A little while ago, I was playing a game with someone and hit a big roadblock. This is a mental/puzzle game that I’m usually pretty good at, but for whatever reason, I kept struggling to get the right answer. I noticed frustration arising, along with worry thoughts that I wouldn’t get it right and would do poorly in the game. Then, my mind went completely blank, and I couldn’t even think. At that point, I noticed sadness and disappointment, a feeling of being stuck, and thoughts that there was no point in continuing, because I’m not going to get it right anyway. I would probably label this experience demoralization.
Demoralization can come in many forms. The experience I describe above could seem trivial, because it just had to do with a game. Not to worry, I am very familiar with demoralization regarding way more significant and stressful life events. Most of us are.
How can we get past demoralization and move forward? With the game, I decided that I had hit a wall, was no longer able to think, and needed a break. Then I realized I didn’t really want to come back to it afterwards, so I had to radically accept that I just wasn’t going to win/finish this time, and I told the person I was playing with that I was done. This was valuable for me, as I can get pretty competitive and feel like I have to win at everything that I do. I sometimes joke that I’m not a perfectionist – I just have to do better than everybody at everything!
Reflecting on the whole thing, other strategies I found helpful were to remind myself of times when I have done well in the past, encourage myself to give the game another try the next time around, and try to understand why I hit the wall on that particular day. Then, I went and engaged in a distracting activity – watching the season finale of one of my favourite shows.
In DBT, we often help people understand their behavior using an assessment strategy called chain analysis. To do an effective chain analysis for demoralization, you have to identify (a) vulnerability factors that made you particularly likely to get stuck on a particular day, (b) prompting events that set the occasion for being demoralized, (c) thoughts, emotions, and sensations, (d) actions, and (e) consequences. The other evening, I would say that the vulnerability factors were having had a long day of Zoom meetings, going to visit a loved one who was struggling, feeling tired, and eating later than usual. The prompting event was not guessing correctly on the game after my fifth try. The emotions, thoughts, sensations, and actions were already described above. The consequences were a combination of sadness and disappointment, a little embarrassment about having performed so poorly, and relief about being done with the whole thing.
Once you understand the chain of events that led up to feeling stuck or demoralized, you might find that it is understandable that you ended up where you were on that particular day. Maybe it makes perfect sense that you were having a hard time, it doesn’t mean you’re always going to be stuck every time, and there’s something you can do about it next time around.
~Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.