“OH, NO! ” “What if…?
It was just a regular visit to the local playground, watching the children enjoying the equipment and all of the imaginative activities that this environment incites. There was a small cluster of toddlers who had congregated in the sand box and, with the pooling of all of their toys, had managed to dig and pile sand with obvious feelings of pride and accomplishment. The mood of the sand box dramatically changed when one of the children, who had managed to fill individual cups with sand and stack all of the filled cups on top of each other, met with an expected turn of events. She had carefully placed one cup on top of the other as the other children watched. When she placed the fourth cup onto the third, the tower started to teeter, and the inevitable occurred. As the cups toppled to the sand floor, this toddler put her hands on her head and with tears forming in her eyes, with a quivering voice, loudly exclaimed, “OH NO!”
This little girl is thinking that this event is a catastrophe – a tragedy. Her voice and demeanor suggest that she is witnessing a catastrophe. She is thinking that all of her hard work has come to nothing; she may also be thinking that her audience of friends is not going to like her anymore. “I’m never going to be able to build a sand tower ever again! My parents will never let me play in a sand box again. I might as well not ever come back to this playground again.”
How many ‘sandbox’ experiences are common in our lives? Catastrophizing is a frequent ‘thinking error’ that sabotages a healthy response to the way life unfolds. A common saying is: “Making a mountain out of a molehill.” The importance of an event that is unfolding in an unexpected way is exaggerated to be a disaster, or something quite awful. And this disaster is so awful that “I will not be able to cope”.
Catastrophizing often includes the sentence starter: “What if….?”
For example, a teenage daughter’s curfew is midnight. When she does not come through the door at 12:05, her parent is fretting, worrying, and wondering, “Oh, no ….what if she accepted a ride with a careless driver?”; and by 12:10 there are images of paramedics at the scene of the accident. “What if she is seriously injured?”
How do we create a more accurate or realistic response to our sandbox experiences?
- Rather than starting our response with ‘What if….”, we start our response with “What else could be happening?” “What’s another way to think about this event?” We can pause, and open up our minds to other possibilities. Catastrophizing limits our thinking to just the worst–case scenario. When this scared parent makes the shift to other ways of thinking about this situation, the actual truth of the situation is within reach.
- When we examine our thoughts, what is the quality of our evidence that either supports or contradicts our catastrophic thoughts? “She has always been responsible with her choices in friends and drivers”; “She generally comes home on time; she is most likely close to home.”
- Is ‘emotional reasoning’ the impetus for the catastrophizing? Pause, and acknowledge that emotional reasoning is a contradiction of terms. We need to access or reasoning ability – which is using our ‘smart brain’ rather than our ‘reactive brain’. Would you pick stocks based on emotional reasoning?
- Apply the Double Standard strategy – what advice could be given to a good friend if this ‘catastrophic’ story was shared with us?
- We are predicting a catastrophe. What is our current record of accurate predictions? Is this a prediction error rather than a catastrophe?
Just a thought …
From Willow Grove Counselling, Inc.
