Mentally attracted to worst case scenario - Changing that.

Hello to all.

I want to pass along this Steven Ozanich quote because bells rang in my head when I read it.

"The tendency of a negative perfectionist is to look at the impossibility and to make that their probability."

My mother, in an attempt to end a discussion, would address something I wanted to do with the ways I might get hurt. I think she mostly did this because we didn't have money to do anything extra, but she would never just say that.

For example: I wanted to take horseback riding lessons and she said: "If you fell from a horse, it would step on you, and you would be permanently injured. Do you want that?"

I was always fearful of the "what ifs."

The best thing I did for myself, after reading Sarno and Steve O's great books, was to discipline myself to not look at symptoms on the internet. Google gets no health questions from me. It has incrementally broken the pattern of being drawn to the worst case scenario.

Just a Monday thought. Keep on keeping on.

Marcia

 

Wonderful post Marcia, and wonderful wordsmithing by Steve O!!! Negative perfectionist is a great term. (I have also heard the term "negative grandiosity" when we get identified with being the most worthless piece of sh-t who ever existed.)

We all catastrophize, and we have to see it for what it is, and "not believe everything we think." Neat that you can find the specific history of how you took this on. Knowing our history is helpful, isn't it, in dis-identifying with those thought processes!

 

Thanks for this, Marcia! It makes even more sense when you take into account that our primitive brains are wired to be negative, always looking out for danger. Add parental conditioning, and that's a lot of negativity to overcome!

Knowledge is power.

~Jan