Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts

I recently suffered from a breakup with somebody I had been dating for almost a year. The timing was not great, as it occurred right when my previous job was ending and I was starting the job-searching process. I quickly realized I was spiraling into depressive tendencies (staying in bed most of the day, ruminating about things my partner did and what she might be doing now), and I decided to try to help myself out of it by buying this book. The major premise of the book is that we should treat our emotional wounds like our bodily wounds: allowing sufficient time to let them heal AND, most importantly, taking special precautions to make sure they don't get worse. If the former part of that statement is a bit of a truism, as some of the other reviewers have noted, I have found Winch's suggestions for the latter part to be on the whole very interesting and helpful. So far I have read the three chapters on Rejection, Loss, and Rumination. The tone of the Rejection chapter is markedly different from the others and, in my opinion, not effective – it sounds like he had a buzzfeed editor insert quips at the end of each paragraph, all of which fall flat. Fortunately, this trend does not continue into the other chapters, which are more serious in tone and I think more comforting (I don't really want somebody making sh@tty jokes about my sadness). Some of the suggestions he makes for rumination (use a third-person perspective instead of a first when remembering events) and for loss (to try to ask yourself why events happened instead of just how they happened) are both novel and research-based. So far, I think this book has achieved what it set out to. It won't be winning any awards, but it will help stock your "emotional medicine cabinet," if you don't have one already.

Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection . .. arrived just as I went through one of the worst experiences covered in the book. It helped me to move from unimaginable pain to peace and its suggestions were very helpful in my efforts to resolve the situation. It's not completely fixed yet - this takes more time, but this book has made me much more comfortable as I move toward a final resolution. I highly recommend it. It's easy to read, has interesting examples and will hit you right where you live. EVERYBODY experiences the situations the author addresses and EVERYBODY can find help from him. It's more than a great start - it can help a person to gain a more comfortable perspective and feel better about himself/herself - the only thing left for me in my awful situation is the mop up.

This is not a book that I would normally read. It was hard for me to digest because it talks about people’s experiences with death, guilt, accidents, etc. These are topics I tend to avoid because my life is happy, and Divinely protected and guided. If you're happy, make sure you have a good self concept of yourself prior to reading this book. When I start reading a book I felt the need to finish. I paced myself only reading 20-30 minutes at a time for a couple days a week. The examples and treatments given to apply psychological wounds are helpful in case you ever come across these wounds yourself or with others. Some of the examples mentioned were familiar to myself and I’m happy I learned how to treat the wound. Overall, this is a good book with solutions for dealing with psychological wounds.

I became curious about Dr. Winch's work after hearing his TED talk, where he spoke with passion and compassion about his vision for a future where people know as much about tending to their emotional and mental health as to their physical health. The world presents more complex (and interesting) challenges today than ever before. The more we can acknowledge the universality of psychological challenges such as rejections, failures and loneliness, the better we can find ways to manage them together. As someone who appreciates learning materials that are easy to apply and reuse, I love the book for its structured, clear and actionable content. Dr. Winch effectively uses anecdotes from his practice to illustrate how to apply the various techniques.

I really liked this. Very practical ways of dealing with life's emotional injuries with lots of compelling patient stories and interesting research studies. I feel like I could send this gift to quite a few of my friends and family that refuse therapy but definitely need it.

I heard the author interviewed on a couple of podcasts and found his approach refreshingly direct, particularly when so many authors/books dealing with emotional issues can be frustratingly abstract. His approach is that we should treat emotional hurt the same way we treat physical hurt. If we burn our hand we know to remove it from the heat source, and can assess whether the burn will heal by itself, if it can be treated at home or if medical assistance is required, and what might happen if we don't treat it at all. Unfortunately few of us are equipped with the skills needed to assess our emotional injuries and treat them accordingly. This book attempts to remedy that in a very practical way. Each chapter covers a specific issue (eg. rejection, rumination, loneliness, guilt, failure) and looks at causes, symptoms and recommended treatments depending on the severity of the 'wound', and suggests when we might need to speak to a professional. It's written in a logical, down to earth, sympathetic way, with plenty of examples from his experience as a therapist to remind you that you're not alone in feeling the way you do. Although his approach is simple, that doesn't make it easy - just reading the book won't "fix" anything. The reader still has to be pro-active and actually apply the treatment methods suggested.... and unfortunately that's often the hard part! But this seems like an excellent companion to help you along your journey to recovery.

Give you a very good overview of mental health and situations that can engulf your life, tools that can have great positive impact on our life

Fue un libro de regalo, por lo que no tengo opinión respecto a su contenido.

I think this book should be in every home just as a first aid kit. It is really eye opening and worth reviewing regularly. It will not only help yourself, but it will also help you to better understand others, therefore improve your interpersonal relationships.

Maybe the best book for those who soffer for rejection, guilt, failure and other everyday hurts! Guy Winch is telling where those problems come from and how to handle them.