ABSTRACT
Most patients who seek the author clinical help do so when dealing with some sort of adversity. Many of these are relatively minor – a failed course, a suspended driver’s license, an illness that causes the cancellation of a vacation trip. Others are more serious, ranging from a broken marriage to a crippling illness. While all these adversities rate as bad, the common denominator that brings these people to my office is that they judge their adversities to be so horrible that they are life destroying. By catastrophizing their hardships, they cause themselves to experience such forms of unhappiness as depression, bitterness, and panic, emotional states that often rival in severity the original adversity itself. To think of some adversity as awful, horrible, or terrible will cause you to react with one or more of the major forms of human misery – depression, anxiety, anger, or guilt.
