Daniel A. Bochner, Ph.D.

We love our kids. We love our lives. Sometimes we are so grateful for what we have, however, that we fear losing it more than we allow ourselves to enjoy it. This fear of losing those things for which we are grateful is called "worrying." Although sometimes worry can be helpful to us, for example when it allows us to act proactively in preventing potential disasters, more often than not it gets in our way by preoccupying us with possible loss when we could enjoy what we have gained. When we worry about others, we cause an even bigger problem since such worrying sends the message that we do not have faith in those others to handle their lives responsibly and efficaciously.

Healthy "worry" is not really "worry" at all, but rather should be called "concern." Concern activates us toward taking sensible precautions to ensure our future well-being. It is healthy to plan for the future or to work toward goals. Some people are so good at managing concern (taking precautions and working on goals) that things usually do go their way. When we worry, however, we are more than concerned. We are scared or sometimes even terrified. We are thinking in drastic terms. Who of us has not, at times, thought things had to go our way, or by some very specific plan, or everything would be ruined.

Excessive worry is typically related to past experiences of things going really badly in situations for which we have taken an irrational level of responsibility. If, for example, when we were young, someone close to us treated us badly or constantly criticized us, one typical reaction would be to think we deserved what happened. If we deserved what happened because we did something "wrong," all we would need to do to prevent future trauma would be to stop ourselves from doing "wrong" things. From this perspective, it feels better to think we are responsible for the bad things that happened than it does to realize how often bad things happen for no particular reason or because someone else had problems. That is, it feels better to think we had some control over things than it does to feel like bad things happen to us in a completely random fashion...

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