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EVALUATING SECONDARY MENTAL RESPONSES

Once you have construed an event, you further reactions will be to the construal, not to the event irself. As explained in the previous chapter, the thoughts that follow your construal are called secondary mental responses.Like the construal themselves, these mental responses influence your feelings and behavior, and you should should therefore learn to evaluate them as well.

Consider the following story. Stan was upset because Cindy said she was unable to get together with him as planned, since she had to bring home a lot of work from the office. At first, he did not know what to make of her behavior. Was she really that busy? Was she being inconsiderate by putting her interests before his? Was she giving him the brush-off because she had found someone else? That lasthought struck a sensitivity. He kept dwelling on it and reviewing all of her past behavior that might give him a clue as to what was going on now. He remembered that two weeks ago she had been cool to him and seemingly uninterested in anythng he said. He also recalled that when he first met her, she wasn't so sure shewanted to go out with him as she was interested in someone else. Maybe she still had not given up the other man. He rejected that thought because this other man had since married, and Cindy was too practical and too interested in getting married to get involved with a married man.

The thought occurred to Stan that maybe Cindy had met someonte new. A surge of jealousy swept over him. He was reminded of another woman he had lost to someone

else, and this made him feel defeated and helpless. He had done everything he could to retain the affectation of that woman, but this best just wasn't good enough. "Let's hace it," he thought, "where women are converned, I just don't have it. I'm a loser." It became evident to him that no woman whom he loved could everlove him. He was destined to be a bechelor and would never have the family lifehe dreamed about. He would just have to make the best of a lonely existence andderive whatever satisfaction he could from his work.

Stand had a restless night and was sad throughout the next day. That evening thephone rang. It was Cindy, sounding very chipper: "Stan, I got my work done faster than I thought possible. Could you come over for dinner? I'd love to see you.

Stand had caused himself a lot misery, not only with his intitial destructive construal that Cindy's cancellation of their date meant that she was rejecting himbut with his secondary mental responses. His construal wa destructive because there were alternative interpretations that were at least as plausible and wouldhave been much less disstressing, such as assuming that Cindy was telling the truth. His secondary mental responses were no better because he marshaled all theevidence he could to prove to himself not only that he would lose Cindy but thathe would be lonely all his life. None of these thoughts were supported by evidence, and most of them were untestable. Stan is no fool. He has a high IQ. Bur his experiential mind surely was not acting in an intelligen manner, for it made him die a thousand deaths unnecessessarily.

A more constructive approach would have been for Stan to reassess his construal,

recognize that it lacked supporting evidence, and decide, for his own peace ofmind, that he should give Cindy the benefit of the doubt. Or having made the deestructive construal he did, he could have done some damage control by learning from the experience. He could have learned about his sensitivity to rejection andhow it interfered with his interpretatio 213