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 th at follow your construal are called secondary mental responses.Like the construa l themselves, these mental responses influence your feelings and behavior, and y ou should should therefore learn to evaluate them as well. Consider the following story. Stan was upset because Cindy said she was unable t o get together with him as planned, since she had to bring home a lot of work fr om the office. At first, he did not know what to make of her behavior. Was she r eally 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 las thought struck a sensitivity. He kept dwelling on it and reviewing all of her pa st behavior that might give him a clue as to what was going on now. He remembere d that two weeks ago she had been cool to him and seemingly uninterested in anyt hng he said. He also recalled that when he first met her, she wasn't so sure she wanted to go out with him as she was interested in someone else. Maybe she stil l had not given up the other man. He rejected that thought because this other ma n had since married, and Cindy was too practical and too interested in getting m arried to get involved with a married man. The thought occurred to Stan that maybe Cindy had met someonte new. A surge of j ealousy 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 co uld to retain the affectation of that woman, but this best just wasn't good enou gh. "Let's hace it," he thought, "where women are converned, I just don't have i t. I'm a loser." It became evident to him that no woman whom he loved could ever love him. He was destined to be a bechelor and would never have the family life he dreamed about. He would just have to make the best of a lonely existence and derive whatever satisfaction he could from his work. Stand had a restless night and was sad throughout the next day. That evening the phone rang. It was Cindy, sounding very chipper: "Stan, I got my work done fast er 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 co nstrual that Cindy's cancellation of their date meant that she was rejecting him but with his secondary mental responses. His construal wa destructive because t here were alternative interpretations that were at least as plausible and would have been much less disstressing, such as assuming that Cindy was telling the tr uth. His secondary mental responses were no better because he marshaled all the evidence he could to prove to himself not only that he would lose Cindy but that he would be lonely all his life. None of these thoughts were supported by evide nce, and most of them were untestable. Stan is no fool. He has a high IQ. Bur hi s experiential mind surely was not acting in an intelligen manner, for it made h im 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 of mind, that he should give Cindy the benefit of the doubt. Or having made the dee structive construal he did, he could have done some damage control by learning f rom the experience. He could have learned about his sensitivity to rejection and how it interfered with his interpretatio 213