Emotional First Aid (E65)

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete talk about recognising emotional trauma and how to apply emotional first aid to your psychological cuts and bruises.

Show notes

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: And we’re back!

P: Hi, hi, hi!

M: Hey.

P: Muz, how ya doing?

M: I am a bit frantic and frazzled this week.

P: Oh.

M: So I have, in response, upped up my physical exercise, I’ve been on the treadmill and just making sure I’m getting enough sleep. It’s just a busy time at work and with everything else. I’ve kind of got two jobs that I’m juggling.

P: Mmm, yes.

M: So, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

P: Laugh.

M: I’m just so grateful to have such a full and satisfying life. But it’s just a bit busy at the moment. How about you?

P: I’m good, I’m good. I’m pumped and ready to go. I excited about this week’s episode because –

M: Because this one’s all you, isn’t it Pete?

P: It is.

M: What are we talking about?

P: Well, I led with that question. I was hoping you were going to say something else along the lines of, you know, my body’s a bit sore and I could go, ‘Oh, that’s great, I can fix that!’

M: Laugh.

P: Because I’m a sports therapist and I know what to do with broken bodies, But you brought up a really interesting point because you sAid frantic and frazzled and we’re talking about emotional First Aid this week. And when someone comes to you and says ‘I’m frantic, I’m frazzled’, it’s like …crickets.

M: Laugh, mmm hmm.

P: That not good, what are we doing for Sunday dinner?

M & P: Laughter.

P: Let’s move on, laugh.

M: Yep.

P: And the reason that we do this is because not many of us know how to deal with emotions or apply the First Aid for emotional First Aid.

M: And this is such an important topic. I Don’t know why it’s taken us a whole year to get to this. But we are encouraging people to do self-analysis and to understand their emotions and their triggers and emotional baggage and to work through it, whether by journaling or by talking to other people. Yet as a society, there are so many people out there who just freak out. They don’t know what to when someone says, ‘you know, I’m not doing so well.’

P: The change is in the winds though Marie, it is changing. We’re moving away for a biological biomedical health model. We’re now looking at the socio ecological model of health and that means we now GP’s pharmacists, all these health professionals are now taking into account social issues, people’s emotions. It has become a change and a shift and 100 years ago, this change and shift happened around physical health. All of a sudden we became aware that we have to take care of ourselves.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: We have to eat well. We have to, not imbibe in too much rich food otherwise we get gout and that brought about a 50% increase in life expectancy. This is 100 years ago and the person that will be referencing today, who is Dr Guy Winch, he talks about that at the moment we’re on a different bent in that were becoming aware of our emotional health.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And people are now becoming more okay with the terminology around psychological health, mental well-being, understanding social equity and all these sorts of terms that 20 years ago, 40 years ago maybe we didn’t even know about. But now it’s so much more in our faces that’s being promoted so much more because this stuff has an impact on our mortality. If we don’t address this stuff, we die! Laugh!

M: We were saying that around here, don’t we?

P: We do! Laugh. We say it a lot.

M: It’s actually really topical because this month, May, is Mental Health Awareness Month in Australia, and I’m talking on a panel at my corporate gig in a week’s time. So I think I agree with you 100%. We are having these discussions in the corporate setting, as well, which is where a huge portion of our population work, not all of them by any means, but a large portion.

P: Yeah.

M: And corporate are also changing their language and driving change around this. They’re talking to older generations and men, people who traditionally have shunned a lot of this talk because they were tougher.

P: Yeah, it wasn’t accepted. It wasn’t encouraged in our society, for men, particularly to be in touch with their emotions. That’s out the window, now. That’s gone. The tough male model is gone, thank goodness.

M: Well… a lot of it.

P: Yeah.

M: We’re opening up the conversation. I think there’s still a long way to go, yeah.

P: The expectation, though there is now that boys are allowed to cry.

M: Yeah.

P: And that, that’s a good thing because, yes, it’s good to express our emotions. I’m referencing a very interesting psychologist this week from America, Guy Winch. Who some of you may know from his very famous Ted talk on emotional First Aid. He was interviewed as one of one of the First speakers for Being a Better Human, which is a new Ted talk series which is coming out. And his talk on emotional First Aid that he also go to Google was voted as one of the most popular Ted talks ever.

M: Hmm.

P: So reasonably well known. He’s published two books, one that we’re looking at today is his book on emotional thirst Aid, which is entitled The Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt and other everyday Psychological Injuries.

M: So is that –

P: Do you have any psychological injuries?

M: Oh my gosh yes! Who doesn’t?

P: Laugh.

M: My psychological damage is giving me a crick my neck. Seriously.

P: [Silly voice] Ay, I got such a crick in my neck, it is such a sunder!

M & P: Laughter!

M: I’ve even got a bag, thank you from Life School, which says emotional baggage.

P & M: Laughter!

P: But it’s true we all have emotional baggage.

M: And you’ve got to open it up and dig around in there sometimes –

P: Absolutely.

M: – because otherwise it drives you and drives your behaviours and reactions without you even realising it.

P: Exactly and when you listen to this guy’s talk, it’s amazing how much it drives. So we could take a few examples today. So let’s work through the main –

M: Well, before you get started. What do you mean by emotional First Aid?

P: Emotional First Aid is knowing how to apply a Band Aid to a psychological trauma. So if you’ve had a bad day at work and your boss has pulled you into a meeting and sAid that presentation that you gave last week was substandard, you didn’t address this, you didn’t address that, I’m really disappointed in your performance. I think you need to go away and actually have a think about this again before you present it again to the national forum on next week and for God’s sake, do a better job this time. How would that make you feel?

M: Didn’t even get a shit sandwich.

P: Laugh!

M: Just went straight for the kill. I’d be looking for a new boss of that’s how they do feedback.

P: Laugh!

M: But I’d also be feeling pretty crappy.

P & M: Laugh!

M: Now in the real world, corporate leaders are taught to compliment, deliver the hard stuff and then finish it with a compliment.

P: Yeah, I missed that one. I come from the art’s, it’s just cutthroat, Laugh. ‘That plier was shit, do it again!’

M & P: Laughter!

P: So, with those sorts of traumas, that’s as bad as a wound, that’s an emotional wound. So, your ego’s taken a hit, your self-esteem has taken a hit and you’re feeling pretty low. How do you address that?

M: How do you personally address it for you? Or how do you help friends and family and colleagues?

P: Let’s take the, let’s take the personal straight away because it is up to us to look after our own health.

M: Yep.

P: And, if I cut my finger when I was cooking, I’d know to wash it, put some Dettol on it and put a Band Aid on it because I don’t want it to get to get infected. We should have that same understanding when we have an emotional wound. So, if someone tells us we’re crap, we should have immediate steps in place that we know that was a hit to my ego. So now I need to go and do some self-esteem work, however minor or free it is, or do something that’s good for myself. Rather than going and finding a bowl of ice cream and eating it all in one go, opening up the wine bottle –

M: [Longing Sigh] Oh…

P: – or going and doing some retail therapy.

M: Can we do both?

P: Laugh. That’s the point. These things are not emotional Band Aids. They don’t help the injury, they waylay it.

M: No, but if you feel good in the moment, laugh!

P: They smother it. They push it down and Guy Winch –

M: Are they part of a holistic strategy, you know, multi-pronged attack, laugh!

P: No, no. I’m going to say no.

M: Darn it, alright.

P & M: Laughter!

P: Because they just suppress the issue. So high carb – sugar rush. So it releases endorphins in your system and you don’t think about the injury. Alcohol suppresses all the all the emotions. The problem with alcohol and Doctor Winch uses this example is it’s going to come back up.

M: Laugh.

P: They’re going to vomit that alcohol back up. So, it’s really important that we have more fundamentally beneficial First Aid approaches when we have a psychological trauma.

Let’s take something like failure.

So failure is a psychological wound.

M: Yes.

P: When you fail at something, you’re not feeling good.

M: I never fail.

P: Oohhh…?

M & P: Laughter!

M: I just don’t do things that I’m going to fail at.

P & M: Laugh!

M: That’s why. No, I lie, I lie. I’ve had some shocking failures in my life.

P: Yeah, and you’ve gotta bounce back from those. So what we’re talking about here is the way that failure registers with us the mind tricks us into not being able to function and do the simplest tasks. Things like going and doing the washing, going to the fridge and getting the milk out of the fridge and you drop it and it falls on the floor and you end up in a puddle of a mess because you’ve had a hard day.

M: Laugh.

P: Those sort of simple tasks we can’t do when we have failure because our cognition and our ability to just coordinate is impacted by our emotion. The mind is a hard thing to change once it’s been convinced that it’s a failure. So, if someone says your shit, then it’s really hard to actually bring yourself up going ‘No, I’m not’; unless you’ve got really good self-esteem in the first place, it’s really hard to go ‘No, I’m not shit, I have these qualities, and I can do this, and this, and this, and this, and that’s going to make you feel better and that is an emotional Band Aid.

M: I’ve actually seen people with failure, baggage and the huge impact can have on their happiness levels.

P: Definitely.

M: They’re going to operate in society and at the smallest challenges they run away rather than step up and learn or grow or fight.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: And it’s such a limiting thing to carry around in your emotional baggage.

P: Absolutely, definitely and it doesn’t have to be a big failure. It can be a small failure if can happened when you were a teenager.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: That informs so much of your developmental understanding. And this in a psychological wound, so we have to know how to take that up and take care of it and let it heal. So there are different things that we can do.

M: Also, failure is part of life, right?

P: It is.

M: Let’s be really honest. So when kids experience failure, it’s about helping them to develop the tools to pick themselves up and try again, rather than trying to stop them from experiencing that failure because experiencing it is still so important.

P: Yes, so much.

M: And we found with the latest generation of parents who stereotypically have over parented and tried to protect their kids. And they’ve gone in and fought with the teacher who gave them the B, so they could get an A.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: And all of those things, have had arguments with the coach who benched them, and these kids have never learned to fail.

P: Exactly.

M: And they hit the real world.

P: And they can’t cope.

M: Parents can’t go in to bat for them to get the promotion, laugh.

P: Absolutely, definitely.

M: And they buckle at the first sign of any pressure because they’re not used to stepping up in the face of that.

P: Yeah, I’ve got a great example from when I was doing my study when I was a massage therapist and I knew my nutrition lecturer really well. We were friends. We were colleagues. And we went out for dinner one night and she said,

‘Oh, so we have the test on Monday, are you ready?

And I’m like ‘No! I haven’t been able to study!’

And she goes ‘That’s ok. I’ll just throw you a question. Why don’t we eat meat when we’re unwell?’

And I just sat there going ‘I don’t know!

M: Laugh!’

P: And Kirsty looked at me and said ‘It’s okay Pete, it’s alright.’ She said it’s because we don’t want iron in our system because that’s what the bacteria feeds off when we’re ill. We don’t want iron in our system.

M: I just learned something?

P: Exactly. And do you know what? I have never forgotten that conversation since 15 years ago. So now whenever it comes up I’m like ‘ah, we don’t eat meat when we’re sick!’

M & P: Laugh!  

P: It’s stuck in my brain.

M: I’m betting the science has changed since then, now we have to eat meat, laugh.

P: Oh, I’m sticking with it because I had an emotional response.

M: Yep.

P: And It triggered a memory in me, and it happened a couple weeks ago in uni. I’ve got the same thing, I got something wrong. I will now always know that DALY always stands for disability-adjusted life years.

M: Laugh.

P: So it’s there, you had those emotional responses, they are a step to learning. Let’s take one more example.

Let’s look at something which is really fun, ruminating.

The brooder, we all know a brooder, don’t we?

M: We need to redefine your definition of fun.

P: Laugh! A person who sits there and creates and thinks some things through endlessly. This is a real risk of psychological trauma because it puts you in that cycle again, and it doesn’t let you come up with any solutions again that’s not exercising the right kind of brain waves that allows you to achieve tasks that affects your work ethic and affects your achievement scales, it affects your self-worth. Because you’re not seeing any positivity coming out of a situation, you start fantasising. You start creating situations that are never going to happen. You know ‘the FBI are going to come from a chimney at night and gag me and take me away because I didn’t put the toilet seat down.

M: Are you fantasising? Or ruminating? Laugh!

P: Well, that’s the thing. One thing leads to another. That’s a serious example, though.

M: I think in a way we’ve covered this in the past with conversations about gratitude and how we’re actually wired to see the negative. The person who noticed the tiger that was stalking them was more likely to live than the guy who was skipping through the daisy field oblivious to the, you know, the threat, right? So, we’re wired, biologically wired to look for the negative, and that can really lead down a really bad path if you don’t stop it.

P: Yeah.

M: And so a really great way again to counter act that, is to bring a gratitude practise into your daily life.

P: Definitely.

M: It is so simple and easy. And it helps you to scan your environment for positives.

P: Mmm.

M: And balance that out, and might even to a certain degree, depending on what your brooding or ruminating on might even short circuit a lot of that behaviour and retrain your brain to not ruminate.

P: Science says you are right, Marie.

M & P: Laugh!

M: How about that, laugh.

P: Dr Winch talks about it in terms of adaptive versus maladaptive, so self-reflection can be maladaptive. When you become a ruminator and your self-reflecting and you go down that negative cycle and you keep looking for the negatives that’s maladaptive reasoning and that has powerful affect because it leads to alcoholism, eating disorders, increased cortisol and cardiovascular disease, so the science says, I’m not going to quote any studies because we’re running out of time. He calls it picking at emotional scabs.

You’re not letting something heal because you keep driving a knife into the wounds going ‘Yeah, let’s put this knife in deeper and see how deep it can go.’ Whereas adaptive reasoning is exactly what you’re talking about, Marie. It’s taking some time to be positive and do some real work around, trying to bring yourself up and bring yourself out of that brooding, only seeing the negative cycle.

M: There’s a great course that life line used to run called Accidental Counsellor, which I took last year, actually, and it teaches people who may be caught off guard who are not mental health professionals how to have conversations and support friends, colleagues, people at work, customers even who’ve come out with, you know, some really tough, tough disclosures at times.

P: Yeah

M: And if you’re not prepared for it or equipped, what do you say? How do you support that person and give them what they need? But then, also on the flip side, how do you not give them too much advice or coaching because you’re not the professional, right?

P: Exactly.

M: And one of the great things that we learned in that session was that you can be there for someone too much.

P: Hmm.

M: If you’re letting them talk too much, and they’re in that ruminating space, and all they’re doing is just reinforcing the negative. There comes a time where, you know, as the friend who’s supporting you need to say, ‘enough’s enough, this isn’t working. This is ruminating.’

P: This is brooding and it’s not beneficial.

M: I’m supporting you.

P: Yeah, and I’m enabling you to do more of it. Someone has to come in at some point and cut that that process off. Otherwise, we get so many health risks coming forward.

M: Yeah, so it’s not just with yourself, but with friends who may be going through a tough time. You can listen and listen and listen. And that is the number one recommendation out of this course for how to help people who are going through tough times. Listen.

P: Yeah.

M: Sit and listen and validate what they’re feeling, but there comes a point where you need to stop listening and move them to a professional or even extricate yourself out in the right way.

P: And you can do that on yourself as well, you can, listen, listen and listen to yourself talk, but there comes a point where you going ‘Right, enough’s enough. Let’s take, take some action. And if that action is going getting some professional help then that’s great, because getting that is a positive step we’re taking action.

M: Yep.

P: I know we’re pushed for time,

but I do want to mention one more, rejection.

This is a psychological trauma, which a lot of people go through, it can be rejection from a job. It can rejection from a lover. It could be rejection from a date. I mean, who hasn’t gone on a date and have someone get up in the first ten minutes and say ‘Sorry, I’m out.’ It’s like, Oh my God, I feel terrible. [Sad laugh]

M: Is that common?

P: Not if you’re married. Laugh.

M: Well, I’ve been married for 15 years. [actually, 9 years this December]

P & M: Laughter!

P: Online dating. We have so much interaction on an online sphere, and then you go and meet the person and you realise, oh my God, they’re completely not who I thought they were and I actually have nothing in common with this person.

M: Mmm.

P: So people will back out in five minutes flat.

M: Which I think is fine, but you can deliver that message in a more sensitive way, laugh.

P: Absolutely. So, let’s look at that feeling of rejection.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Now, it’s interesting. The science behind this was done using a ball game. So, I’m number one, Marie you’re number two, let’s make Francis number three. I throw the ball to you, you throw the ball to Francis, and Francis throws the ball to me.

Then halfway through this, we keep doing it, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la; And then all of a sudden, Francis throws the ball back to you, and then you throw to Francis and Francis throws it back to you. Then all of a sudden, I’m standing there going ‘no one’s throwing me the ball’. That’s going to make me feel rejected. It’s going to make me feel ostracised.

M: Piggy in the middle!

P: Laugh! As a piggy though, I’m active cause I’m trying to catch the ball. This, I’m not even involved in the ball game anymore because you guys have decided to keep it between the two of you.

M: Yep.

P: So what they did was they took some MRI scans of the person who was feeling these feelings of rejection. What they found was the pathways, the neural pathways that activated during the feelings of rejected mimic the pain pathways that we experience when we are in physical pain.

The reason behind this, when we were running around in tribes, as nomads we needed to make sure that we were part of the clan. Otherwise, we died. Literally, we could not survive as a solo human being in the wild because something would eat us or we wouldn’t be able to get enough food.

So the body developed this in our evolutionary history. This process to let us know something is wrong. We’re going to make you feel pain because you need to get involved with the group again.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And that’s a lever, that’s creating something that makes us go back to the group. And it’s really important because it can be as simple as a ball game and it can leave someone feeling out. And if we don’t act on that, if we don’t know to recognise that as ‘I’m being excluded, somehow I have to find a way to connect back in with the group’, then we are left feeling ostracised and it results in trauma such as cardiovascular disease, increased cortisol levels, all those things that we’ve talked about in terms of chronic illness and inflammatory responses which have a physical impact on our body.

M: There’s a great book called The 10 Types of Human by Dexter Dias, and he talks about this study [similar to above], and it was actually done on the beach with people playing Frisbee.

P: Laugh.

M: They talk about how this relates to other animals that are social and pack animals as well, there’s some great stories in there. But it is a biological and physiological response about rejection.

P: Yep, definitely. We don’t like it, it’s not just humans, it’s other animals as well.

M: Yep.  

P: But we don’t like it, and it’s not good for us. So, learning to identify that and applying the processes of being able to go, that’s an emotional wound, let’s address it, helps to keep us healthy and better and living longer.

M: So you’ve got a few others here, loneliness and guilt, and we’re out of time. But to wrap up the conversation, I guess, on emotional First Aid, what we’ve done is talked about some of the things that can really lead us down a path of lifelong injuries, mental injuries that we carry with us and into our relationships and everything we do and really what you’re saying here Pete, if I can maybe parrot it back, is that we need to be better at identifying that and short circuiting that.

P: Absolutely.

M: Exploring it, picking at it, but not too much.

P: Yep, laugh. Don’t pick the scab.

M: Yep, laugh.

P: This goes into something that we can talk about later, which is this whole idea we came up with of emotional literacy like we have health literacy, there’s happiness, literacy, there’s emotional literacy. We need to know it and it’s identifying those markers and going ‘ah, this is loneliness, this is what we do for loneliness.’ We need to be better at that. And maybe we can talk about this in another episode about the tips behind how we can address that.

M: Yep.

P: Maybe that’s a different episode that we can do.

M: Sounds good, all right. On that note, we’ll definitely put Guy Winches Ted talk in our show notes for everyone.

P: Yeah.

M: And I’m going to go have a read of that because I haven’t yet, laugh.

P: Yeah, it’s really interesting, he presents it in a really interesting way with some great anecdotes and stories.

M: Love it. All right, well, that’s all we have time for this week. We’ll see you next week.

P: Till next time.

M: Bye.

P: Bye.

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M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

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