Healthy Alternatives to Negative Emotions

Professor Windy Dryden is an Emeritus of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmiths University and a UK based REBT psychotherapist. In his book ‘Transforming eight deadly emotions into healthy ones’, he shares how negative emotions are a natural response to life’s adversities and how feeling a positive emotion about an adversity is largely unhelpful.  Here’s a closer look at depression and hurt…   

DEPRESSION
When an individual feels depressed, it is because the thoughts they are having are depressive thoughts such as: “I can’t cope, there is no point in trying, and things are hopeless”. The theme for depression is loss or failure – in the sense of our motivation, drive, and energy.  The behaviors include withdrawing from reinforcements and to withdraw into oneself. According to Dryden, the healthy emotion of depression is sadness.  

Sadness can be a helpful and an appropriate emotion because the thoughts associated with sadness allows the individual to understand the situation, loss, and failure, but at the same time focus on the future. For example; “Although I struggle with this, I can give it a try, things do and can improve, and they have done in the past and can do so again”. These thoughts are based on evidence such as our experiences in life. Sadness allows the individual to help themselves and consider the future with hope.  

Activity: Try writing down thoughts you have when you are feeling depressed, and try thinking about what a friend would say to you and how you can make that thought more helpful to you for the situation. 

HURT 
The theme of hurt, according to Dryden, is when ‘someone has treated you insensitively or badly and it has been ‘undeserving’. When some individual experiences the emotion ‘hurt’, it is because their thoughts tend to be overestimating the unfairness of the other person’s behavior; the other person is showing a lack of care or indifference, self is alone, not cared for, or misunderstood and the individual tends to think of past ‘hurts’. Thinking in this way leads to shutting down communication channels and criticizing the other person without disclosing what one feels hurt about.  

The healthy emotion to feeling hurt is disappointment. Disappointment still has the theme; however, the thinking differs. With disappointment, the individual thinks realistically about the degree of unfairness of the other person’s behavior and is perceived as acting badly rather than uncaring or indifferent, and behaviors include communicating one’s feelings to the other directly and to influence the other person to act in a fairer manner.   

Activity: Try and identify what events tend to make you feel hurt. What are your strong negative thoughts? How could you think alternatively about this, so it is more helpful to you? 

(Credit: Mandeep Jassal, Cognitive and Behavioral and Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing Practitioner)