Writing on Substack

Catastrophic Predictions… why and how to re-set?

 

 

How much of the unknown can you cope with before you start to lose your sense of safety? 

Do you sometimes feel freaked, wondering if some

Do you sometimes feel freaked, wondering if something dangerous is going to happen… will the car crash, food be contaminated, war break out, or a loved one die? Have you noticed other people don’t? This, at its base, is a fear of the unknown. 

To free ourselves of these catastrophising tendencies, it helps to examine the nature of the unknown. No one knows what the future holds. When there is certainty, as horrid as it can sometimes be, we get on with what’s needed. Without certainty there is the possibility of change. Inevitably, life brings change: jobs, homes, parenting or elder-care routines, our health – everything changes. Trying to avoid this natural flow just creates control issues, or frustration at the failure to do so. Within change usually comes loss; we leave something behind, even if it is simply the reliability of the daily routine. Some changes and losses may not bother us, but with the bigger, more permanent changes (divorce, a house move, the death of a loved one), loss is integral. Unwanted loss holds grief, sadness, regret and other difficult feelings. We mourn what cannot return.  

With change, what was predictable is gone. We step into the unknown and we have little choice in that. If as a child we were not well parented through experiences of change and loss, our internal working model of the world may be that life is dangerous – because of the feelings it brings, rather than the actual events. We habitually anticipate danger in the future because it is unknown, and experience fear and dread as a result, but what we’re actually afraid of may be the grief and sadness inherent in change. Good (or good enough) parenting would have included provision of safety and reliability as a holding container for change and loss. An internal model of the world as a safe place would have been constructed where dangerous things sometimes happen but can be coped with. 

Each child matures to adulthood taking their own unique internal model with them, and with age models can become entrenched as an understanding of danger and safety. They then play out as coping mechanisms regarding the unknown. The former child, as an adult, may be fear-filled, often predicting calamity of the exact same situation that an adult parented in the second way would see as safe or even exciting, enticing and enlivening. 

We might call our internal model of danger and safety a ‘tolerance’ of the unknown. Allied with this tolerance is our personal evaluation of the situation. When we do not know what is going to happen next (or cannot get clarity on what is happening right now), there is a moment where our nervous system automatically evaluates the level of danger. This evaluation depends upon a conglomeration of things: personal past experience which is usually outside conscious awareness, plus learnt or observed experience (a child watches its early care-givers to understand what is safe, thus internalising their reading of safety or danger). And recent research suggests inter-generational trauma leaves a genetically predisposed reading of safety versus danger.  

When two people have their window of tolerance or their predictive patterns in different places, tensions can arise. Whose reading is right? Often the optimist will chastise the pessimist as being negative, without spotting that the pessimist has their internal ‘evaluative settings’ of possible dangers in a different place, a more cautious place. While we can never know if there is safety or danger in an unknown situation, many catastrophising people would prefer to feel safer and less worried about the unknown. What can be useful is working to learn where safety already exists in their lives. This sense of safety can be built into a holding container and ‘installed’ into their adult mind to replace the risk-averse settings left by childhood experiences.  

Looking at these links between the unknown, change and feelings of loss starts to explain why we imagine unwanted catastrophes, and how the not-known elements of a situation create a gap in the future for the mind to conjure fear-filled possibilities.  How much of the unknown can you tolerate before you feel unsafe?

thing dangerous is going to happen… will the car crash, food be contaminated, war break out, or a loved one die? Have you noticed other people don’t? This, at its base, is a fear of the unknown. 

To free ourselves of these catastrophising tendencies, it helps to examine the nature of the unknown. No one knows what the future holds. When there is certainty, as horrid as it can sometimes be, we get on with what’s needed. Without certainty there is the possibility of change. Inevitably, life brings change: jobs, homes, parenting or elder-care routines, our health – everything changes. Trying to avoid this natural flow just creates control issues, or frustration at the failure to do so. Within change usually comes loss; we leave something behind, even if it is simply the reliability of the daily routine. Some changes and losses may not bother us, but with the bigger, more permanent changes (divorce, a house move, the death of a loved one), loss is integral. Unwanted loss holds grief, sadness, regret and other difficult feelings. We mourn what cannot return.  

With change, what was predictable is gone. We step into the unknown and we have little choice in that. If as a child we were not well parented through experiences of change and loss, our internal working model of the world may be that life is dangerous – because of the feelings it brings, rather than the actual events. We habitually anticipate danger in the future because it is unknown, and experience fear and dread as a result, but what we’re actually afraid of may be the grief and sadness inherent in change. Good (or good enough) parenting would have included provision of safety and reliability as a holding container for change and loss. An internal model of the world as a safe place would have been constructed where dangerous things sometimes happen but can be coped with. 

Each child matures to adulthood taking their own unique internal model with them, and with age models can become entrenched as an understanding of danger and safety. They then play out as coping mechanisms regarding the unknown. The former child, as an adult, may be fear-filled, often predicting calamity of the exact same situation that an adult parented in the second way would see as safe or even exciting, enticing and enlivening. 

We might call our internal model of danger and safety a ‘tolerance’ of the unknown. Allied with this tolerance is our personal evaluation of the situation. When we do not know what is going to happen next (or cannot get clarity on what is happening right now), there is a moment where our nervous system automatically evaluates the level of danger. This evaluation depends upon a conglomeration of things: personal past experience which is usually outside conscious awareness, plus learnt or observed experience (a child watches its early care-givers to understand what is safe, thus internalising their reading of safety or danger). And recent research suggests inter-generational trauma leaves a genetically predisposed reading of safety versus danger.  

When two people have their window of tolerance or their predictive patterns in different places, tensions can arise. Whose reading is right? Often the optimist will chastise the pessimist as being negative, without spotting that the pessimist has their internal ‘evaluative settings’ of possible dangers in a different place, a more cautious place. While we can never know if there is safety or danger in an unknown situation, many catastrophising people would prefer to feel safer and less worried about the unknown. What can be useful is working to learn where safety already exists in their lives. This sense of safety can be built into a holding container and ‘installed’ into their adult mind to replace the risk-averse settings left by childhood experiences.  

Looking at these links between the unknown, change and feelings of loss starts to explain why we imagine unwanted catastrophes, and how the not-known elements of a situation create a gap in the future for the mind to conjure fear-filled possibilities.  How much of the unknown can you tolerate before you feel unsafe?