Anticipating a Denial

It’s Sunday and I’m in need of some inspiration. I scan through my usual list of suspects and, luckily for me, Dr. Sanity has just what I need. She uses her experience as a NASA flight surgeon to introduce the subject of anticipation and how a bit of honest thought about the future can help keep you in the pink, psychologically speaking.

Anticipation is defined as the realistic planning for future discomfort, and it involves something more than simply making long to-do lists, or even obsessive and careful planning for some event in the future. In particular, it necessitates both thinking and feeling about the affective components of potentially stressful or threatening future events.

Since I’ve been doing a whole lot of anticipating – okay, in my case, worrying – about things lately, this subject is right in my wheelhouse. Granted, the excavation of my bowels is um, behind me now, but there are plenty of other future events for me to dwell on: my teeth are in pretty awful shape and my dentist has informed me that the work to fix them will be a “challenge”; my daughter is starting high school this week and, oh yeah, I’m still jobless and the savings account is about to go on life support.

Maybe I should hold a blogathon for my favorite charity: me.

Anyway, since, as the good doctor points out, anticipation is the realistic planning for future discomfort and not just a song by Carly Simon, it turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong. As she puts it:

…anticipation is a psychological strategy that spreads out anxiety or other distressing emotions (e.g., fear, anger) over time. The advantage of this approach is that, like a psychological immunization, the process slowly allows the individual to accommodate to what otherwise might be an emotionally or physically overwhelming, or impossible-to-handle situation.

In my case, “over time” means every night around four AM but I understand what she means. Thinking about, and planning a strategy for dealing with, unpleasant situations is something that can only be done in fairly small doses over a period of time. Otherwise, the anger or fear aroused by the situation will paralyze the thought process, leaving a person about as rational as a democrat discussing the war on terror.

Of course, there are problems with this strategy, the first one being that few of us want to employ it:

In the world outside of space, or aviation, or other stressful or risky professions, anticipation is not used nearly often enough to learn to cope. The truth is that most people don't much like to think about situations that might cause or result in emotional distress at all, let alone plan in any way for it. And that is the major reason why anticipation is a psychological defense that frequently requires a social structure or network that supports it and encourages it.

In this case, “most people” and I are a lot alike. I don’t so much think about situations involving emotional distress as let them wash over me like the last reel of a horror movie. And the only “social structure” I have for dealing with the aftermath consists of Jim Beam or Johnny Walker. I’m joking, of course. Sometimes, I prefer Cutty Sark.

But the point is still valid: most people would rather actually go through unpleasant situations resulting in emotional distress than spend any time thinking about or preparing for them ahead of time. Once is more than enough, thank you very much. What’s more, not planning for the future can give you a certain level of deniability, as most of the elected officials in Louisiana can attest.

So where does that leave me? Well, I’d love to deny that I have a dental appointment on Wednesday, but I can’t. So I guess I’ll have to anticipate a strategy for not screaming during my root canal.