Me to my therapist this week: “How dare my trauma not fit conveniently into these nice little boxes I purchased just for the occasion?!“

I was joking, of course, but it’s true; trauma doesn’t follow directions. It has a mind of its own. And it will creep in and color your perception of everything if you’re not mindful and self-aware (and sometimes even if you are).

For years, I had a tendency to catastrophize – to imagine the potential worst outcome of everything in my life. Everything was either already bad or inevitably would become bad, and it was my fault in one way or another, because I didn’t deserve good things. Nowadays, I am confidently sure that none of the ideas in my previous sentence are true. Well, most of the time. But when I was in the thick of this worldview, it was miserable. If I was in a relationship, I felt sure it was doomed to fail sooner or later, which inevitably sabotaged things. If I was working, I lived with constant anxiety that I was not doing a good job and was going to eventually get fired (I’ve only ever been let go from a job once, and not for poor performance, but this anxiety always made things harder). At home, sometimes I would freak myself out worrying about if a flood or fire might happen and destroy my possessions and/or leave me homeless. In some really dark moments, I would have a difficult time driving, without my imagination bringing up thoughts about what would happen if the big truck on the other side of the highway were to drift over into my lane.

If that sounds scary as fuck to you, well, it should. It was a terrible way to live, but I didn’t know how not to have that mentality.

It wasn’t until my late twenties, after I’d been seeing my current therapist for the first few months, maybe almost a year in, that she did something nobody else had ever done for me with this issue – she allowed me to follow that thread, instead of forcing me to move away from it like a hot surface I wasn’t supposed to touch. Everyone else I’d ever dared to mention my fears and what-ifs to had always told me simply to stop thinking that way, dismissing those feelings. She was the one who guided me to actually explore the worst-case scenario, to legitimately consider how it might play out, and what the after-effects could be. I don’t remember now what particular would-be catastrophe I was wrestling with at the time, but it doesn’t really matter. The end result was such that I’ve kept it in mind as a guidepost for every anxiety-ridden situation in my life ever since, whether the problem is more on the real end of the spectrum, or the imagined end. That guidepost is as follows:

She told me to look back at my whole life, citing various examples. To look back at everything I’ve been through. All the pain, all the abuse, all the trauma, all the loss, all the disappointment. Relationships that ended, jobs that didn’t work out, aspirations that never came to pass. Were those things all hard? Yes. Devastating, even? Absolutely. Did they impact my life in lasting ways that have taken a very long time to even begin to be able to recover from? They sure did.

But have I survived them all? You bet your ass I have.

I have survived every single one of my worst-case scenarios so far. Every damn one.

And when I am again faced with a worst-case scenario, either in my own head or in actuality, I know that no matter how hard that will be, I’ll figure it out and I’ll live to fight another day.

So I say unto you, or anyone who struggles with catastrophizing, or even with just trying to find the light: you have survived before, and you can do it again. Find whatever help you need to bring with you along the way – but in my experience, a really helpful first step is simply knowing you can. Because you already have.