ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the 'horror' out of a feared event by encouraging clients to see themselves dealing adaptive with their catastrophic predictions. Catastrophic thinking is often generated by 'What if?' statements such as 'What if I panic in the supermarket?' or 'What if I fail my exams? Barlow and Cerny state that 'the general strategy for decatastrophizing is to encourage the client to outline specifically the consequences of the feared event'. Beck et al. see that 'when predicting dire consequences, the anxious patient does not use all the information available to him and rarely takes into account his past dire predictions that failed to materialize'. This information includes rescue factors in the situation. Barlow and Craske propose that decatastrophizing can sum up as 'so what?' However, these authors concede that the 'so what' strategy would be inappropriate with client fears of death or loss of significant others; focusing on overestimation of danger is the more right strategy in these cases.
