Rachel is criticized, and her brain gives her a dose of adrenaline to
help her protect herself. Her senses sharpen, but there’s nothing to see
because the external event has already passed. Like Jane, Rachel looks
inward to find the danger. She begins to generate worst-case scenarios in
her mind. A little mistake becomes the cause for losing her job, and in the
blink of an eye she’s homeless, starving in the snow.
Everyone engages in this process to a certain extent. The common
name for it is worry. A little worry is a good thing; it leads to contingency
plans for dangerous events that are real possibilities. Too much worry, how-
ever, can create more problems than it solves. Our brains can’t tell the dif-
ference between reality and fantasy, so every time we imagine a dangerous
possibility, our bodies immediately prepare to deal with it. Most of us are
able to stop the process when we recognize that it’s no longer useful.
There are, in fact, circuits in our brains that help us apply the mental
brakes automatically.
For Rachel, and all the rest of the explosive people we’ll discuss,
these braking circuits are not working correctly. There are many reasons,
both physical and psychological, for this malfunction. Later, we’ll exam-
ine them in greater detail. For now we need to understand that in emo-
tionally explosive people, normal worrying takes on a life of its own and
becomes rumination, the internal replay of imaginary dangerous situa-
tions, which expands and increases arousal with each repetition. Virtually
all emotional explosions involve rumination. Explosive people differ in
the kinds of dangers they imagine and especially in their tactics for pro-
tecting themselves. People who explode into anger want to fight; people
who panic want to run away. People like Rachel, who explode into sad-
ness, see the battle as already lost and are crying out to surrender.
The technical name for Rachel’s condition is depression. The term
refers to a specific set of psychological and physiological symptoms, of
which sadness is only the most visible. Depressed people think and act in
a predictable manner that tends to keep them sad regardless of what is
going on around them.
Rachel regularly overestimates the probability of negative events and
underestimates her competence to deal with them. She replays scenarios
of failure in her head until she feels totally overwhelmed and completely
lost. That’s when she comes to you for help. What she wants is for you to
16 ❧Emotional Explosions