Are You Minimizing or Maximizing Your Addiction?

Minimizing is an attempt to make the addiction seem less than it is. Maximizing is an attempt to make the addiction seem more than it is—more powerful, more inevitable. Maximizing is also called catastrophic thinking. From Psychology Today: “Catastrophic thinking can be defined as ruminating about irrational worst-case outcomes. Needless to say, it can increase anxiety and prevent people from taking action in a situation where action is required.”[1]

In the defeatist thinking of maximizing, the addiction is so big that it’s already won and attempting to change is a lost cause. The future becomes defined in failure, with success no longer up for grabs. “This is just the way I am” becomes the rationale for stay- ing trapped within the addiction, which becomes the new normal.

After the power of the addiction has been maximized and deemed inevitable, I’ve seen something odd happen—the maximized is flipped into the minimized. What was so huge and terrible and inevitable becomes “just the way things are” and takes on a sense of normalcy. Normal has a way of seeming less terrible. When terrible becomes normal, the definition of terrible is downgraded. Maximization morphs into minimization.