So I’ll just come right out and say it: I made a careless mistake this morning while moving my blog to a new domain, and I lost all of the content from the past nine months. Posts, tags, categories, etc…all gone. I’ll admit that I had quite a “freak out” moment earlier today after it happened. My brain kicked into panic mode and sent several catastrophic, not to mention self-critical, thoughts through my mind…”Will it be the same?,” “It’s not worth doing if I’ve lost everything,” “How could I be so careless?,” and “All that work for nothing…” are just a few gems. Then my rational mind started up, and I told myself that there has to be a solution for recovering everything. I did some research and tried a few tricks, but nothing worked. Then I really started panicking and feeling pretty hopeless.
Does this situation sound familiar to you at all? Something happens, you catastrophize and just know that the world is about to end, and you get wrapped up in an emotional response that doesn’t help you or the situation. You get sucked down the spiral of negative thinking until you’re convinced that you are the worst person on the planet and nothing could possibly ever get better.
I see a lot of clients who describe a similar process. It’s part of being human, I think. While I can’t say for sure, I’m guessing that it has something to do with our evolutionary response to threat; while losing blog content isn’t life-threatening, my brain interpreted it as panic-worthy and reacted accordingly.
After a bit of bargaining with some higher power to bring my blog back, and a little self-pity, I’ve gotten to a better place. My true rational mind has taken the reigns and let me see things as they really are: disappointing and frustrating, certainly, but not the worst that could happen. This strategy of seeing reality for what it is, rather than getting swept up in thoughts that may or may not be true, again calls to principles of mindfulness. I use this with clients a lot as well – helping clients get in touch with what is real and known rather than what is assumed in the heat of the moment.
In closing – welcome to the new Talk Therapy! And good luck with your own mini-catastrophes that you might be dealing with 🙂
Jeremy