Like daily physical exercise builds physical strength, daily meeting well our basic emotional need builds emotional strength, self-confidence, and optimism. The easiest way we can do this is taking time for involving ourselves in talking with our friends. How daily talking can build emotional strength, by meeting well our basic emotional need, was well exemplified by a combat veteran who had a most remarkable experience of enduring severe combat conditions without becoming a psychiatric casualty. He was a highly decorated WW2 veteran who had spent much time in a frontline infantry squad. With this squad, he was frequently ordered to go on night patrol in order to determine the map co-ordinates where the enemy was concentrated. He told me how he could kill an enemy soldier at night without that person uttering a sound. When I asked if he felt his job was extremely stressful, knowing that he, himself, would have been similarly killed if he were discovered first by the enemy, he told me he never once felt his night patrols were more stressful than he could handle. He said, “I felt I was just doing my job like everyone else in my squad was doing.” He even admitted that at times he took pleasure in his work, for he told me that once they had located where the enemy armor was, the map co-ordinates would then be conveyed to the artillery, and “the next morning they would blow the place to Hell, and that made me feel good knowing it was because of me and my buddies that made it all possible.”
This person’s talking within his squad, and the resulting camaraderie, met well his basic emotional need even though the circumstances of his army life on the front lines would seem so unimaginably frustrating to anyone’s basic emotional need. Severely deprived of the comforts of home, as he was on the front lines, separated by thousands of miles from his loved ones, and living in constant danger, he and his squad contended very well with the stress they were under. He admitted they were a “cocky” bunch that, together, felt they could handle anything night or day, as well, if not better, than any other infantry squad “on the line.” What might have appeared as massive frustrations of anyone’s basic emotional need, weren’t perceived as such. How that could only be, was because of the great amount of emotional strength these soldiers developed. Their on-going talking within their squad gave them a high level of emotional strength to contend with adversities that one would think would greatly increase anyone’s unmet basic emotional need. No one in their squad had any earlier army training in “building confidence,” “developing psychological coping skills,” “learning stress management,” “building resilience,” or “learning to avoid becoming a psychiatric casualty.” They accomplished what they did in combat with their emotional strength, which came from the talking they did with each other. Without that resulting high level of emotional strength that these soldiers had, they wouldn’t have been able to exist without developing disabling emotional problems of one kind or another. The talking these soldiers did with each other created large emotional attachments, recognizably bonding them closely with each other, and building emotional strength. Why their emotional attachments were large ones was because their interpersonal relationship sphere for meeting their basic emotional need was pretty much limited to the infantry squad, and to no one else. This wasn’t a reality situation one commonly finds in civilian life where interpersonal relationship spheres are usually larger, so that one can better spread out the meeting of the basic emotional need, and the getting rid of stored anger. When this person left the service, he didn’t become involved in any extended talking with friends, like he had been in his infantry squad, for he told me he didn’t have the time, and that things were often such between his wife and him that weren’t always conducive to doing much talking with each other. For him, it was like discontinuing any daily physical exercising because of not having the inclination, the time, the means, or the opportunities for it, and having, as a direct result, a dramatic decrease in physical strength.
The reason this veteran came to see me was because he had lost that high level of emotional strength that he had on the front lines when he was daily engaged in talking with his buddies. When I first saw him, he had a job at a nearby latex plant making women’s pantyhose and came to see me because of the stress he was feeling in his job. He got over that stress by meeting a lot of what was unmet of his basic emotional need in the extended talking he did with me. There was no teaching him how to handle stress, or how to build “resilience,” or having him “learn coping skills.” Just getting him to talk was all that was necessary for him to regain his emotional strength, because with that talking and my listening, he met much of what was unmet of his basic emotional need. With a much better met basic emotional need, resulting in more emotional strength, what had seemed so stressful before at the pantyhose factory, no longer was. What made the difference was the amount of emotional strength he now had. I never had to tell him that. When he discontinued with me, he felt he knew what the reason was that he no longer felt stress at work. He told me that things had changed at the plant, and there was no longer the stress that there was before. But it could have been a lot more that his perception of stress had changed with his gaining more emotional strength from his talking to me, so that what he had previously seen as so stressful was no longer seen as such, and a lot less that things had really changed at his plant. If it were more this “change of perception,” and less the reality of his work situation, his explanation might have been a little like saying that a flight of stairs you couldn’t go up before with less physical strength, that you now can go up with no difficulty with more physical strength, is because the flight of stairs became shorter and less steep.
One can see the same beneficial results from talking, in people who have very stressful jobs in civilian life. Firemen, policemen, paramedics, and people that work in hospital emergency rooms, are just a few of the great number of people who have very stressful jobs. These people can handle the stress of their jobs easier when they have opportunity to regularly engage in talking with those with whom they work. Mothers, who don’t work outside their homes, but who have to contend with the sustained stress of raising multiple children, handle that stress better when they have opportunity to be involved in regularly occurring talking with other mothers, which can come about for any reason to get together to talk. By talking with others, many of these people, who have stressful jobs of one kind or another, feel emotionally close to those with whom they talk regularly. They develop that same “band of brothers” feeling that is characteristic of any closely-knit infantry squad in combat, regardless of what side of the war the squad is on. It’s the on-going talking of people that can meet what might be uncomfortably unmet of their basic emotional need that increases their emotional strength. What stresses they might then encounter are less likely to be seen as insurmountable, or that they have to be faced alone. Stresses, like losses, disappointments, “hurts,” or pain, seem to decrease in size