Emotional Distress — A Terrible Blog Post #14

Chris Dwan
Sep 8, 2018 · 6 min read
“person sitting on mountain” by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

I coach people through emotional distress daily. Albeit most of them are small people, but children go through a lot of emotional distress, let me tell you! The thing that’s on my mind today is the topic of coaching people through emotional distress.

I’m in the process of writing 300 terrible blog posts. I recently told someone that if someone wanted to write good blog posts, they probably should buckle down and write a whole lot of bad ones. That would short-circuit the mechanism that stops us from beginning because we only want to do it when we can do it well. I like to be a person who does what he says, and it really does seem like a good idea, so here I am.

I can recall a time when I was talking with a colleague in a management position. She was dealing with people who were experiencing some kind of emotional stress and she felt that she had to take action to solve it for them. Her proposed solution was to remove the thing that was causing the stress. I tried to advise her that it wasn’t a good solution and that a better solution was to coach the people experiencing the distress to address it and go through it. Unfortunately she didn’t take my advice and suggested that would be far too hard to do. Perhaps for her it would be?

Somehow I got thinking about that today. On Saturdays our family does a deep clean of our house, so I was literally pondering this while I was scrubbing the kitchen floor. I know that in any normal kind of blog post that wouldn’t be mentioned. I mean, why do you need to know that I was scrubbing the floor? It’s because this is a terrible blog post, Dear Reader. Only good blog posts stick to the topic, but in my blog posts I will interject with as many random thoughts as I want. Keeping it terrible, one post at a time.

I was scrubbing the floor and thinking about why does it seem simple to me to coach people through emotional distress. The first thing that I realized was that I was only able to do it because I have had to learn how to go through emotional distress myself. I know that there are right ways and wrong ways to go through it. I did the wrong ways plenty of times and it was only through self-reflection and seeking for a deep understanding that I was able to learn how to go through it. It still sucks, but it’s OK.

The second thing that I realized is that I have experience helping others through emotional distress. Notably there’s my wife. How could I not go through it with her since she’s my very closest friend and love of my life? There’s also my friends. That’s part of being a good friend after all, to be there when they’re down, to help them process, to lift them up. Then there’s my children.

As a parent, I take it as one of my most important roles in life to teach my children how to go through emotional distress. If they only take away one thing from living under my roof and being coached by me as their parent, then having a little voice in their head that tells them “you’re OK, you can go through this” during times of emotional distress might be one of the best.

Lastly I wondered what I would say if I were to be asked what steps to follow when coaching someone through emotional distress. I’m debating at this point if I should dive right into it or save it for another blog post. If I make this a longer and more interesting post, it would be potentially less terrible. At the same time I really would like to get it out there. Maybe I can cough up an outline and then be done.

Firstly, we shouldn’t just remove the thing that’s causing the emotional distress. Many parents just remove the child from the situation, and managers just step in and deal with the situation. Teach a man to fish and all that. We’re doing them a terrible disservice by removing their opportunity to learn how to deal with it, unless of course there is some kind of real safety concern, but even then we can be too quick to step in.

Secondly, we have to avoid getting entangled in the emotional distress ourselves. It is so easy for me to fly into a rage when one of my kids hurts another one of my kids. I take it personally and them I’m involved in the emotional distress. I will have a much more difficult time helping the other person get out of it.

Thirdly, let’s not tell them to stop feeling upset! This is the worst violation that we parents get caught in, in my opinion. The reason we want them to stop feeling upset is because it’s making us upset. We’re using the ‘make it go away’ strategy which is really us being unwilling to go through it ourselves. We have to model for our children that it’s OK to be upset and show them how to go through it by doing it ourselves. We can’t give what we don’t have.

Practically speaking, the tool I often pull out with my (little) kids when they’re freaking out and screaming is to say “You are allowed to be upset, but if you want to scream and cry you have to do it in your bedroom.” Then when they’ve calmed down, usually the first thing I ask is “Ok, so how did that work out for you, did it get you the thing you wanted? What could you do instead of screaming and crying?”

Once we’ve escaped these first traps of dealing with it then we can help them to sort out the problem for themselves. This is where it gets tricky and I probably need to do more thinking before I ramble on. The main thing I want to get to talking about is observation and interpretation. Someone in emotional distress observed something then interpreted it as distressing. Personally when I see a spider, I don’t find it distressing, but my wife’s skin crawls. She’s interpreted the phenomenon differently from me.

At work, someone might say “your work sucks” and one person will thank the person for the feedback and move on whereas another one will break down in tears. What’s the correct interpretation? I don’t know, but if you help someone to talk through the observation and interpretation then you can help them make some clear decisions on how to respond to the situation. It may be enough to just offer a new interpretation that’s not quite so distressing.

Besides this, there are many other things that you can help a person with like breathing exercises to slow down the anxious thoughts and mindfulness where the person pays attention to the negative emotions and asks them what they are trying to tell them.

The key thing you need to drive towards with someone in distress is to figure out what action that they should take, and maybe help them to take that action if they need help. Sometimes they don’t need to take any action, sometimes they need to take some extreme steps to resolve the situation like contacting the police. You can help them by letting them know they’ve got what it takes to undergo the remedy with grace and by being present to them when they take the steps if necessary.

One way or another, the key thing to do is to help someone go through the emotional distress rather than running from it or trying to kill it and make it go away. The most important thing in those moments, I’ve learned from experience, is to not do something stupid and reactionary. I’m still learning, but like I mentioned the other day, every time I go through it rather than run from it or seek to destroy it, it’s a private victory.

Doing all the Software Development Things for 20 years

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