Everything Isn't Terrible

CHAPTER 1

Focusing on Yourself

Jordan spent most of her first appointment telling me about Kyle, her ex-boyfriend. Kyle had a history of freaking out when things got serious. He feared intimacy because he didn’t have a stable relationship with his parents. He had used Jordan to find a job and fight his depression, and then promptly dropped her. Jordan and Kyle were no longer a couple, but they still hung out in the same friend group and occasionally had sex. She told me that she followed Kyle on Venmo to see what “dumb” things he was buying for other women. She knew his email password and logged in to see his dating app notifications. Jordan had blocked Kyle on Instagram during a moment of rage, but her friends texted her the pictures he posted while partying with twenty-two-year-olds. “Honestly, I’m embarrassed for him,” she said.

You might want to laugh, but I’m not going to throw the first stone here. We have all been Jordan in one way or another. To be human is to be focused on another human, especially when it’s a romantic relationship. While Jordan gave me her dissertation on Kyle, I realized I knew nothing about this woman that didn’t relate to her ex. Her mind was completely fixed on Kyle, and I could feel the anxiety radiating off of her.

This is the first and most daunting challenge for any therapist: to help a person begin to focus on herself. It’s ironic, considering that many people label therapy as a selfish practice. The reality is that there’s rarely enough self in it. So many people come through the door ready to complain about their partner, their parents, or their boss. They know that they’re anxious, but they don’t see how focusing their attention outward, what I call “other-focus,” contributes to their anxiety. Therefore, the first step in calming down is simply to begin to think about yourself. To see how your anxiety is at work. It sounds easy, but it isn’t.

What Is Anxiety?

It’s not surprising that Jordan was uber-focused on Kyle. The habit of focusing on others has biological origins. When we feel threatened, we must respond to the threat. This is the simplest and best definition of anxiety: anxiety is your response to a real or imagined threat.

Our anxiety serves a very important purpose, because the central goal of being a human is simple: to not die for as long as you can. One might call this, oh I don’t know… living. But in your quest to live, there are a lot of things in the world that threaten you. Bears. Earthquakes. Chipotle. Kyle. Fortunately, evolution has given humans a way of surviving scary things.

You can:

Most organisms have some or all of these built-in responses to danger, but we humans are special. Not only can we sense danger, but we can imagine potential danger. Your dog doesn’t worry about whether you’ll feed him tomorrow. He only wants to know if you’re going to finish that piece of cheese. Our ability to perceive danger has helped us survive and thrive. But like any superpower, it can cause problems. We end up worrying too much about hypothetical threats and not the reality-based problems of today.

Because humans have different genes, families, and experiences, we vary in how sensitive we are to imagined threats. Think of it as a built-in alarm system. Some of us have alarms that trigger very easily, and others do not. Maybe your alarm only goes off when there’s a real fire, but mine will sound when I’ve only slightly burned the chicken nuggets.

Our alarms also can evolve based on our encounters with real threats. You’re going to be more anxious after you’ve seen a bear than on a regular Tuesday with no bears. (In case you can’t tell, I’m very concerned about bears.) When your alarm sounds, you don’t exactly have time to self-reflect. If you stop to self-reflect when you’re being chased by a bear, then you’re toast. You know that the bear is the cause of your distress, so you need to escape it as quickly as possible. Most human relationships, however, are more complex. But the more we feel threatened, the more we apply the same cause-and-effect thinking to our relationships. Our brain shifts to the tunnel vision that plagued Jordan. We want one person to be the bear, so we make them one. To protect ourselves, we invest a great deal of energy into becoming experts on someone we can’t control, that is, the Kyles of the world.

Much of the world today is caught in a state of other-focus. We feel frightened by many things, so we see many bears. Republicans. Democrats. Family members. People who don’t agree with us. People who don’t look like us. No wonder everything feels terrible.

The Trouble with “Why”

When someone tells you to focus on yourself, it can feel like the other person is getting off the hook. You might think, “Aren’t some people just terrible? Doesn’t Kyle play a role in the dysfunction of this relationship?” You bet he does, simply by being a human. But when Jordan became anxious about the state of their relationship, she could only see Kyle’s part. Jordan knew that Kyle’s behaviors were a part of the problem, so she labeled him as the cause of the problem. She saw Kyle as the person who must change to free her from her anxious email snooping. By focusing on Kyle, she had given up her own agency.

There are many ways we get caught in the trap of focusing on others. When we really want someone to like us, or we worry about someone we love, we lose sight of ourselves. When someone disagrees with us or hurts us, we try to calm down by changing or blaming the other person.

Focusing on another person can also look like:

Humans end up in this cause-and-effect thinking because we’re programmed to ask the question “Why?” when we’re anxious. Asking why implies fault. It conveniently gives us someone or something to blame. Jordan was asking herself, “Why am I so unhappy?” And she had an obvious answer to this question: “Because Kyle is a tool.” The problem was that Kyle was not sitting in therapy. Jordan was there, and Jordan was the only variable she could alter in this grand equation of dysfunction. To help her focus on herself, I simply asked Jordan a bunch of questions that didn’t start with “why.”

Weeks passed, and I tried to keep Jordan focused on how she wanted to respond to this situation with Kyle. There were glimmers of self-focus, but her attention always shifted back to her ex. She tried to teach Kyle how to not talk about other women when they were together. She tried to convince Kyle that they needed couples counseling to work on their relationship. She hypothesized why Kyle was too immature and would never change. Jordan put so much of her energy into trying to manage Kyle’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. The only thing that calmed her down after a fight was getting an apology text from him. No wonder she was so tired and so anxious. She had forgotten that someone else besides Kyle could calm her down—herself!

Over time, Jordan’s focus began to shift back to herself. Jordan started to notice how her relationships were a two-way street and that her own stress level affected her functioning and level of maturity. She observed how she arrived late to work when her boss was in a bad mood. She saw that she was more likely to fight with her mother on the phone when she had been drinking. By noticing the part she played in every important relationship, she was ready to take responsibility for her functioning. Because that’s what responsibility is—the ability to respond. Jordan could see that if she learned to focus on being her best self in her relationships, a lot of the drama would simply fizzle out.

How quickly a person can get to this place of self-focus depends on a few things. One variable is how strong their sense of self is. We’ll talk more about this concept in the following chapters, but the idea is that we all have varying levels of how other-focused we tend to be. A second variable is how much stress is present. Maybe you can stay self-focused during a mildly challenging event. But if the stress keeps getting cranked up, it can become difficult even for the most mature person to not shift into blame-focused thinking that asks, “Why?”

Let’s Practice!

One way of strengthening your ability to focus on yourself is to practice flipping other-focused questions into self-focused ones. Think of it as hitting the reverse camera button on your phone in order to take a selfie. Here are a few examples:

When you begin to focus on your part in a relationship or a problem, a funny thing will happen—you’ll start to calm down! This is because you’ll be focused on the one thing you can control: yourself.

My office became a place where Jordan could calm down a little bit and begin to think more about her anxious functioning. Over time, she got a good sense of how her intense focus on Kyle reinforced his desire to stay away from her. They were caught in the classic relationship dance of anxious pursuit and anxious flight. Jordan took the focus off Kyle and started working on her friendships, her health, and her career goals. She began to see that her happiness maybe wasn’t dependent on Kyle’s behavior. In other words, she calmed down. And can you guess what happened? Yep. They got back together. But now Jordan saw that her new challenge was to continue to take responsibility for herself and her anxiety while in a relationship with Kyle.

I don’t know what happened to those two. People will often stop coming to therapy when things have calmed down. But I hope that Jordan found a way to keep thinking about herself when she was tempted to focus on Kyle. People can grow up and calm down within relationships or without them. But I’m still rooting for Jordan, because I know what it’s like to get a small taste of your own capacity in life. I hope that she has continued to see how staying focused on herself will make her relationships a little less anxious.

Your Questions

Observe

Evaluate

Interrupt

Your Practice

Over the next twenty-four hours, make a note every time you find yourself focusing anxiously on another person. Examples could be when your significant other loads the dishwasher the wrong way or when someone says something on social media that infuriates you. You are other-focused anytime you want to manage the thoughts, emotions, or behaviors of another person, even if it’s a stranger or a celebrity. At the end of the day, give yourself one kind pat on the back for every name on the list, and don’t beat yourself up for how long it is. Paying attention is the most important part of change! The more you pay attention, the more likely you are to remember to stay focused on yourself.