Stop Overreacting

by Judith Siegel

  Envy at Work

  It would be fair to say that competition breeds envy. Who wouldn’t want to be acknowledged for doing an excellent job or given a promotion? Even when money isn’t at stake, coworkers bristle when only one person is acknowledged or one person takes the credit for other people’s work. Sometimes being appreciated and recognized is as important as a financial reward.

  Just as your family had its own way of allowing or curtailing sibling rivalry, the company you work for has its own culture. Some organizations thrive on competition and believe that it brings out the best in people. While it is true that the desire to win creates inspiration and encourages attention to detail, there is an emotional cost that is rarely recognized. Just as some children become aggressive and retaliate against siblings, employees can turn against a coworker who is unfairly rewarded. Malicious envy at work can take many forms, including backstabbing, harmful gossip, and undercutting the “opponent” at every opportunity. Even when a coworker appears to be handling things maturely, he may be trying to sabotage his competition at every opportunity. If your work environment allows that kind of behavior, it is very difficult to maintain a sense of group cooperation. The confidence that comes from being part of a team goes out the window and is replaced by a sense of mistrust. Instead of being able to concentrate on the job, you may find that too much of your energy is wasted on interpersonal dynamics.

  In the face of unguided competition, some people back away from the heat and withdraw. However, this response can be equally damaging to the work environment. Have you ever worked with someone who seems sour about your group or the entire company? Envying others can lead to feelings of being treated unfairly and being powerless to change a situation (Vecchio 2000). A person who believes she will never get the recognition or advancement that others get may feel resentful and demoralized. This kind of response can be contagious, as it cramps everyone’s enthusiasm and expectation that a job well done will be rewarded. Working with someone who is pessimistic and cynical makes it difficult to maintain your own positive energy, as your efforts are made to seem a complete waste of time. An entire team can be brought down this way.

  Tolerating Envy

  A thoughtful response to envy involves recognizing the emotional experience as it unfolds. In response to the trigger, you might feel a sudden tension in your chest or stomach and become aware of muscles tightening in your neck, back, or hands. You might be aware of feeling angry, deprived, resentful, neglected, or diminished and find it difficult to focus on anything else. Rather than allowing your thoughts and feelings to take over, put your energy into getting centered. As you register the thoughts and feelings that have been created, acknowledge that you have been stimulated to feel envy.

  To put the situation into perspective, scan for incidents from the past that may have resurfaced. When feelings are stronger than the immediate situation calls for, chances are you are flooded with old emotional memories. Some of your old beliefs and schemas are probably complicating or even distorting your appraisal and expectations.

  Separating Past from Present

  While the emotional memories that are in your file cabinet are unique to you, we all had childhood experiences that created envy. The better you understand your own sensitivities, the more quickly you can recognize a feeling from the past that has been reactivated. Once childhood memories spring into action, we start thinking and acting like we did when we were younger. When that happens, we strip ourselves of the power and ability we possess, as adults, to analyze a situation. The less clearly we understand the power of these past emotional memories, the more quickly they can invade the moment and add to the pain of the current experience.

  Processing the Emotion of Envy

  When you are in the middle of an episode that creates envy, the situation may seem intolerable. One way to manage this is to activate the thinking part of your brain along with the emotional part. Remember, your amygdala will lose power if you can become thoughtful and aware. To help accomplish this, consider these questions:

  Are you reacting mainly to the injustice? (“It isn’t fair!”)

  Are you reacting mainly to thinking you have no power? (“There’s nothing I can do about it.”)

  Are you reacting mainly to feeling left behind or left out? (“I never get the good stuff.”)

  Once you know which aspects of the situation disturb you the most, ask yourself if your point of view might be somewhat skewed. When we are in the middle of a situation, we usually lose sight of the bigger picture and give too much weight to the situation at hand. It often helps if we can reestablish our perspective.

  Reestablishing Perspective

  Part of solving your dilemma is trying to regain perspective. To do this, consider these questions:

  What are the things in life that you value the most? How does this incident relate to those key things?

  Are you blowing up the importance of something that, when all is considered, isn’t that huge?

  Are you assuming that losing out one time will have permanent or irreversible consequences?

  Why do you believe that there will never be another opportunity to make things better for yourself?

  Are you splitting (seeing things as either all good or all bad)? Do you think that you never get the things you deserve or want? Are you only remembering the other times that you lost out and forgetting times that worked in your favor? Are you viewing the person you envy as only or always getting the good stuff?

  Remember, envy is a normal emotion. It’s not wrong to experience envy, but focusing on your situation in this way won’t help you solve it. Once you identify that you are experiencing envy, you have taken the first step toward taking control of a response that can be damaging to you and others. Aggressive or malicious competition and cynical or helpless pessimism are painful and need to be challenged. If you let your childhood response style take over, you will lose the opportunity to use your feelings to solve the problem in a thoughtful way.

  Being able to put things in perspective will help you calm down. Remember, the amygdala is activated when you perceive a threat. If you are flooded with old emotional memories, it is almost impossible to evaluate the present situation on its own.

  When you are able to separate old schemas and memories from the present situation, your emotional intensity will diminish. However, the point of resolving an overreaction is not just to restore calm. Sometimes, envy awakens us to a problem that truly needs to change. When we are able to thoughtfully acknowledge how important something is, we can get out of a stuck position and consider different ways to create changes. Usually, we have more options than we are aware of in the middle of an intense emotional episode. Once you are able to calmly consider your situation, there may be lots of productive things that you can and should do.

  Thoughtful Responses

  Things that may help resolve a situation that produces envy include the following:

  Talk to other people who care and can offer support and encouragement. You are not just looking for sympathy but want to remember that there are people who truly care about you and your happiness.

  Identify a new goal or opportunity to get what you want. Once you identify that new target, give yourself a pep talk to generate confidence that it is doable.

  Evaluate whether you have been caught up in goals that were created by others versus values that you have defined for yourself. It is so easy to be influenced to want things that you really don’t need and to forget that you have found a formula for contentment that works just fine for you.

  Finally, even though it may not seem related, spend time helping others who have less. Envy is quickly put into perspective when we see how truly lucky we are.

  End-of-Chapter Exercises

  It is almost impossible to grow up without experiencing childhood envy. Many of these deep emotional memories have been buried because they were too intense and uncomfortable for you to stay in touch with. As you think about your child
hood, you may once again feel some of that original discomfort. Although this may be difficult, it is a worthwhile challenge if you take it in small steps. Remember, your body will signal you when you feel danger. If that happens to you during this exercise, or while you are reading any part of this book, stop reading and just jot down one sentence in your journal that captures what you were thinking; there will be time to return to any of the themes that are particularly difficult for you. Your goal is to learn ways of processing difficult emotions so that they lose the power they once held. You can choose how much to take on at any one time, knowing that it makes sense to become comfortable with a small emotional memory rather than allowing yourself to get flooded with too much information.

  Exercise 1: Your Childhood Envy

  To better understand your vulnerabilities, ask yourself the following questions. See if you can remember a specific incident that “proves” your point. Write down as much as you remember.

  What talents or attributes were most prized in your family? Where were you ranked?

  Did you get your fair share of recognition for other talents or attributes?

  What things could your siblings do better than you could? How were they rewarded?

  Who was your mother’s favorite child? Why do you think that?

  Who was your father’s favorite child? Why do you think that?

  When you think about the details of past incidents, you unleash the emotional memories that accompany them. Don’t be surprised or uncomfortable if envy was one of the feelings you experienced. I would like to give you permission to acknowledge the feeling of envy so that you can spend some time understanding it better. Ultimately, I would like to help you identify and challenge the ingredients of envy that are most painful for you. Perhaps you are uncomfortable with feeling powerless or deprived. Perhaps the response of wishing harm on someone you love makes you feel frightened or guilty. By exploring your unique response to childhood and family memories, you have taken an important step toward acknowledging the powerful emotional memories that can invade the present when you are least expecting them. Your ability to identify the old experiences will make it much easier for you to do the exercises in later chapters that are designed to help you loosen the power of those experiences.

  Exercise 2: Sorting Out Goals and Ambitions

  While the preceding exercise helped you understand how envy can stem from childhood experiences, it is also helpful to identify ambitions that were formed when you were young but that still hold power. Many of our aspirations are based on magical thinking, fantasies, and definitions of happiness that are presented to us through the media. When we were children, we were easily impressed and allowed fiction to shape our own beliefs and goals. As adults, we develop a more realistic and mature understanding of what is truly important to us. Your answers to the following questions may help you sort out the differences.

  Complete the following phrases based on the way you remember thinking when you were younger.

  1. When I was in middle school, I wanted (very much, somewhat, not at all) to…

  be on a TV show or on the news.

  be rich enough to buy anything I wanted.

  be the person in charge.

  have my own office and put my feet up on the desk.

  have everyone admire me.

  win or be on the team that wins a national trophy.

  get a standing ovation from a large crowd.

  be as beautiful as a movie star.

  have the latest and best clothes, cars, and games.

  Complete the following phrases based on the way you think now.

  2. Now that I am an adult, it’s (very much, somewhat, not at all) important to…

  be as healthy as I can be.

  make sure that the people I love have what they need to be safe and healthy.

  do the kind of work that I am best suited for.

  have financial security so that I don’t have to worry about paying the rent.

  have opportunities to work out, play sports, and do the hobbies I love.

  have time to spend with my friends and family.

  be able to plan for vacations that will let me do things I don’t ordinarily get to do.

  buy the clothes that look the best on me and are easy to take care of.

  If you can’t see the differences in priorities, try completing phrases from part 2 from the vantage point of your preadolescent self, and phrases from part 1 from your present perspective. Most people find that the things they learn to value have little to do with the things they coveted when they were young. And yet the beliefs that were formed during childhood continue to influence us. When a childhood ambition is sparked, we may momentarily revert to the things that we once believed would make us happy. Winning and fame may be prizes that children see on the media, but they rarely bring the long-term contentment that adults learn to cherish.

  Chapter 7

  Rejection

  The need for group membership is hardwired in all of us and serves to ensure survival of the species. Human infants are helpless and depend completely on adults for survival. Even adults are programmed to live communally in order to survive. Perhaps that is why the experience of being rejected is one of the most unbearable triggers of emotional overreaction.

  The Pain of Rejection

  Most of us have experienced some form of rejection, whether it was a failed romance, soured friendship, failure to make a team, or loss of a job opportunity to someone else. You might agree with the saying that “rejection is painful” and remember having physical symptoms along with the disappointment. Research in brain functions actually confirms that the brain experiences social rejection in the same way that it processes physical pain. Drs. Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman (2004) have shown that the receptors for rejection are strongly connected to the part of the brain that detects physical injury. These scientists speculate that pain teaches us to avoid making the same mistake twice. Just as we learn not to touch the hot stove once we’ve been burned, we are motivated by a painful rejection to do things differently in order to avoid further rejection.

  Early Experiences with Rejection

  All triggers activate belief systems that can serve as fuel for the fire or as a balm to help us calm down. For that reason, it is important for you to consider some of your early experiences with rejection. Experiences that were the most difficult, or that happened repeatedly, have the potential to be reactivated years later.

  Peer Rejection

  Many of us experience a form of rejection at school. Part of growing up is learning to function on our own without a parent or sibling to help us communicate our needs and work things out. For many of us, starting school was one of the earliest times when we were left on our own to deal with a large group of other children our own age. While many of us think of school as the place where we learned how to read and write, being at school taught us other lessons as well. School-age children learn how to make friends, how to stand up to the scrutiny of others, how to manage interpersonal conflict, and, all too often, how to deal with exclusion.

  Social standing is very important to children as they learn to evaluate other children and recognize their own worth in the eyes of others. Even when children feel completely accepted by loving family members, they must learn to face the process of being scrutinized and judged by their peers. For most of us, this early school experience was the first time that personal differences were identified and brought to our attention. Suzy may never have thought twice about wearing her older sister’s clothes until one of her classmates makes a joke about the way she looks in hand-me-downs. Robby may have adjusted easily to wearing eyeglasses like his parents and elder brothers and not understand being taunted by a classmate who calls him “four eyes.” But when Suzy and Robby realize that others are laughing at them or refusing to let them join their play group, they will have their first experience of shame and social rejection.

  Childhood Shame

  Bei
ng shamed by others is a particularly uncomfortable feeling. Years ago, psychoanalyst Eric Erikson (1950) recognized the psychological harm created by shame. In school, children judge others as being desirable or undesirable. The way that you handled this process when you were younger is likely tied to the level of self-esteem you possess now as an adult. Group acceptance and exclusion seem to peak in middle school, when preadolescent children are creating their identity beyond their family. Despite efforts to curb bullying, children are routinely victimized by classmates and often suffer lifelong emotional scars from it.

  Just as children react to envy by either becoming aggressive or withdrawing, they react to social rejection with the same two major response patterns. In the face of rejection, a child might become enraged and turn aggressively against the child who is attempting to spurn her. She might also take out her anger on a different child or even reject someone else in order to make someone else the victim. A different child might react in an entirely different way and accept the rejection and humiliation, believing that he is worthless. Typically, that kind of child will withdraw and become very sad or even depressed. Both responses have the potential to become dangerous—to the child, as well as to others. Research on the students who commit or attempt school massacres shows that they have been socially rejected by others and made to feel shamed (Leary, Twenge, and Quinlivan 2006).

  Carrying Shame into Adulthood

  Dr. Brene Brown (2006) speaks of the intensely painful sense of being flawed and therefore unworthy of belonging. To Brown, the worst part of shame is the way it makes a person feel trapped and isolated, as if she is the only one who is different and unacceptable. Because of self-doubt and the sense of not fitting in, many women who have experienced rejection eventually turn to alcohol or drugs as a way to numb themselves from the excessive pain. For this reason, Brown believes that women who are substance abusers need to confront the vestiges of shame in order to get past the lingering emotions.