If you cut yourself, what would you do?
You probably won’t choose to walk around bleeding. At some point in your life, you’ve been taught to put a Band-Aid on a cut to protect it. You might clean the wound or put ointment on it, to avoid infection and speed up the heeling.
If the cut is especially deep, you’ll know you’re out of your depth. You’d possibly consult a medical professional, or the wound could cause permanent damage.
Most of us know how to respond to everyday physical ailments. But how many of us are taught how to care for everyday emotional bumps and bruises – like failure or rejection?
The truth is, emotional wounds are as debilitating – if not more so – than physical ones.
But the impact of emotional pain – like rejection, failure, heartbreak, anxiety and depression – is not really taught to us in any formal way. The result is, more people have tools to deal with their physical aches and pains than they do to deal with their emotional ones.
We’re not given school subjects in how to deal with life’s up and downs. We don’t get classes on how to pick ourselves up after a rejection or failure. We’re not trained in how to deal with the tricks our minds can play on us when we’re depressed or anxious. We know what sick days are – but mental health days have only just started to be taken seriously.
We’ll expect weeks to recover from a broken leg. But what about a broken heart, a painful experience or a deep-felt failure?
Your mind is as medically complex as your body. Yet for some reason, we don’t prioritise emotional health in the same way as physical health.
This is where I’m trying to learn the value of emotional first aid.
What is emotional first aid?
Emotional first aid is about knowing how you’re feeling, the ways you tend to respond emotionally, and how to deal with those in a way that helps you heal.
I heard a talk recently by Guy Winch, who talks at length about emotional first aid in his work. He comments:
We sustain emotional traumas, like rejection or failure, even more regularly than we do physical ones. And, like physical wounds, they can get worse when we don’t treat them. This can impact on our daily and long-term functioning and happiness.
By treating these battle scars when we sustain them, we can heal more quickly and minimise their negative impact on our lives.
Like any kind of first aid, emotional first aid isn’t just for “big” things.
First aid can vary from a bandaid to CPR. And so it is with emotional first aid.
Sometimes, it’s the hum drum of life that can be the most corrosive to our emotional health.
Loneliness is a common experience, but has been said to have a similar debilitating effect as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Most of all, it impedes your ability to create meaningful relationships.
Rejection can make our self-esteem wither and our self-talk turn dark, as in “You’re so stupid”, “You’re unlovable” or “You’re a failure”.
Ruminating on negative thoughts can make you lose perspective on what the real situation is and never get objective advice.
When we don’t recognise these patterns as destructive, we can end up injuring ourselves further.
We can keep opening old wounds instead of letting them heal. Or we can end up with emotional hang-ups that we can’t seem to get past.
To be clear – emotional first aid doesn’t fix everything. First aid is just that: a first response, and what you’re going through may need more professional or specialised treatment.
But it can certainly help you get to know yourself, and to tend to your emotional health more intentionally. My emotional first aid could involve all kinds of things:
- Avoiding ruminating on negativity. Instead, I can try to break my time up with positive activity (like creativity, social time, exercise) or talking to a friend to get a less subjective opinion.
- Labelling my feelings. Instead of saying, “I am stressed”, I can try to think of why. If I can identify why I’m feeling the way I am, I can focus on problem-solving instead of feeling overwhelmed.
- Writing it out.
- Recognising that, like most humans, I tend to have a bias toward remembering negative thoughts.
- Talking to a therapist.
- Trying to note the things that I can be grateful for. I can’t pretend nothing is wrong. But I can recognise that not everything is wrong.
Maybe it sounds silly. And I’m still learning what works for me. But as time progresses, it’s my goal to get better at doing this for myself.
Because no one can do this first aid for me, except me.
