A friend once told me not to send him YouTube links because he was trying to cut down on his YouTube watching. That is the way it sometimes is for me with TED talks. TED talks are excellent and valuable but maybe a little addictive. I do find that if I watch more than one or two in a row, my brain gets a bit tired. I found that Sherwin Nuland had given a good talk and I wanted to see what it was. Turns out he has several.
Naturally, when you visit the TED talks website, you see some featured talks and yesterday, I found Guy Winch, a psychologist. I watched his "How to Mend a Broken Heart" and "Emotional First Aid". I think that for a long time, matters of feelings were considered too wispy, too transient to matter. If a person is despondent or deeply afraid or very shamed, they should carefully examine the situation and take corrective action. That seems like a good idea and as time goes on, better ways to take corrective action emerge. Dr. Winch makes it clear in his talks that there are self exams and actions that are available that often help a person. The man has 20 years experience working with people who are in emotional pain and upset. He knows strategies that can help but that often don't come to mind, so they aren't used.
His broken heart talk emphasizes that some broken hearts and cases of abrupt, unexpected rejection produce symptoms much like those described in "The Body Keeps the Score" by Besel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist at Harvard who specializes in post traumatic shock disorder. Dr. Winch describes some instances where people were expecting to be married, even the next day, only to be told by their betrothed "No deal, the wedding is off and I am leaving you." Van der Kolk and others make clear that a severe and damaging trauma may occur from an unexpected source.
All the usual things, like being the victim of violence, can certainly be deeply upsetting. Being mistreated as a child, being in severe domestic violence and experiencing horrible events in warfare are often the sort of events that shock and disorient a person. But many other things might be traumatize a person, such traffic accidents. Severe, immediate rejection sounds like it can rock a person's world, too. Dr. Winch has some good practical and useful suggestions for handling psychological shocks and repairing one's feelings. He also has inexpensive books at Amazon on the same subject.
