Noah didn’t expect the rain, but the heavens opened and
water surged from below, obliterating every living thing on the planet.
However, the rainbow came afterward, proving that God would never destroy the
earth again with a flood.
More
than a reminder for Noah’s time, the rainbow is also sign for us today that as
bad as things may get, they don’t necessarily have to get worse. And while
catastrophes do happen—whether natural disasters or those created by humans—our
mind doesn’t have to immediately jump to the conclusion that the sky will
fall.
This sort of behavior is known as
catastrophizing. The mind leaps to believe something far from the best.
Disaster appears to lie just around the corner. Psychologist Albert Ellis calls
it “awfulizing,” because the individuals involved imagine a consequence so
awful that they will not be able to stand it. But by any name, this is easy to
do.
God’s people should not live this way.
So why do they?
Unfortunately, the tendency to think
the worst affects us all. No one is better than we are individually to make our
own predictions come true.
Thinking the worst can bring the
disaster you fear in subtle ways. Chicken
Little is the perfect example because after the acorn fell from the tree, he
went forth to spread the alarm.
In fact, he was so unnerved by his
belief that he couldn’t manage to do anything more functional than run around
and panic. Chicken Little wasn’t merely worried,
he was terrified—because he was
convinced not only that he was faced with imminent disaster but also that there
was nothing he could do about it.
There are all sorts of situations in
which it is easy enough to lose your cool. Remember the mother in the previous
chapter who was convinced her children were kidnapped or killed because they
failed to contact her?
The kids were not home on time. Mom
said to herself: They’ve been killed.
They’ve been kidnapped. Her heart started pumping wildly. She was so
panicky, she couldn’t even call or text them.
Or consider Ralph, who was driving to
an important job interview, praying that he would say the right things and make
a good impression. But then he took a wrong turn and realized he would be late.
I’ve blown it, he said to himself. Now I’ll never get that job. He was so
upset about losing the job that he wasn’t concentrating fully on driving. As a
result, he missed a turn that would have gotten him back on the right road.
Sometimes the end result to the Chicken
Little syndrome is not just missing a turn but failing to look for one. A
common tendency of those who believe that disaster is unavoidable is to simply
give up—to make no effort to resolve the problem. After all, if you have
concluded there is nothing you can do, then it follows, you will probably do
nothing:
·
Emily has mislaid a report she knows would be very helpful
in a meeting that is scheduled for today. Lord,
help me find it. No, wait, I must have thrown it away, she thinks. It’s just like me to throw away something
important. No use looking for it. I’ll never find it.
·
Joe is laid off from this job and knows that he’ll never
find another. He sends out a few resumes and hears nothing. That proves his
point. It’s hopeless, he says to
himself. God obviously doesn’t love me. A
friend hears of an opening and tells him about it. “They’d never want me,” Joe
tells his friend, and doesn’t bother to call.
·
Marcia turns down a friend’s invitation to join a committee
at church because she is positive no one will listen to her, rejecting any
ideas she has to offer. So instead she stays home and feels sorry for herself.
If Marcia does not join the committee, she will avoid the humiliation of being
rejected—but she will also eliminate the possibility of making an impact for
God and church members. And she certainly isn’t having a good time at home if
she fills her hours with self-pity.
This sort of thing happens all the time. For example, take
Mark, an associate pastor who has been asked by the elders’ board to become
senior pastor after the senior took another position elsewhere. Mark is
ordinarily self-confident about his abilities to speak in front of various
groups in the church. But the thought of standing in front of the entire congregation,
in the sanctuary, on a Sunday morning turns him into walking Jell-O. He has
never preached a sermon to everyone before, and he is sure he will flub it. But
the elders insist that he give it a try, and after praying about it, Mark
thinks God may be telling him to go for it.
Mark
has spent all week preparing and practicing his message, in the privacy of his
office, but as he is ready to step to the podium, a series of horrible scenes
fly through his mind:
The microphone won’t work.
I’ll get upset and
lose my place.
Which will cause me
to stutter.
Then
I’ll get it all messed up.
And everyone will
laugh at me.
That will make the
elders furious
I can forget any
hopes of getting this job.
I’ll be lucky if I
keep my current job.
I’ll be destroyed.
In a matter of seconds, Mark has both
written a script for disaster and convinced himself it is inevitable. No wonder,
then, by the time he opens his mouth to speak, his tongue is stuck to the roof
of his mouth, his palms are sweaty, his knees are knocking, and his voice is
wobbly. He does stutter. He does lose his place. I knew it, he says to himself miserably. More accurately, he caused
it by falling victim the Chicken Little syndrome.
Why couldn’t Mark trust God in this
situation? A stronger, more mature Christian leader would have been able to
conquer his fears and not messed up.
The Bible says to not be anxious about
anything but to pray about everything, and you will have peace. Apparently,
Mark doesn’t have enough faith, and the elders should look elsewhere. And on
and on, the self-righteous self-talk goes amongst many believers. However, a
closer, more honest examination by any of us would quickly put self-righteous
statements like the ones above to rest. Who hasn’t at one time or another taken
a single piece of evidence and magnified the negative consequences of it? This
is what we common refer to as making a mountain out of a molehill.
We are all guilty of it. But we don’t
have to be in bondage to it if we can learn—through God’s help and the principles
of CBT—to become more realistic thinkers who can recognize danger and suffer
disappointment without automatically assuming there is nothing we can do to
improve things.
If you recognize that, in the past, you
have fallen victim to the Chicken Little syndrome, it’s likely that you start
out with a heightened awareness of the fact that terrible things do happen.
That may simply be part of the way you view the world. Chicken Little may have
been convinced by a source he found credible that under certain circumstances
the sky really could fall. That thought is tucked away in his brain. Then
something happens (the acorn) to release that thought. This release doesn’t
happen all at once. As psychiatrist Dr. Aaron T. Beck discovered in his
groundbreaking research, what happens is that you quite literally talk yourself
into that worst conclusion.
Take Mark, the associate pastor, for
example. Somewhere in the back of his mind is the view that it is possible for
him to be denied a job because of one mistake. That is not what he is thinking
about, however, when he first approaches the podium. He starts out merely being
concerned about whether the microphone will work. But that thought, like the
acorn, is enough to trigger the next thought (that he’ll get upset and lost his
place), which leads to the next thought and the next and the next, until Mark
can actually visualize himself having no chance whatsoever of getting the job.
Mark is not aware that he is quite
literally persuading himself that a disaster is about to befall him. His
internal conversation takes place not in minutes but in seconds, maybe even
milliseconds. His thoughts fly through his mind so quickly that each individual
thought is barely noticed. Dr. Beck calls these quick-flying thoughts, “automatic
thoughts.” We all have them.
Automatic thoughts are perfectly
normal. Most people have a constant stream of thoughts running through their
minds. They might merely be quick little daydreams that have nothing to do with
the task at hand. Sorry, my mind was drifting,
you might say. Or those thoughts might be critical to accomplishing the
task at hand. Running quickly through a catalog of thoughts is necessary in any
decision-making process. Should I do this
. . . or that? you ask yourself. You mull over the reasons for one choice
or another before deciding what to do.
But because your thoughts—whether
positive or negative—have a profound effect on what you do, there are times
when it is vital to make yourself consciously aware of precisely what you are
thinking. You can easily replay the tape of your thoughts if you concentrate on
doing so. When you review the thoughts that led to your conclusion, you give
yourself a chance to evaluate their accuracy. You can even challenge your own
thoughts just as you might challenge someone who tells you that the world will
end in 20 minutes, with Jesus coming in on the clouds (Are you sure? How do you know that? Why should I believe you?)
Learning how to challenge a conclusion
to which your brain has leaped will help you to recognize when that conclusion
is unjustified by facts. Learning how to argue with your automatic thoughts
will help you avoid those self-fulfilling prophecies of disaster and enable you
to cope—realistically—with upsetting situations. Obviously, you can’t always keep
bad things from happening, but you can make sure that you not read more into
them than they actually mean. Or to put it in Chicken Little terms, you may not
be able to prevent an acorn from
falling on your head, but you can prevent the pain, panic, and self-fulfilling
prophecies that might result if you simply jump to the conclusion that the bump
on your head means the sky is caving in.
This does not mean analyzing everything
you do. Rather, it is a technique to be called on when you are facing a stressful
situation and thus are most likely to rush into mistaken reasoning.
If you were a munitions expert called
on to defuse a bomb, you would want to concentrate all your attention on that
delicate task in which you are engaged. But you wouldn’t have to be equally
intense later while having lunch or shopping in the supermarket. The point here
is to develop your skills so that you can call on it when you need it. Life has
a way of producing lots of emotional bombs that need defusing.
Defuse them through examining your
thinking. It’s what God wants for all believers, whether more mature or newer
to the faith.
