly know notice all the other red cars that that make on the on the road when we hadn't noticed them earlier because that's we're now sensitized to to noticing those things and when you start to think that oh this person is doing this then you'll start a noticing when they do and perhaps over interpreting when they're not necessarily doing it so the best thing to do in those situations is if something is bothering you and then it's happening again bring it up because to me about relationships um one of the things that you need to do in a relationship is test out pretty early on can the this person work with you is this is this someone who's going to be able to work with you to address issues when they come up and they will come up they will come up early they will come up at some point you know there there are no relationships that don't take work so can this person is this person open to feedback are they open to working on things are they opening to hearing what I'm saying without getting defensive or or accusatory or stonewalling or or or you know bringing up beefs of their own with before they respond to mine that is a very important question and I think these are opportunities then to say look there's something that's been bothering me I'm not sure you're aware and see what they do with it and then if they can't handle it they don't do well with it perhaps that is a problem but they might surprise you and go oh you know I was totally unaware I was doing that for entirely different reasons and then they don't do it again or it could be that they'll say okay I get it still do it again and when you point it out the second time they'll get actually better at it so I I I think these These are opportunities to test out the theory and to test it out with the other person rather than just by yourself um because by yourself you're not really giving them a chance to address it and maybe they cannot maybe they can well it's interesting there's um a chapter on guilt in your book emotional first aid and it it brings up to mind because I I did address it with this person and the first time I my goal was to understand and the conversation went really well and I felt like wow this is someone who can calmly have a discussion I was really impressed and then I was noticing it happening again and I went into this is just like that other guy who turned out to be crazy and rather than handling it the way I did the first time I handled it from that perspective and needless to say he was a little bit defensive not overly so but it it kind of further perpetuated the problem and and I'm left now wondering was all of this Behavior him or was he being triggered by the way I brought this up had the way you brought it up the second time you mean because the first time seemed to have gone well exactly so how you I mean it's important to to bring it up and address it but it's also just the same as with apologizing how you do it is really important how you address a topic is going to impact the the person who's on the receiving end of that absolutely I think how you bring it up is is is the most important thing because you need to bring it up in a way that's easy for the other person to hear because look we uh it it's natural for us to get defensive when somebody lobs a complaint at us in a relationship it just it's a very natural we are being not attacked per se but kind of we're being accused of something so even if it's mild it's natural for us to get defensive and therefore it's actually kind of important to bring it up in a way that triggers least of these defenses and I'm certainly you did that that well the first time because they actually the conversation went well what I'm curious about though is that when you bring it up again and it doesn't necessarily go well some people they will get defensive but then after that their behavior will change in a good way in other words they might not be able to admit it but they'll change their behavior and maybe that's good enough and some people uh are just so unaware or uh you know are just see things from such a skewed perspective that even though they might be able to see what you're talking about they actually can't change what they're doing and and again you know it the kind of the time will tell in these kinds of scenarios after the second conversation if things didn't change then I do think that a beginning of a relationship of a few dates you're bringing something up twice and things aren't changing probably not a good sign okay that's helpful because I've been r i mean it it ended like a week ago and I've been thinking about it and I still feel like I wasn't wrong to have those concerns and at the same time because I got emotional and I didn't I I I saw the way that I dealt with it the first time and how effective that was and I know that I didn't handle it as well the next time so I because I ruminate and I have all this guilt um it just is it's kind of I I need to really work on uh some of the tips in your book so actually let me just say that then so so one of the learning things for you then would be uh okay when I bring something up the first time I I I can probably do that well I have to be very cautious when I bring it up the second time because I'm probably going to be much more upset at that point and much more of a skeptic so it might not come out as productively as I can actually make it because I did that well the first time so pay attention to when you have round two in these kinds of scenarios because round two is a vulnerable round for you and and I'm just saying it because I think once we figure out what are typical blind spots are or where we typically go wrong we're going to repeat that error you know again and again unless we figure out to pay special attention to that kind of thing and for you it might be round two of bringing up something after round one um and so once you know I have to pay special attention on round two take a very very deep breath because I'll be more annoyed but I actually have to do it in the same productive way I did it the first time that might be helpful in the future thank you that's really helpful guy I really appreciate it well right now we are speaking with Dr Guy winch he is a clinical psychologist with his PhD in Clinical Psychology from NYU and he is the author of the book we're talking about right now which is emotional first aid healing rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts and if you want to check out his website or his tedex talk on how to practice emotional hygiene you can visit guy win.com welcome back to the show this is synchronicity talk radio for your mind body and soul I'm your host Marie Bernard you can find me at spiritual show.com you can also find me on YouTube at youtube.com/ spiritual show and right now we're speaking with Dr Guy winch you can find him at guy win.com and he's the author of emotional first aid healing rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts and we have just about 15 minutes here on citr before uh Parts Unknown is up so I'm just wonder wondering where you'd like to take the conversation so one of the things actually I want to uh mention uh is I start the book with rejection because it's I think it's the most common uh wound we we sustain and I just wanted to say a few things about that because I found the research there to be really really fascinating and I I and I think it's just something that we all experience I mean you know in the dating world we experience it and in when we're looking for jobs we experience it when we're looking for internships we experience it and you know today um unfortunately on social media we experience it all the time and people actually uh I don't know when it was exactly but some years ago I started noticing that more and more of my patients would bring up experiences of rejection related to social media they would actually be really upset because they they just came back from their vacation and they posted their pictures and while they had liked all their friends vacation pictures now their friends weren't liking theirs or their they were looking for jobs and they were trying to connect with people on LinkedIn and uh people weren't responding and they were like don't they understand it's really important for me because I'm looking to a job or they were retweeting everyone's tweets but people weren't retweeting theirs and so the social media is is this new uh uh Frontier I think for uh kinds of rejection experiences now one of the things that fascinated me most uh when I was doing the research about rejection is what happens in our brains when get rejected and uh people did the study I'm going to describe the study just because to me it's kind of interesting to see the lensx researchers and other people will go to but what they did is they they recruited subjects who had just had a very difficult um heartbreak uh breakup and their heart was broken and they asked them to come in uh with pictures of the person who broke their heart and to lie in a functional MRI machine functional MRI machines are machines that actually can look at what's happening in your brain in real time while you think about something specific do a math problem Etc so they can see what areas of your brain get activated when you're doing or thinking about certain things um and so they asked them to lie in the F fmri machine while gazing at the picture of the person who broke their heart and reliving or the actual breakup conversation and then they wanted to see what's happening in their brains so first of all I think that's kind of brutal and when I was reading that study the first section I skipped to was how much do they compensate these poor people to do that you know because usually for studies to get $5 $10 they actually gave them a little bit more um but what they found was that um the same areas in the brain get activated when we experience rejection as get activated when we experience physical pain uh exactly the same areas and so that expression hurt feelings uh which is actually the same expression in almost every language is there because indeed we are hurt um when they saw that the same Pathways of the brain respond to rejection as to physical pain they did another study and they did a rejection experiment in which they gave half the people uh Tylenol and half the people a sugar sugar pill and people didn't know they were receiving Tylenol which is a uh a a pain reliever and then they put them through this uh rejection experience and people who had received the pain reliever reported less emotional pain than the people who didn't again because it's the pain Pathways that get activated when we experience rejection and I found that to be really really fascinating because to me it explained why even small silly rejections can really really sting we've all had this experience where people were not that interested in didn't invite us to a party we wouldn't be that interested in going to and somehow we felt hurt by it and you're sitting there thinking why do I even care I don't like these people I'm not interested in their party why does it bother me but it bothers us because literally our brains are wired to experience these kinds of things in a painful painful way and then I'm curious what happens because it sounds like um yeah I've been through that too where I'm I'm like something insignificant or a per an insignificant to me person has rejected me on some level and I go over it in my mind like why am I so bothered by this and then I judge myself for being bothered because I don't feel like I should be right now that's the thing that I think is most uh most important people to know that it bothers you not because it actually matters because this is literally the way our brains have evolved to respond in other words part of the Assumption of why this is the case why is it that rejection of all the emotions why did rejection literally the the the expression is that it piggybacks on the pain Pathways why does rejection piggyback on those Pathways what was the point of that in terms of evolution and if you think about it when we were hunter gatherers living in tribes um then being ostracize being rejected from the tribe was basically a death sentence you couldn't survive alone you needed your tribe and so we needed to develop an early warning mechanism to warn us if we were in danger of being ostracized and booted out from the tribe and that was rejection and so people who experience rejection as more painful were more likely to correct their behavior remain in the tribe and pass along their genes and those who did not were more likely to be booted out and not pass along their genes and then over Generations after Generations the more you experience rejection as painful the more likely you are to survive now imagine times in tribes where there are very few resources it's a very stressful situation people can get on each other's nerves being super aware of when you might be rejected when you're getting the cold shoulder when people aren't being warm to you would be very very very useful and so that's why that evolved but now that it has we're kind of stuck with it and so then when somebody doesn't like your your your your update or your status update or your tweets it will actually hurt whether they matter to us or not and all that means is you evolved along with everyone else in tribes it doesn't mean anything about why that person is important or is not important to you and if you go on this whole exploration of why that person really matters then you're wasting your time it's not that that person matters your brain is wired that way and so it's a very important thing to know about rejection because we can if we're gauging the pain of things to indicate how much we care we're getting it slightly wrong because it's going to be painful in a way whether we care or not and so it's a very important thing uh to know um you know in one experiment they put people through a rejection uh and then they told them that the person who did the rejection uh was a member of the klocks clan and then they asked them so how does that make you feel and people still felt emotional pain and then they told them actually they weren't a member of the klock clan it was just a research Confederate this whole thing was a setup and learning that the rejection wasn't even real did not take away the emotional pain that people were still feeling they still felt bad because their brains were making them still feel bad even once they found out it was fake that they actually never were rejected in the first place that's the power of rejection and the wiring we have in our brain and that's why I started the book with it a because it's so common and B because it has such a big impact on us and C because what we then do is something really really terrible we then go and beat ourselves up we become you know when when we get rejected by a dating Prospect we will start listing all our faults and all our shortcomings and start saying oh I wish I was more this if only I was more that if only I had more money if only I were taller if only I were more blonde if only I was this if only we really go through this Litany of all our inadequacies which actually only makes us feel worse and in almost every situation has nothing to do with why the person rejected us they didn't reject us because we're not blonde enough or tall enough or whatever it is they rejected us because we were not a match for them in whatever way that that manifests we did we weren't a good match for them so it you know it's not an evaluation of who we are it's an an evaluation of a match of of how our key fit into their lock or vice versa so with rejection we experience it it's very painful and then we go and we inflict a lot of self damage image by becoming really self-critical and harsh and creating a lot of damage to our self-esteem making ourselves feel really really really bad and adding to the emotional pain that our brains are already providing free so it's actually really really important to understand the psychological mechanisms that are in place that we tend to have in a reflexive way when we get rejected because we need to really take control of those situations and at least make sure we're not making things worse for ourselves by becoming self-critical at least make sure we're not overthinking things and wondering why something is so painful when it just kind of is cu that's how rejection works you know an example of that is it might be a few dates you have with someone I don't mean you I mean in general and people can feel incredibly mournful as if it was an entire relationship it was only a few dates but it hurts that way because you got your hopes up and because rejection is wired our brains are wired to respond to rejection in those ways and so I think it's one of those things people once they're more educated about it um and once they're more informed they can manage those situations uh in a much healthier way without resorting to the kinds of thinking and the patterns of behavior um that are actually unhealthy and and damaging that was really helpful guy and I'm also curious now the the acetaminophen helps with with the pain but especially in this day and age with social media we're being rejected on on a constant basis we can't just be popping painkillers all the time yeah I'm actually not suggesting anyone who feels rejected takes aom minin okay because it'll take away a little bit but I don't think that's the solution um you know the solution is and let's talk about social media I mean it's happened to me many many times I'll see a sentus update by someone on my phone while I have you know something in one hand I'm rushing in the other I'm basically clicking and I just don't have a free thumb to click like but I'll see the pictures I'll even go oh that looks great and the next time I see them I might say to them oh you had a great time on your vacation I just don't have the the the the the thumbs the fingers the time the the wherewith all whatever it is to click like so when we are interpreting uh a lack of a rejection um in a you know we don't need to interpret it in the worst possible way with LinkedIn a lot of people you know who are looking for jobs use LinkedIn and people who are not usually don't so they'll go on there once every few months they're not not adding you to a contact they just haven't been on there so rather than assume the worst on social media you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes why not assume the best why not assume that people will notice and even if they didn't click like they will actually say something to you or or or they will have enjoyed it and and so it's important to put in these uh Corrections as it were cuz our minds can take us to the most negative possible explanation for something and there's absolutely no good use of trying to think of the worst possible explanation for something there's actually much better to think of the best possible explanation for something and when you see the person next you can say oh did you see my vacation pictures and they might say oh you know what I didn't I haven't been on Facebook for a while or they might say oh you know what I thought I did but I really was so busy I didn't I should go look at them you know if they're a friend they they care but they just might not have the the this might not be important enough or might not be critical for them to click like even though they did like but you even point out in your book when you talk about rumination how we don't lie awake at night thinking about all the great things that happened in our day yeah you know again Evolution here is at fault in terms of evolution it was much more valuable to scour the The Horizon for any kind of threat because that saved Our Lives you know whether a bear was about to come into the cave we were in was very very useful um whether uh you know a good thing was about to happen was was in terms of evolution less of a priority nice but less of a priority and so we are uh wired in a way to to orient towards threats and negative things but in our day and age where very few of us are living in places where a bear might wander in we need to make an adjustment a a conscious adjustment to our minds because our minds are operating on assumptions and on situations that we are no longer living in we are no longer in in you know living in caves our survival is no longer you know in question every second of the day um we we and our minds are still operating that way so we need to Institute these Corrections and know when to put in a correction and when to adjust for the reality of today's lives because it'll take many thousands of years for our minds to catch up to where we are we have to put in the corrections manually as it were and a lot of this book is about the kind of manual Corrections you can put in and you need to put in in these various kinds of situations where your mind is going to lead you astray thank you so much Dr Guy winch emotional first aid healing rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts we have just a couple minutes left in the show and I'm wondering um if there's anything else that you want to say to to our audience um I would like people to check out the Ted X talk because I think it's a short talk it's 17 minutes but I think it's pretty concise um the other thing is that since I feel we're such on the on the you know on the initial steps of really educating people about how our minds work the ways in which they help us the ways in which they don't especially and what the corrections are that we need to kind of put in or or how we need to really uh uh uh think of things and and behave and and and and and adjust for things so that we're more psychologically healthy um this is the kind of thing I'd like people to talk about it's the kind of thing I'd like them to notice in friends to point out to friends if you have a friend who is obviously lonely um bring it up with them ask them if they're feeling that way ask them you know maybe suggest that they uh take a look at the book maybe suggested they look at articles about it um but be aware I think be awareness to me is the most important thing start being much much more aware of how your uh psychology works how your mind works and how impact you and start paying as much attention to it you know I I give this example that when we when we wipe out on a skateboard the first thing we do is we check ourselves to see if we're injured that should be our instinct when it comes to uh psychological injuries as well when we have a difficult failure or a bad rejection or we're feeling lonely we need to check in with ourselves and see um how we're doing how we're feeling if our self-esteem is damaged if it is what we can do about it if our confidence is short if it is what we can do about it and and really not just let things happen but become much more proactive and much more prominent in the psychological care we administer to ourselves because there's so much more that we can be doing thank you so much Dr winch we could probably talk about this all day but we're out of time so I really appreciate your time and the work that you do and happy New Year happy New Year thank you so much for having thank you again that was Dr Guy winch he is the author of emotional first aid heal feeling rejection guilt failure and other everyday hurts and again you can go to his website guy win.com and you can see his Ted X talk so coming up in just a moment here on synchron on citr rather is Parts Unknown yeah it's just all synchronicity all the time it's all about us uh so Chris rific is coming up with Parts Unknown here on citr so happy New Year again be well I love you so much Namaste namaste he