by Mark Willis, Stake Mental / Emotional Support Specialist

This month I reviewed a TED Talk by Psychologist Guy Winch titled “Why we all need to practice emotional first aid” where he shares examples of how once we become convinced of something it can be very difficult to be open to something new or other changes in our minds.

While being deeply convinced and convicted of things can be good when we are seeking for and being converted to Truth, it can be damaging when we apply the same level of certainty to personal messages about our failures, loneliness, and rejection (or other untruths). 

Unpackaging loneliness itself, which many of us may have felt a heightened sense of in the past 18 months, Guy Winch said,

“Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It makes us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? “

Due to loneliness, fear, rejection, abandonment, and perceived failures, it is natural for each of us to begin seeing life through a lens that is skewed and distorted compared to what it had looked like when things were “rosier” in our lives.   Telling ourselves or others to simply move on, move forward, or to just forget the past can be foolish and damaging to real healing and recovery.   From Guy Winch again:

” We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don’t. It doesn’t even occur to us that we should. ‘Oh, you’re feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it’s all in your head.’ Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: ‘Oh, just walk it off; it’s all in your leg.'”


Painted in that light, it’s simple to see that when we hurt inside where no one can see, do you still have past injuries that need to be taken care of by qualified help?  

We may fear that getting help means we are weak or that someone else will learn something about us that we’ve never wanted to share. Yet, keeping things inside can perpetuate the isolation and beliefs that because we feel feelings we don’t like, we are bad, broken, or worthless individuals ourselves.  

With a team of qualified individuals and my Savior, I have been mucking out the corners of my emotional baggage. It is becoming easier to rewrite the stories of my past and respond to present experiences without shame. I am finding that I am more able to lean into the future because I am more free to hear the voice of truth instead of a blurred vision of someone else’s truth for me.  May each of us pray for and seek out help for the wounds within us so that we are more able to withstand the buffetings around us without living a try-harder, do-more, or just-keep-going attitude.