decatastrophize your life

a guide in two parts: part one

I braced myself in 2016 but once it happened I realised I had no feelings about it. Not even one. I had thoughts and opinions, obviously. I even had concerns. But I was not remotely distressed. No deep emotions. None whatsoever. Odd.

I wasn’t a heartless idiot, I was distracted. See, just a few days before Trump got elected the first time another person came out of my body. Crazy right? But it happens. If you or a loved one have gone through it, you’ll know that contrary to the experience of, say, Jules Oliver, having another person come out of your person is extremely frightening and unpleasant. You could literally die, and the person inside you could literally die, but for some reason no one mentions this to you until you are right in the middle of it and panicking for good reason. Because unlike Donald Trump? It’s happening to you and the other person. It’s for real.

So the second person who came out of me ended up in NICU and for the last two weeks of the Trump-Clinton race, I lay in a hospital bed receiving blood transfusions watching the second season of Fleabag on my iPhone while being attended to by NHS midwives who I must say, excelled at their job of ever-so-subtly making me feel like a failure as a woman.

So no, I didn’t really feel much about Trump in 2016. Nor did I feel much about anything that was going on outside the confines of my battered mind/body or my son’s, until about Christmas that year when, miraculously, my shit-giving-perimeter expanded to include the boundaries of my North London terraced house and the other people in it. By spring 2017 I cared a teeny bit about the people on my street, as well as the local nursery, primary school and library at which I began to volunteer. I think it was around this time I stopped doing social media in much earnest. Not because I found it addictive but because I could not, for the life of me, muster up any interest knowing about the lives of the people on it, save the ones whose lives I knew all about anyway.

Months passed, then years, and eventually I began to care about lots of stuff again. I began to read and listen to music again. I watched movies and occasionally socialised with my friends. These experiences reminded me of something I’d completely forgotten which was that actually, I find people very interesting. It’s a maddening and beautiful world, isn’t it? After realising this I walked around for weeks starring at the patterns of the leaves against the sky thinking, We are all just flotsam blown on ancient winds. Who invented the stars? I could barely sleep. Strange electrical vibrations moved through my body. I wanted to run naked through the streets singing, even when sober. This was peri-menopause.

Flash forward a few years and, yet again, the orange guy’s in office and once again, I feel nothing much.

This time my detachment isn’t birth trauma but a more rational response: I am able, for the first time in my life, to differentiate between feelings and thoughts. I understand that while politics everywhere is happening, it is not actually happening to me. Or to you. Right now.

Notice the difference?

It’s possible to register that something worrying and/or dangerous is going on in the world and to take conscious action against it without actually freaking out completely. In fact, history demonstrates that not completely freaking out completely might actually help you to do this effectively.

Unless your last name is Trump or you work in the West Wing, Donald Trump is not actually happening to you right now this minute, so why waste your precious emotional energy focussing on him emotionally? If you want to feel better, focus on what you can do about him. Or focus on thinking about him without conflating those thoughts with emotions.

Detachment isn’t fashionable at the moment. We’re all meant to act as if everything is happening to all of us personally all the time. We do this in order to demonstrate how socially-conscious and virtuous we are. If we don’t we fear being seen as uncaring or out of it. I’m not saying we ought to ignore the news for the sake of our mental health, because that would be ignorant. I’m saying if you want to feel better in the long run, learn the difference between your thoughts and your feelings, then consider how the conflation of the two is effecting your behaviour in ways that are negatively impacting your life. And if you want help figuring it out, call someone for help.

For the past couple of years I’ve been training to be a therapist — a life transition which has coincided with the end of my marriage, which is culminating in an ongoing legal, health and financial crisis. These two simultaneous transformative experiences — going back to school and a midlife-family-upheaval — haven’t been easy but they’ve taught me a hell of a lot.

I was putting the theory I read into practice everyday, which is instructive. The result is that I’ve got some actual, hands-on, means-tested evidence-based cognitive-behavioural strategy for dealing with this crazy making world and all the crap it throws at us. I no longer need to numbing effects of birth trauma, Instagram reels or alcohol to feel nothing about the US election.

I am no longer flotsam in the wind, but instead: A self-taught master in the art of decatastrophizing.

In tomorrow’s (paid) post, I will share my simple, means-tested, step-by-step cognitive-behavioural method for de-catastrophizing your thinking patterns and your life. So if you’re struggling out there, please consider signing up and joining me on the detached side where thinking and feeling are two separate things and everyone’s calm and contented (most of the time anyway).