WHAT DO I DO WITH MY DISTRESS?

In my own life and thoughts, I am sometimes prone to catastrophizing or doom spiraling. Something difficult, painful, or simply uncomfortably unexpected occurs in an area of my life that I care about deeply, and suddenly my mind is racing through the next twenty awful things that are going to result from this until I arrive at the worst possible outcome. I become distressed, I ruminate, I catastrophize and suddenly the absolute worst thing imaginable has gone from being considered a highly improbable outlier to being treated as an inevitability that looms over everything.

This is a very uncomfortable experience. It results in an increased feeling of agitation and distress. And yet, when I sense myself initiating the spiral—i.e., when I am aware enough to observe that I am making a choice to initiate this process of catastrophizing—I learn that part of me really wants to throw me whole-heartedly into this distressing experience. I sense that I am beginning to spiral, I move to stop myself from doing so—and then something very strong within me says, “No! We are going into this and nothing can stop us and we are going to obsessively ruminate about everything awful and catastrophize until we feel absolutely annihilated and overwhelmed by it all!”

That’s kind of weird, right? Well, not really, because so many of us do that with behaviours that we experience as undesirable or painful and which we tell ourselves we want to avoid at all costs. It’s actually pretty normal to compulsively, obsessively, and sometimes rather forcefully do things that, on average, we say we really don’t enjoy doing at all. So instead of calling this weird, let’s call that a very curious thing. This part of me that refuses to allow this other part of me to stop me from doom spiraling, this part of me that wants to doom spiral and catastrophize, isn’t that a curious thing? What’s up with that?

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