supply what she has lost—the capacity to control her own thoughts. Unless
you want to become a permanent appendage to her brain, you need to
help Rachel find some control within herself. Here are some ideas:
THINK FIRST. As with all emotional explosions, the first thing you need
to do is switch off your automatic pilot. You want to help Rachel, but as
we have seen with Jane, helping doesn’t necessarily mean doing exactly
what Rachel or you feellike doing. To be truly helpful, you have to step
outside of social conventions and do the unexpected.
The expected response—being nice—might be to sit there and lis-
ten while Rachel complains, hoping that if she gets the emotions off her
chest she’ll feel better. When she finally winds down, you might try a lit-
tle reassurance, explaining how whatever she did isn’t all that bad, that
everybody makes mistakes. You might consider pointing out some of the
positive things she’s accomplished on the job and in the rest of her life,
and giving her a little advice about what she could do to make her situa-
tion better.
Big mistake. Whatever you say, Rachel will think of a reason why it
isn’t true or won’t help. The conversation that you hoped would last a few
minutes can drag on for an hour and never seem to go anywhere. Even-
tually, Rachel will start to feel better, but your kindness and understand-
ing may become addictive, making it likely that she’ll be back the next
time she needs a shoulder to cry on. Somehow, her problems will become
your problems.
And you were only trying to help.
Even if this is the first time Rachel has appeared at your door in tears,
when she sobs out that she never does anything right, you can be pretty
sure that whatever happened has already become a part of the endless
series of failures and disappointments already playing in her mind. To help
her in a meaningful way, you need to get her to stop the cycle of rumina-
tion and focus on the specific situation. You can’t do this by passively lis-
tening.
IGNORE TEARS. This is easy to say but hard to do. Tears have instinctive
power to command action. But just because they command, it doesn’t
mean you have to obey. When people cry, we want to protect them as if
The Blast Zone ❧ 17