What is Catastrophizing?-Signs, Symptoms, and Ways to Stop It

 

Catastrophizing is when you use your imagination, the seat of your creative abilities, to imagine the worst-case scenario. 

People need stability, safety, and security. If you grew up in an environment where these three were not fostered, encouraged, and embraced, you will struggle to find your place. That leaves your mind open to interpreting that things will go badly, also known as catastrophizing. You have been conditioned, or conditioned yourself, to expect the worst.

It is the result of an overstimulated nervous system. This is a common symptom for anyone who grew up in an emotionally unstable or emotionally neglectful home environment.

If your parents did not create a non-judgmental space for your to discuss how you were feeling, and embrace your feelings without making it a reflection of themselves, you learned to take on their emotions as a reflection of your relationship with them.

If they were unhappy with how you expressed yourself or reacted with anger and frustration, you learned to withdraw and hide as a way to make them more comfortable.

You learned how to emotionally and energetically interpret how they were feeling as a way to connect with them. Children do this naturally, even though it's not healthy, it was your way of making sure you were loved. It's also how you were able to cope with their inability to accept you for who you were. You learned to blend with your tribe, be it family, school, or society, as a way to fit in and find acceptance.

The problem with this is that households based on emotional instability and emotional neglect are inconsistent. You might do something wrong someday and be punished for it, while the next day they don't even notice. The lack of consistency, clear rules and boundaries creates a breeding ground for mixed messages where an authoritarian parent can take center stage. 

Consistency is powerful, but lack of consistency is more powerful for an authoritarian. They have the power to change the rules and the rules always change. It will leave you guessing on who you need to become or what you need to do in order to be loved and accepted.

Nothing will ever work. You will do everything right, become a perfectionist and learn to be who they want, when they want, and turn on a dime if necessary to ensure they are happy but they will never be happy.

When this happens in childhood, you will begin to believe that there's something wrong with you and you can't do anything right. Naturally, when you're a child, you'll elevate those around you as knowing more and being smarter and better. An authoritarian will take advantage of this power, rather than helping you to come into your own strong version of yourself by supporting, loving, and encouraging you as you develop on your path. 

Authoritarians benefit from the power that they feel within when they can have control over another person. This stems from their extreme need to hide who they really are from the world. If they are found out as being weak, incapable, incompetent, or unintelligent (their biggest fears), which are their own perceptions of themselves, they would be emotionally destroyed. So, they need to control to appear strong. 

If you don't do what they want, they withdraw love from you. They will either stop communication, turn cold and distant, react negatively or withdraw support. Over time, this creates an innate feeling that will repeat well into adulthood as, "It's never enough", which really stems from a feeling of, "I'm not enough."

If you are dependent on them in any way, this is the abuse of power cycle playing out as you'll learn to compromise your needs in order to continue receiving their support, which is often financial for two main reasons:

1. You haven't learned how to provide emotional stability and security for yourself, which is negatively impacting your ability to support yourself in other ways, like finances. This happens because you don't believe in yourself or your ability to accomplish goals and manifest your dreams because you have been conditioned to believe that you are incapable and never enough.

2. Authoritarians benefit from you not believing in yourself because it keeps you dependent on them. As long as you need them, they can do almost anything they want and maintain control while you find a way to make it palatable. Until it's not.

Signs and Symptoms of Catastrophizing

 

The abandonment core wound becomes activated during this neglect cycle. Abandonment is a complicated emotional wound that expresses itself in a variety of ways. Each of these is learned through a negative experience that occurs in your life that you then turn inward toward yourself. If it remains unhealed, it will manifest in the following ways:

Rejection: You'll push people away and people will isolate themselves from you, or at least it will feel that way. If it happens from people who are, in theory, supposed to love you, you may interpret this rejection as happening because something is wrong with you or you are wrong in some way.

Vulnerability: You'll have trouble opening up to others and sharing your authentic self. You may not even understand who you are or what you need, which often stems from shape-shifting behavior in childhood if you were surrounded by people who didn't love and appreciate you as you were.

Intimacy: You may struggle to deepen your connection with others or fear commitment. This is typically an association with expecting to be rejected, so you won't want to invest more than surface-level.

Burden: If you always feel overwhelmed and often procrastinate or struggle with anxiety, you're overburdened with people-pleasing, poor boundaries, and an inability to say no when necessary. If good boundaries weren't modeled to you, unraveling this particular symptom will take deep work on self-worth and learning to honor who you are, no matter who you are upset in the process.

Responsibility: Feeling responsible for other people's happiness is a heavy burden to bear and taking responsibility for your own happiness will feel daunting. This is the biggest symptom of an abandonment core wound and the most difficult to shift because it will require you to let go of the need to make other people happy from deep conditioning that tells you you're not worth it and may not be able to meet your own needs or make yourself happy.

Each of these becomes the precedence for how you treat yourself.

Rather than accepting and loving yourself, which would be modeled to you in a healthy dynamic, you model the unhealthy behavior instead. Rather than learning to love yourself, you have learned to reject yourself in some way.

I don't believe all parents are authoritarians or that this is the only root cause for catastrophizing, but it is the one that I encounter most frequently in my work and the one that negatively impacts self-perception, self-esteem, and self-worth the most. This can certainly be the same cyclical pattern that occurs in any situation where an adult has power over a child and chooses to abuse that power.

Although the family tribe is the most prevalent in childhood, it's not the only tribe you'll encounter throughout your life and the connection with each of them is not just energetic. It's also emotional, physical, mental and spiritual, or religious. While some people will adapt and become like the tribe in order to fit in, others will reject or repel it completely and become the antithesis of how they were raised.

Although we've been talking about authoritarians who may have used their power directed against you in some way, this cycle actually turns inward into adulthood and you may begin talking down to and neglecting yourself as a result. You have the power to end the authoritarian cycle and it ends when you stop abusing your power by allowing the authoritarian access to you and your life. Authoritarians typically don't respect boundaries, because they have none themselves. By not taking responsibility for every area and connection you have with them, you allow them to continue exerting control of you. Those cords need to be cut and you need to exert control over your own stability in the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual areas of your life. This will require deep healing to overcome feeling unworthy and incapable of achieving by standing on your own two feet.

Who is Commonly Affected?

Catastrophizing can affect anyone that has some unprocessed pain, is prone to overthink, or is accustomed to suppressing their emotions.

What Causes A Person to Catastrophize?

Catastrophizing can start after a painful event or trauma occurred. In my experience, it can become a trauma response after living a lifetime defending yourself. It's a mental spiral of negative thinking.

It stems from any time you asked for something you needed and wanted and were relentlessly questioned or given reason that you would feel. This would cause you to doubt yourself over time.

If you were blamed for things that you didn't do, you learned to anticipate needs by imagining all the possibilities that can go wrong before you actually take the first step. That is the definition of catastrophizing. The problem with this is that so much visioning and imagining will cause overwhelm and you'll probably stop before you start.

The first step is to really change your type of thinking to a more optimistic view but this can be challenging until you calm your nervous system. This is where anxiety can come into play because you'll feel anxious in your body when triggered.

 

What Are The Symptoms of Catastrophizing?

Catastrophizing can show up in a number of ways and it's different for everyone. Here are a few of the most common symptoms:

Nervous system issues: Pay attention to any areas of your body that are locking up or have limited movement, especially in the chest area. Catastrophizing can feel like a locked up in your own body feeling where you're only able to do so much without experiencing pain.

Anxiety: Anxiety is a common symptom for anyone who tends to catastrophize. Catastrophizing leads to worry about all possible scenarios, consequences, and outcomes so it can naturally trigger anxiety.

Negative, repeating thoughts: If it feels impossible to turn off the repeating 'broken record' thoughts, you are not alone. Constant worry can circle your mind day or night as you ruminate on the past and struggle to let go even if you say you want to.

Interrupted sleep: If your mind ramps up the repeating thoughts at night when you're trying to wind down, it will cause interruptions in your sleep cycle. Catastrophizing usually comes with guilt and regret because it's excessive worrying. 

Procrastination: This is caused by overthinking to an extent that you end up feeling paralyzed and unable to move forward without worrying excessively about any decision and the consequences associated with it.

How to Stop Catastrophizing?

Deconstructing Catastrophizing is all about having a plan to act on when your thoughts begin to turn south.

Pay attention: I think the most important course of action is to actually catch yourself when you're in catastrophic thinking. Once you're aware of when catastrophic thinking is taking place, you can begin to alter the course of your own thoughts. This is a powerful first step to shifting it long term.

Explore: Allow yourself to consciously explore all possible outcomes as a result of a choice you're going to make. This exploration should include both the positives and negatives, not just the negatives. By facing all scenarios upfront, you're creating an environment where you can plan ahead. Try to focus on the benefits and counteract any risk with logical planning. Try to steer clear of allowing your emotions to make the choice, especially if you find yourself worrying.

Move around: If you feel anxiety or overthinking set in, get up and move around. Physical exercise or even just a walk around the room will get you out of your head and back into your body. This stops the cycle of overthinking in its tracks and allows you to get back in touch with how you're feeling, not what you're thinking about.

Take a break: If you realize that you're stuck in the catastrophizing cycle, take a break from the work and do something totally different. If you're doing something creative, switch to something structured. If you're already doing something structured, switch to something creative. This lets the other half of your brain take over so you can switch off for a few minutes.

Create some mantras: This one may sound esoteric but stick with me. Catastrophic thinking actually stems from a deep-down worry that things are going to turn out to be a disaster. So, if that's what you're expecting, that's what you'll probably get. Have a list of mantras you can recite when you find yourself repeating those same disastrous thoughts that send you down the rabbit hole. These are some of my favorites:

• I am safe and protected.

• I am loved.

• Things are always working out in my favor.

• If I need clarity, I can ask.

• What if things work out better than I planned?

Journal: Journaling is my tried and true method for shifting fear and catastrophic thinking. Here is my favorite journaling prompts. Feel free to use them or create your own to help you shift this cycle for good.

1. What do I need in order to feel safe at this moment?

2. I seem to be worried about ___________. What steps can I take to feel more empowered about this?

3. Which elements of this situation are out of my control? What self-care can I involve myself in to help me relax until things become more clear?