I’ve been talking in the past several posts about my family, and here is something I rarely admit out loud. One of the reasons I get so frustrated when my mother goes down the negativity route is becuase it echoes the monkey chatter in my brain as well. I can ‘what if’ until the cows come home, and it makes it so it’s really difficult for me to make an actual decision about anything important.
When I was in my twenties, K and I talked about how different our mothers were. Her mother was very much a ‘things will work out, no matter what’ kind of person, whereas my mother had a ‘something will always go drastically wrong, no matter what’ mentality. This came out when K was taking me to the airport and joking about me having a roll of quarters, an umbrella, and a bunch of other things she thought unnecessary. I said you never knew what you might need when you were on vacation.
Years later, I realized t hat as long as I had proper Id and my credit card, I could buy anything I needed. A huge privilege, yes, and not something I wanted to abuse, but it really eased the anxious part of my brain.
That’s something I learned in my twenties/early thirties. I had to find ways to work around the destructive chatter in my brain. I had to build that into everything I did because it was just a part of me. It makes it harder for me to do things, but I’ve gotten better in the last few years. In some ways. In other ways, it’s gotten worse.
K and I talked about the pros and cons to our mothers’ ways of thinking. With K’s mother, a pro was that she did not have to expend too much energy on ‘what ifs?’. She assumed things would turn out ok, and that must have been a relief. On the other hand, when things didn’t turn out ok, she was ill-equipped to deal with it.
Whtereas with my mother’s Debbie Downer mentality meant that she was always prepared for the worst, but didn’t know what to do if things did not reach that point. In addition, in always looking at the negative side of things, it paralyzes her from actually making decisions because any choice seems bad.
This is what I hate the most because it’s how I deal with things as well. I can see a million things that could possibly go wrong at any given time, and I can’t see a way forward. Rationally, I know that every decision has consequences, both good and bad. I know that there is no choice that is completely positive.
And yet. My brain equates negative consequences with catastrophe, and then I can’t make any choice at all. I have to consciously push my way past that mental barrier in order to make a decision.