Healing the Version of Me That Learned to Expect the Worst

There was a version of me that learned to expect the worst. I don’t think she woke up one day and decided that she wanted to be afraid of everything. I don’t think she wanted to overthink, prepare for disappointment, question people’s intentions, or constantly wonder what could go wrong. I think she learned to do those things because at some point, expecting the worst felt safer than being surprised by it.

When life has surprised you with pain before, you can begin preparing yourself for it to happen again. You can begin believing that if you expect the worst, maybe it won’t hurt as much when it happens. If you think about every possible outcome, maybe you can prepare yourself. If you keep your guard up, maybe no one will be able to catch you off guard. If you don’t get too excited, maybe you won’t be disappointed. If you don’t trust too much, maybe you won’t get hurt. If you always have a plan, maybe you will finally feel safe.

But eventually, I had to ask myself something: Was expecting the worst actually protecting me, or was it keeping me from experiencing the best?

Because there is a difference between being aware and constantly being afraid. There is a difference between wisdom and expecting everyone to hurt you. There is a difference between preparing for life and spending your entire life waiting for something bad to happen. At some point, I realized that I was allowing things that had happened in the past to determine what I expected from the future.

The truth is, there were reasons I learned to expect the worst. There were moments in my life when things happened that I could not predict. There were situations that changed everything. There were disappointments I didn’t see coming. There were people who did things I never expected them to do. There were losses I wasn’t prepared for. And when life teaches you that something can change in a moment, you may begin spending the rest of your life trying to prepare for every moment.

Maybe you understand that.

Maybe you are the person who thinks of everything that could go wrong before allowing yourself to think about what could go right. Maybe when something good happens, part of you immediately starts wondering how long it will last. Maybe when someone loves you, you begin wondering when they will change their mind. Maybe when an opportunity comes, you start thinking about all the ways you could fail before allowing yourself to imagine succeeding. Maybe when you finally experience peace, part of you is still waiting for something to come and take it away.

Maybe you learned to expect the worst too.

And I want you to understand something: there is probably a reason you became that way.

Sometimes we are so focused on changing our behaviors that we forget to ask where they came from. We tell ourselves to stop overthinking, stop worrying, stop being negative, stop expecting the worst, but we don’t stop long enough to ask, What happened that taught me to think this way? What was this version of me trying to protect me from?

That question changed the way I looked at myself.

Instead of hating the version of me that expected the worst, I started trying to understand her. I started realizing that she wasn’t trying to ruin my life. She was trying to protect me using the only information she had. She remembered what happened before. She remembered being surprised. She remembered not having control. She remembered the pain of believing something would be okay and then realizing it wasn’t.

So she decided that maybe expecting the worst would make things easier.

But it didn’t.

Because expecting pain doesn’t always protect you from pain. Sometimes it just causes you to experience it before it even happens.

I realized that I could be sitting in a perfectly good moment and still be afraid. Nothing could be wrong, and I could still be looking for what was. Someone could genuinely love me, and I could still be questioning whether they did. God could be opening a door for me, and instead of walking through it, I could be standing there wondering what was waiting on the other side.

And that is when I realized that survival mode can follow you into seasons where you are no longer just surviving.

Your circumstances can change before your expectations do. You can finally be safe and still not feel safe. You can finally be loved and still not know how to receive love.

You can finally experience peace and still feel uncomfortable because you have become so used to chaos.

You can finally have something good happen and still be waiting for something bad to follow it.

That doesn’t mean you are broken.

It may mean that there is a version of you that needs healing.

The version of you that learned to expect the worst may have developed for a reason, but she doesn’t have to control your future forever. You don’t have to shame her. You don’t have to pretend she doesn’t exist. You don’t have to force yourself to suddenly become fearless. Maybe healing starts by acknowledging her and saying, I understand why you are afraid. I understand why you learned to prepare for everything. I understand why you don’t trust good things to last. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living as if the worst thing that ever happened to me is always about to happen again.

That is a difficult thing to admit.

Because sometimes expecting the worst can feel like being realistic. We tell ourselves that we are just being prepared. We say that we don’t want to get our hopes up. We don’t want to be naive. We don’t want to trust too easily. We don’t want to believe something is good only to find out later that it wasn’t.

But there is a difference between being realistic and being unable to imagine anything good happening.

There is a difference between wisdom and fear.

And I had to learn to ask myself, Is this discernment, or is this fear speaking? Am I paying attention to what is actually happening, or am I responding to something that happened before?

Sometimes the person in front of you is not the person who hurt you.

Sometimes the opportunity in front of you is not the opportunity you lost before.

Sometimes this season is not the season that broke you.

Sometimes God is doing something new, but you are still looking for Him to repeat something old.

The Bible says in Isaiah 43:18-19, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” I don’t believe this means that we have to pretend the past didn’t happen. I don’t think healing means forgetting everything that hurt us. But I do believe there comes a point when we have to stop allowing the past to have the final say over what we believe is possible for our future.

God can do something new.

But sometimes we have to allow ourselves to believe that He can.

That was difficult for me because expecting the worst had become familiar. And familiar can sometimes feel safer than hope. At least when you expect the worst, you feel prepared. Hope requires you to believe that something different is possible. Hope requires you to open your hands a little. Hope requires you to consider that maybe everyone isn’t going to hurt you. Maybe everything isn’t going to fall apart. Maybe this good thing doesn’t have to be followed by something bad.

And that can feel incredibly vulnerable.

But healing required me to become vulnerable with hope.

Romans 15:13 says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him.” I love that because it reminds me that hope is connected to trust. And for someone who learned to expect the worst, trust can be difficult. Not just trusting other people, but trusting that God is still good even when life has been painful. Trusting that God can lead you somewhere you have never been before. Trusting that you don’t have to predict everything in order to be okay.

I had to begin asking myself, what if something good happens?

What if they really do love me?

What if I am actually safe?

What if this opportunity works out?

What if I don’t fail?

What if I can handle whatever happens?

What if God really is with me?

What if I don’t have to know what is going to happen in order to move forward?

Those questions began changing something in me.

Because for so long, I had only asked what if something goes wrong? What if they leave? What if I get hurt? What if I fail? What if this doesn’t work? What if God doesn’t answer? What if everything falls apart?

But healing required me to make room for another possibility.

What if it doesn’t?

What if the future holds something I haven’t experienced yet?

What if I don’t have to keep preparing for a life I no longer want to live?

What if I can allow myself to experience the moment I am actually in instead of constantly living in fear of the next one?

The Bible says in Matthew 6:34, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I think sometimes when we have learned to expect the worst, we spend so much time trying to live tomorrow that we miss today. We are trying to prepare for pain that hasn’t happened yet. We are grieving things that haven’t been lost yet. We are protecting ourselves from people who haven’t hurt us. We are worrying about doors closing before we have even walked through them.

And in the process, we miss the life happening right in front of us.

Healing the version of me that learned to expect the worst meant learning that I could be present. It meant learning that I didn’t have to predict everything to survive it. It meant learning that even if something unexpected happened, I was not the same person I used to be. I had grown. I had learned. I had survived things I once thought I wouldn’t survive.

Maybe I didn’t need to constantly prepare myself for disaster because I was beginning to trust myself and God enough to know that whatever happened, I wouldn’t have to face it alone.

That changed everything.

Because maybe the goal isn’t to convince yourself that nothing bad will ever happen again. We live in a world where disappointment, loss, and pain exist. Healing isn’t pretending that life will always be easy.

Healing is learning that you don’t have to spend your entire life afraid of what might happen.

Healing is understanding that you can experience joy without apologizing for it.

You can get excited without immediately preparing for disappointment.

You can love without constantly waiting to be hurt.

You can trust without needing guarantees.

You can walk through a new door without knowing everything waiting on the other side.

You can experience peace without wondering how long it will last.

And most importantly, you can trust God even when you don’t know what tomorrow holds.

The version of me that learned to expect the worst deserved compassion.

She was doing her best to protect me.

But I don’t want her fear to determine my future.

I want to thank her for helping me survive, and then gently teach her that survival isn’t the only thing we are doing anymore.

We are living now. And maybe that is what healing is sometimes. Not becoming someone completely different.

But helping the parts of yourself that learned to survive understand that they are allowed to live differently now.

So if you are someone who has learned to expect the worst, don’t shame yourself for it. Get curious. Ask yourself when you started expecting it. Ask yourself what happened that made you feel like you had to prepare for everything. Ask yourself what you are trying to protect yourself from.

Then ask yourself something else.

Is the worst thing that happened to me the only thing I believe can happen to me?

Because maybe something good is possible too. Maybe this season is different. Maybe you are different. Maybe God is doing something new.

And maybe you don’t have to keep expecting the worst just because it happened before.

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” — Isaiah 43:19