THROUGH UNTRUE
Do you compulsively imagine the worst outcome in every situation? Do you often exaggerate the extent and intensity of your problems and assume that others suffer less than you? Do you feel awful because you think of catastrophes that you think are inevitable?
If your answer is yes, then you are probably “catastrophizing” or “awfulizing” — two terms coined by Albert Ellis, founder of the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).
A passenger in an airplane catastrophizes when he suffers a panic attack because he interprets air turbulence as a sign of an impending crash. A student breaks out in a sweat when asked to give a speech because he is sure to be ridiculed and mocked by his audience. A tired mother shouts “Abolish Christmas!” because she sees it as one exhausting and expensive occasion.
Our imagination can trigger unwanted negative emotions like fear and anxiety. The more vivid our imagination, the more easily we awfulize or catastrophize. So, Ellis suggests that one way to overcome such a behavior is to distance ourselves from our thoughts and recognize how irrational many of these are.
In 2005, the National Science Foundation in the United States published a study showing that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day, and 80 percent of which are negative. That is why it is necessary to discipline our minds or assume control over the thoughts that we entertain.
Another study conducted in the same year by Cornell University showed that 85 percent of what we worry about never happens. Of the 15 percent of worries that did happen, 79 percent of these proved to be easily manageable and yielded important lessons in life. The startling conclusion: 97 percent of our worries are baseless. They are products of our tendency to catastrophize or awfulize.
One man who can teach us a way to overcome this negative behavior is St. Joseph. In our gospel reading today, even before having the chance to touch or kiss Mary, St. Joseph discovers that she is already pregnant. He feels awful and is tempted to catastrophize.
St. Joseph decides to quietly break up with Mary to avoid what he thinks is an impending disaster. He imagines that he would be the laughingstock of their society. He and Mary could never live in peace because of the prying eyes of their neighbors. Worst of all, if they learned about Mary's pregnancy, they would stone her to death. At that time, this was the punishment imposed on a woman who got pregnant before marriage.
But an angel appears to Joseph in a dream saying: “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-23)
How many of us would make a life-changing decision simply because of a dream? But St. Joseph is not any ordinary man. Being a man of hope, he has learned to envision possibilities and make these happen. Being a man of faith, he has trained his eyes not to focus on the worst-case scenario. Faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, he fixes his attention on the bright prospect of being the foster father of Jesus. The story ends on a positive note: “When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary into his home” (Matthew 1:24).
Christmas is fast approaching. Let us not catastrophize or awfulize it by listening to the stringent voices of advertisers telling us that Christmas means buying this or that, traveling here or there, eating this or that, and being this or that. Most of what we hear about Christmas from television, newspapers, and movies are all attempts to sell us something. They heighten our unrealistic expectations, setting us up for a monumental letdown.