When and where

Like medical first aid, emotional first aid offers help but not necessarily cure. Nor does it offer advice on further treatment. Since emotional distress is not a sickness, there is no need to assume a person needs further help once the distress has been relieved. The person can make his or her own decisions about the need for some kind of therapy (see Chapter 9).

EFA is most appropriate where there is already a relationship, since it requires contact and caring. In any good personal relationship, of friend with friend, or parent with child, emotional support is already being given. If distress occurs, the support may turn easily toward emotional first aid without any verbal 'contract' being necessary.

A contract can be as simple as an offer to help and its acceptance by word or gesture. Even among friends it may be best to start with such a contract. In a counseling, teaching, or work situation, where the boundaries of involvement may not have been clearly established, such a contract is always necessary before the further involvement that EFA represents.

The person in distress may spontaneously ask for help. Even here it is best not to rush in. The following section lists some of the dangers.

Invasion

Invasion may occur when the helper loses sight of the distressed person's need. The helper presses his or her own need, and the person becomes a victim. It is as if someone cleaning out a shallow wound dug in with a knife. A problem with EFA is that its abuses are not so obvious as in medical first aid. We are not used to really observing emotions, let alone managing them. And when we do, our observation is often blurred by our own emotional blocks. But some common invasions can be identified:

—unasked for help, given when there is not already a personal relationship or a contract that would permit any gesture, such as touching or holding, which the EFA requires.

—programming the distressed person, manipulating them into what the helper decides is the most acceptable emotion. —doing therapy. This includes taking measures to increase the tension of the situation, deepening the emotion to breaking point, and delving into private details. All this is best left to a therapeutic context that the person has contracted for.

—faking concern. Doing EFA with a person whom you dislike is an invasion, an intrusion of falseness into the person's already difficult situation.

—relentless contact. There is a natural pulsation in human interaction, between contact and withdrawal. Relentless contact, not letting go for one minute—of eye contact, talking, touching, or whatever the medium of contact is—is ultimately hypnotic and controlling.

—stickiness, smothering. A kind of relentless contact where either the helper's own need for contact is taking over, or some of his or her own resentment is being covered up.

'Third-party emotions'

An important limitation to emotional first aid is that it can only be valid for 'third-party emotions.' That is, if you have caused the emotion, you cannot help adequately if it causes distress. You cannot remain objective, and your motives will be" suspect. In the cases of grief and fear, if these emotions in someone else result from something you have done or provoked, your attempts to help may seem sadistic. In the case of rage, you will simply be joining battle with the person.

This leaves a wide range of situations where your help can be needed, where emotional distress is clearly related to situations for which you are not responsible. There is inevitably a middle area, where the other person is upset by a situation in which you are partly involved, or in which you share but are less upset. In such cases, you can only help validly if you are confident of being able to maintain enough emotional distance to respect the basic guidelines for noninvasion.

The helper's motives

Why are you reading this book?

You might ask yourself this question and try to follow it through honestly, in particular searching for the irrational elements in your interest in EFA. If you analyze these irrational elements, this will not get rid of them, but they will at least come out of hiding and you may then become more aware of the rational elements in your interest: no matter how many irrational elements you identify, rational elements will remain. It is useful to know them also.

By irrational I mean such personal 'trips' as needing to be a savior, to be kind, to be powerful, to be a calm rescuer—and especially to be seen doing these things. There is no shame in this. Many good therapists have begun as 'rescuers' (for example, fulfilling an old need to rescue a martyred mother), just as many good parents of children have begun their families to make up for a lack of love in their own childhood. None of us is completely clear of these kinds of motives. But it helps to identify them, since they will influence emotional contact. The danger is that a distressed person becomes, at the emotional level, someone from your past, so your action becomes inappropriate.

It may help to ask yourself questions about what kind of emotional support or help you yourself have received in the past, and what kind you might need now. What kind of 'help' do you most dislike?, and so on. It is useful to discuss these issues with a friend who will give you some perspective on yourself.

The contact cycle

If two people are in contact during a shared task or a conversation, the contact need not lead to a more deep interpersonal involvement since the presence of a third element, the task or discussion, channels the energy outward. In medical first aid, the physical condition of the distressed person becomes such a third element, as does the conflict or emotional expression of a client in therapy. Much therapy follows the rhythm of a contact cycle: contact, intensification, release, resolution. For example, a therapist may start by making contact with the client's problem or conflict, then encourage its intensification to the point that forces a release of whatever has been blocking the resolution that is now able to follow. Throughout this cycle, the therapist must be in contact with the client but, at the same time, keep a certain distance so as to retain some objective judgement of what the client is capable of in the particular session. If a therapist becomes emotionally involved with a client, the therapy goes astray because this objective concentration on a third element, the client's conflict or problem, becomes lost. What is necessary, in therapy and in EFA, is emotional response without emotional involvement.

Contact between two people in which there is no concentration of attention on a third element leads automatically to increased excitation. If you try maintaining eye contact with another person, while not staring, allowing yourself to blink normally, and at the same time you do not restrain your breathing, it is probable that an impulse will emerge toward further contact or emotional expression. You may get angry, or want to embrace the person, to cry, to run away, or to begin some kind of joint activity that will draw the increasing energy off into external movement. Or you may feel increasing anxiety and a sense of constriction as your organism rejects the excitement or emotion. Normally, the contact cycle tends to impose itself automatically when there is no third element. For example, in the case of lovers or of parents and their children, the contact between two organisms can intensify into an embrace and a release of emotion or pleasure. Spontaneous intensification of contact to the point of emotional release also occurs among friends or in special situations such as partings and meetings.

It is important to keep a certain distance during EFA. This is not coldness. You can still be caring, communicate tenderness, and remain in touch with your own emotions. But if the helping situation is lost sight of, and you abandon yourself to unrestrained contact with the distressed person, your problems will take as much space as theirs. You may end up crying together, fighting, making love, or clinging to each other. There is nothing wrong with any of these reactions in themselves. But EFA presupposes that one person is in distress and the other is helping, and once a contract has been made, it requires that you maintain some objectivity.

It may be particularly dangerous to apply any intensifying measures to children or adolescents, who are not as well protected by experience as adults are. Invasion risks harmful consequences. This may be true of many adults as well. Never underestimate a person's vulnerability, even if it is covered over by rage or hardness.

Deliberate intensification measures are not recommended in EFA. But a spontaneous process of intensification of either then emotion or the resistance to it is to be expected if you enter into contact with the person. It is not to be feared. In the chapters on basic emotions, ways will be discussed of handling this intensification and channeling it toward release and resolution.

Maintaining contact

Your capacity to stay in contact with the person and the situation depends on your character structure and your habitual response to emergency. Whatever your structure, however, the signs of increasing nervousness or anxiety tend to be: a diminishing capacity for eye contact, tightness of the breathing, and unsteadiness on the feet if you are standing up.

Eyes. If you feel panicky or your eyes are tending to mist over, move your gaze away from the person and back a few times, and make sure you are blinking normally.

Breathing. If you feel constricted in chest or abdomen, you may be holding your breath or breathing more shallowly than usual. Try to allow your breathing to move in your abdomen as a base, then extend it gently up into your chest so that your ribs move with each breath.

Ground. If you feel shaky on your feet, make sure your knees are unlocked, adopt a more 'ape-like' stance in which you can feel a certain springiness in your knees and more contact with the ground.

Then turn your attention back to the other person. This attention, if it is calm and yet not remote, constant and yet not relentless or overwhelming, is in itself a large part of EFA.

Some don'ts:

Don't invade

Don't initiate (Help unblock what is happening, don't make something new happen.)

Don't interpret (Leave analysis for later, if at all.)

Don't redirect (Don't decide that a given expression is incorrect and try to replace it by another.)

Don't 'overcharge' (Don't try to raise a level of excitation that is already difficult to handle.)

Don't prohibit (Unless there is physical danger, let the person's organism find its own way, using EFA to lead the way where necessary.)

Don't condescend (We are all somewhat like children in our emotional expressions. But a superior view of the distressed person as childish is of no value. Remember that you too have many childlike emotions.)

The basic rule

Finally, the basic rule of all EFA must be: Never try to help

a person to express an emotion that you yourself are not able to express.