God Is Your Defender by Rosie Rivera

Author:Rosie Rivera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

ISSUE DYSMORPHIA

I find the news stories that pop up on occasion about crazy lawsuits fascinating. There’s one that is pretty much a poster child for this kind of thing. A judge in the Washington, DC, area went to pick up his dress slacks from the dry cleaner and found they had accidentally sent his pants home with the wrong person. They apologized for the mistake, tracked down the slacks, and returned them to the judge. He, in turn, decided to sue them for $67 million! The dry cleaner had a sign up in their shop that said “Satisfaction guaranteed,” and the judge claimed that in misplacing his pants, they had violated their guarantee of satisfaction and therefore owed him millions and millions of dollars.1

Ultimately, the lawsuit was dismissed, but not after costing a whole lot of people, the dry cleaner included, a lot of time and money in legal fees. Something as small as a forty-dollar pair of pants turned into a huge ordeal all because of where that judge decided to put his focus.

Every time I drive my car, I see those words stamped onto the passenger-side mirror: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” It’s a warning that my perception of how close or far another car might be can be off, particularly when I get ready to change lanes.

I think we sometimes suffer from miscalculating the actual scale of an issue. We minimize something that should be a big deal, or we can turn a small issue into something much larger. Like a pair of pants lost at the dry cleaner or a vanity not painted in a high-gloss finish.

Maybe you’ve experienced someone not greeting you when you walked into a meeting or a gathering. Did you start to fill in the blanks? She didn’t talk to me—I bet she’s been talking behind my back, trying to bad-mouth me to other people. It’s probably because I had that idea at the last meeting that she wasn’t fully on board with. She’s trying to discredit me. She probably thinks all my ideas are stupid. Or maybe she’s intimidated by me. Yeah, I bet that’s it. And now she’s going to be all catty and rude. I can just tell . . .

The reality is, you don’t know why that woman didn’t acknowledge you when you walked into the room. You don’t know if she’s truly giving you the evil eye or just got something under her contact lens. But you’ve expanded your assumption until it outsizes everything else that may have gone right in that meeting.

I’ve been most at risk of issue dysmorphia when it comes to a hurt or a slight or a wrong committed against me, particularly because my history and background include some legitimately huge injustices. You know how when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek? That initial injury hurts like crazy and is a valid wound. But then if you hit that place again when you’re eating dinner—even if you just graze the spot—it can hurt just as much or more than the original injury.

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