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A crisis is frightening when we ourselves paint a terrible picture – with broad strokes of generalizations and exaggerations. Then the crisis appears omnipotent, and we – helpless. How to stop feeling like a victim? The psychologist-consultant Danila Gulyaev tells.
Let’s imagine that a film director from another planet, who does not know what a crisis is, makes a film about what is happening to us now. What does this director see? Here are people in suits vigorously discussing something on the stock exchanges. Here are the numbers on the electronic scoreboards. There are queues at the banks. But depressed people in the smoking rooms of large offices are wondering which of them will be fired. Many then sit in the kitchens and discuss how to live on. They all utter a word that the alien does not understand – “crisis”. And he becomes interested in what it is and how it affects people’s lives.
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- Question to the expert: “How to explain our financial difficulties to a child?”
This word describes what is happening, and explains, and predicts. What’s happening? A crisis. Why is this happening? A crisis. What’s next for us? A crisis. This concept invades people’s lives and changes it not only at the level of circumstances, but also at the level of identity – how people define themselves and how they feel.
Our alien director noticed that many people use the concept of “crisis” to explain to themselves the events that are taking place. Explanation is reassuring: when something incomprehensible becomes more understandable, it causes less anxiety. By giving disturbing events a descriptive name, we identify what we are dealing with and begin to understand how we can proceed.
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But with the help of the concept of “crisis” we also predict the future: calling what is happening now a crisis, we already know that its continuation awaits us. We do not know exactly how long the crisis will last and where it will lead. The future looks uncertain, and this keeps us on our toes and anxious. Such anxiety is a natural reaction, and it is not necessary to fight it. Denying or suppressing anxiety can be even more harmful than worrying, because it takes a lot of energy. According to many people, it helps to reduce anxiety by planning actions that can prevent frightening events.
The most debilitating thing is catastrophic thinking, the tendency to exaggerate the likelihood of terrible events in the future. When we imagine the future as catastrophic, we experience panic, anxiety robs us of the confidence that is so necessary to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit during crisis changes! It is useful in such a situation to accurately calculate the likelihood of certain events, referring to your own experience and the experience of other people.
A crisis becomes terrifying when we fan it. Most often, we do this collectively when we talk about it as something that absorbs our life entirely. This is a terrible image, but it is difficult for our director to understand it: it is created with the help of words. What is just letters to him is more real to us than what we can see, hear and touch. This is the reality of our overall picture of what is happening, which we ourselves draw – with broad strokes of generalizations and exaggerations. And in this picture, the crisis appears to be all-powerful, and we are helpless victims.
Under the influence of a sense of helplessness, it is difficult to recognize and apply your resources – skills and knowledge. But crisis changes just make it possible to use them more actively and even develop them in order to improve your life. Therefore, it is important to break up the crisis as a concept, to de-construct it. We can focus on specific events, imagining ourselves as that very alien director. And it is easier to react to what is tangible, and not to what general words and global concepts describe.
This fall, my colleagues Olga Zotova and Elena Aksenova and I held a support group “Anxious days. My strategy. The participants and I tried to find individual strategies that would help us actively cope with adverse events without sacrificing our achievements, plans and dreams. According to feedback, one of the most useful was an exercise in which participants asked each other: What will remain unchanged in your life? What areas of your life will not be affected by disturbing changes? What is important and valuable always stays with you? And it was revealed that the crisis does not completely capture people’s lives: the most important thing remains stable – family, friendship, hobbies, skills, life principles, wisdom and much more. All this is our support in times of instability. Moreover, in times of crisis, we begin to appreciate these things more and turn to them more often.