Follow Me Back (complete first draft of the published book)

Chapter 18: Catastrophizing

Chapter 18: Catastrophizing

September 19, 2013

I'm never getting better. I feel like I spent the last six months climbing my way out of a deep, dark hole, and I just lost my grip and fell all the way back down to the bottom again. It's hopeless. I don't know if I even want to try anymore.

Tessa squeezed her eyes shut to block out the words she'd just written in her thought journal. Hopeless. What was the point of writing it down? What was the point of any of her therapy exercises? It only seemed to make her feel worse.

She had to try though, right? Just keep going. Keep writing. It didn't even matter what it said. Just fill up one page, so she had something to show for herself at the next therapy session. Then she could go back to sleep.

Tessa put her pen back to the paper:

I could've dealt with losing one or the other, but both of them? In the space of four days? How am I supposed to deal with that? There's nothing left. I have no other coping mechanisms. None. All I want to do is sleep.

What would Dr. Regan say when she read this, Tessa wondered. She closed her eyes again and tried to imagine her therapist's voice.

"I hear you saying you feel hopeless. Do you think it's possible that you're catastrophizing?"

Catastrophizing. Tessa remembered when Dr. Regan first explained the concept: a form of distorted thinking that made problems seem far more insurmountable than they truly were.

"Try to take a step back and look at the problem critically," she could hear Dr. Regan say. "Is there anything in what you wrote that might be an exaggeration?"

Tessa shook her head. She remembered how she'd argued back at the time, her voice rising in agitation.

"It's not catastrophizing if it's actually a catastrophe! A real catastrophe. Sometimes horrible things actually happened. You can't just pretend like they didn't!"

"No," her therapist had answered calmly. "I'm not asking you to pretend that something didn't happen. But I want you to look for something in what you're saying to me that might be a negative distortion. Even something minor - some detail. Try to look for the distorted thinking and build on that . . . ."

Tessa took a deep breath to settle her nerves. OK. Catastrophizing. Maybe she was catastrophizing. "Look for distorted thinking," she murmured under her breath, as she reread her journal entry once again.

"There's nothing left," she'd written. "I have no other coping mechanisms. None."

That wasn't completely true, she supposed. Writing in her journal was supposed to help her cope, right? Although it didn't seem to be helping much at the moment. What else? There was music. At least she still had that. Even if it turned out she didn't have a single person in the world who actually cared about her, at least she still had Eric Thorn. She could close her eyes and listen to his voice, and try to imagine him singing just to her.

She could do it for hours, if she let herself. Just let reality fade into the background and daydream about Eric and his songs. So what if it was just projection - all her little fantasies about some celebrity's innermost thoughts? At least it made her feel better. It took her mind off her own problems. For a little while.

"Projection can be quite useful," she recalled Dr. Regan saying to her once. "As long as you recognize what you're doing."

Tessa flipped her journal closed and plugged her earbuds into her phone. She pulled up her Eric Thorn playlist and set it to random shuffle. "Talk to me, Eric," she whispered, closing her eyes. "Tell me a secret. Tell me what's going on with you."