Awfulizing

When Do You Push the Panic Button?

Life is filled with suffering.  Every day, someone, somewhere is dealing with a life tragedy.  A loved one dies, a child becomes ill, a business fails, a family is ripped apart by divorce, or someone is betrayed by a once-trusted friend. 

We ask why bad things happen to good people. It is because suffering is part of the human condition. And the only thing that we can really control is how we react to life’s challenges.

Charles R. Swindoll, American writer and clergyman said “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”  I have tried to live by this advice, but have found that in some instances I have taken it to an extreme.

Early in my professional career, I learned about two important concepts that deal with these situations.  The first, called Risk Management, deals with identifying situations that might be a risk to the business and designing controls to minimize the chance it will happen.  The other, called Crisis Management, deals with decisions that must be made when something bad happens.  One concept is preemptive and the other reactive.  Unfortunately, I have had the chance to use both of them in the past.

While I did not realize it, I have transferred these techniques to my personal life. 

And even though they help me sleep better at night, I found that they can become a terrible burden when practiced to an extreme.  I’m talking about expecting the worst possible outcome from each life situation and trying to plan for it using Risk and Crisis Management techniques. 

I've discovered that rarely do these awful situations actually happen.  Yet by preparing for them, we deal with the anxiety and pain as if it was real.

Psychologist Albert Ellis calls this awfulizing. Awfulizing exaggerates the consequences of the past, present and future, conceptualizing events as being terrible and horrible--the worst that can happen.  Research has tied awfulizing to anxiety, anger, depression, shame, guilt and hurt.

Awfulizing can also result from repeated painful situations.  Remember the old saying “fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, shame on me”?  Once we have lived through painful experiences over and over again, we begin to expect that they will happen.  But often they don't.  And when we anticipate these painful events and try to manage them in advance, we can needlessly bring stress and anxiety into our lives.

Having parented a child with a severe medical problem for two decades, I have a developed the tendency to awfulize.  I imagine that I can predict a medical situation occurring and feel compelled to try and prevent it—even though that is rarely possible.  There are two problems here. 

First is that I bring the stress and pain of a medical emergency on myself and my family even though it has not (and may not) occur.  I justify this to myself because I see myself fulfilling my job as provider and protector of my child.  I want to try and stop the pain and hurt. And I don’t want to get surprised. But the reality is that I can inadvertently bring suffering on my family when it was not necessary. 

The second problem of my awfulizing is that by trying to be proactive, I can actually take action that creates a problem.  Unnecessarily consuming expensive medical resources, over-medicating, and over-protecting all have potentially serious consequences.

Now that I recognize awfulizing and its potential negative impact, I have taken some steps to try and control myself.  When presented with a situation, I now ask myself …  

Do I have all of the information?  Awfulizers often have only some of the information and are guessing at the rest.  The solution is DON’T JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS.

Am I exaggerating the information?  People who exaggerate are prone to awfulize.  That is because when they expand the severity and scope of the information, it can quickly move to the worst-case scenario.  The solution is to KEEP IT REAL.

What do others think?  There is truth in the saying that “two heads are better than one”.  Discussing the situation with another can expose the lack of information or exaggeration.  The solution is to GET ANOTHER OPINION.

Most importantly, I have empowered my wife Kathy to bring these situations to my attention.  When she “calls me out” for awfulizing, it raises my awareness and helps me to control myself.

I hope that if you are an awfulizer, you might gain some wisdom through my experiences.

PEACE