None of This Should Be Happening, Yet All of It Had to Happen
Written by Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, PC, Founder & CEO
Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, is a licensed clinician, industrial-organizational psychologist, and communication coach. As the founder and CEO of Measures4Success Academy, she empowers individuals, leaders, and organizations to master communication through Kendall’s Life Languages™ Framework, also known as Communication Intelligence (CIQ).
I noticed it before I had words for it. In posts scrolling past on social media, on the evening news, in conversations with people I love, and in quiet moments with clients who trusted me with what they were carrying. The same ache, said in different ways. If this had not happened, we would be somewhere else. Somewhere safer. Somewhere that made sense. I wanted a name for what I was seeing, because something happens when we finally name a thing. We can look at it, understand it, and choose what we do next rather than stay still in helplessness. What I found has a name, counterfactual thinking, the psychology of why some outcomes must happen before things can change.
I felt that ache too, along with the fear underneath it. A heightened, humming anxiety that never fully rests. The kind that comes from not knowing what tomorrow holds or who to trust with what is left of today. The way I have made some semblance of peace with it is a belief I have held for a long time: that there is a purpose in what happens. Even the parts we cannot explain. That some of what breaks us is somehow moving towards a good we cannot yet see. That belief did not take the fear away. It gave me a place to stand inside it instead of being swept under by it.
That is what sent me looking more closely at what I kept witnessing in the people around me. Not just tired or frustrated, but grieving, and afraid, and uncertain all at once. Grieving the freedom we thought we had and the autonomy we assumed was ours to keep. Living in a survival mode that wears a person down so slowly they almost don't notice what it is costing them: their compassion, trust, and care for one another.
I wanted a name for what I was seeing because something happens when we finally name a thing. We stop being lost inside it. We can look at it, understand it, and choose what we do next rather than staying still in helplessness.
What is counterfactual thinking?
Psychologists have a name for what I was hearing. It is called counterfactual thinking, the mental process of imagining how a situation could have unfolded differently from how it did.[1] The word itself tells you what it is doing: contrary to fact. A story the mind builds about a version of events that never happened, based on a single changed choice or circumstance.
Researchers split this process into two directions. Upward counterfactuals imagine a better outcome. “If I had spoken up sooner, this would not have happened.” These thoughts often carry regret, but they serve a purpose. They prepare us for the next decision by showing us what could have gone differently.[2] Downward counterfactuals imagine a worse outcome. “It could have been so much worse than this.” These thoughts bring relief. They remind us of what we still have, even when there is a loss.
Both directions are normal and serve a function. The mind is not malfunctioning when it does this. It is trying to make sense of an event that felt too large, too sudden, or too unfair to simply accept as it happened.
There is a companion to counterfactual thinking worth naming here because it shows up constantly in how we talk about the state of the world. It is hindsight bias, the tendency to look back at an outcome and believe we should have seen it coming all along.[3] Once we know how something ended, memory quietly edits itself. We forget the uncertainty we felt in the moment and replace it with a false sense that the warning signs were obvious. This is part of why so many conversations right now sound the same. If we had only paid attention. If we had only acted sooner. The mind convinces us the outcome was preventable, even when the truth is far messier than that.
Why we rewrite what we cannot change
Watch any comment section under a story about a corporate collapse, a corruption scandal, or a leader clinging to power past the point of reason, and you will find the same sentence in a hundred different forms. If this person had not done that, none of this would be happening.
There is a reason the mind reaches for this so quickly. Researchers call it the exceptionality effect. We generate counterfactual thoughts far more readily about events that feel abnormal than about events that feel routine.[1] What is unfolding at the national and international levels right now, including the consolidation of power, the erosion of accountability, and the public unraveling of institutions that we assumed were stable, registers as abnormal. It offends the sense of how things are supposed to work. So the mind does what it always does when reality breaks its pattern. It builds an alternate version where the pattern holds.
There is also the controllability effect. We are far more likely to imagine alternatives for events we believe someone could have controlled than for events that feel like fate.[1] This is why so much of the current counterfactual thinking around greed and corruption carries an edge of anger rather than simple sadness. It is not just loss. It is loss we believe was avoidable, caused by a choice someone else could have made differently.
None of this is a flaw in how people are processing what they are living through. It is the mind doing exactly what it evolved to do, searching for the point where things went wrong so it can protect against that happening again. The problem is not that we think this way. The problem is what happens when we stay there.
The grief we have not named
Bargaining is the stage of grief people are least likely to recognize because it rarely looks like grief. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross named it as one of five stages associated with loss, alongside denial, anger, depression, and acceptance.[4] It is the mind's attempt to negotiate its way out of a loss that has already happened with statements such as “If only. What if. Please let this not be true.”
Counterfactual thinking and bargaining are the same mental act wearing different names. When someone says, “None of this would be happening if a leader had made a different choice,” or “If a system had held someone accountable sooner,” they are bargaining with reality itself, the same way a person bargains at the bedside of someone they cannot save.
This is what I believe we are collectively grieving, even without the language for it:
The freedom we assumed was permanent.
The autonomy we never thought to protect.
The version of ourselves that could trust a headline or an institution without bracing for what it might cost us.
Underneath it sits a quiet, constant fear that keeps the nervous system on alert long after a threat has passed because the threat never fully leaves. It just changes shape. Living inside it for long enough rations compassion, turns kindness into a risk instead of a reflex, and narrows what we have left to give the people outside our closest circle. This is grief, not burnout or political fatigue.
Why it had to happen
Here is the harder truth, the one I have sat with the longest myself. Reconciliation requires the very thing we are grieving to have happened, fully and visibly, in front of us.
This is not new to history. Lord Acton wrote in 1887 that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.[5] Greed dressed as ambition, supremacy and hierarchy protected as order, and cruelty justified as necessity are patterns that have repeated across centuries and empires. What sets this moment apart is not the pattern. It is that we are:
The first generation to have documented history, behavioral science, and instant global communication all at once.
Able to see the pattern while it is still happening rather than decades later in a history book.
What gets suppressed does not disappear. It waits and grows stronger from having been pushed down.[6] The corruption surfacing now has been tolerated and protected by people who benefited from looking away for as long as that pattern has existed. Underneath it sits something harder to name: a degradation of character.
Fred Kendall, cofounder of the Life Languages™ framework, wrote that the real cause of the Titanic's sinking was never the iceberg. It was character, or the lack of it.[7] This is not only a failure of policy or leadership. It is a failure of integrity, respect, discernment, trust, and accountability, the qualities that hold a society together long before any system does. When those qualities erode quietly enough, for long enough, the collapse that follows only feels sudden. It never was.
None of this makes it easier to witness. It makes it necessary because what stays covered cannot be treated, corrected, or restored. I believe there is a purpose here, not because suffering is good, but because avoidance was never going to carry us to the other side of it.
This generation was not given this moment by accident. We were given it with the tools to finally do something different with it. That is what moves bargaining toward acceptance: not the absence of pain, but the willingness to stop negotiating with what has already happened and start asking what it requires of us, and of our own character, now.
How we process this differently
Not everyone grieves a moment in the same way, and that is not a flaw in anyone's character. It is simply how we are built to communicate and process.
Those who speak the Action languages, Mover and Doer, tend to move toward doing something the moment discomfort sets in. Sitting in bargaining does not come naturally. Stillness feels like defeat. Their instinct is to act, fix, and hold someone accountable now. When there is nothing to act on, that instinct itself becomes its own source of frustration.
Those who speak the Feeling languages, Influencer and Responder, tend to carry the emotional weight of what is happening longer and more deeply than others around them. They feel the loss of trust and safety in their bodies before they can explain it in words. What looks like dwelling from the outside is often simply grief being felt honestly, without rushing past it.
Those who speak the Thinking languages, Shaper, Producer, and Contemplator, tend to need to analyze the pattern, find the meaning, and build some kind of framework before they can accept what has happened. Understanding comes before peace. Without it, acceptance feels premature, even dishonest.
None of these responses is more correct than the others. Each reflects a different route to the same destination: coming to terms with something none of us chose. What matters right now is what each of the seven Life Languages™ is being asked to develop in a moment that is testing all our characters at once.
Courage for those who speak Mover. Trustworthiness for Doer. Enthusiasm for Influencer. Compassion for Responder. Patience with the plan for Shaper. Resourcefulness for Producer. Loyalty for Contemplator.[7] These are not abstract virtues. They are the very qualities this moment is asking us to reclaim.
Moving from rumination to reconciliation
Research offers something reassuring here. Counterfactual thinking itself is not the problem. A 2025 study out of the University of Utah found that once rumination, specifically brooding, was accounted for statistically, distress no longer significantly predicted counterfactual thinking.[8] It is not the “what if” that hurts us. It is staying there.
So the work is not to stop asking “what if.” It is to notice the moment “what if” turns into a loop with no exit and to have a few concrete ways to step out of it when it does.
Call to action
None of this should be happening. All of it had to. Both are true, and you do not need to resolve that tension today. You only need to stop asking reality to explain itself and start asking what it is teaching you.
This is where Communication Intelligence becomes more than a framework. It is the bridge from reckoning to change. Every conversation you have with a colleague, a family member, or a stranger holding a different view from yours is a chance to practice the very qualities this moment is asking each of us to rebuild: integrity, discernment, compassion, accountability, and trust. Not as ideals to admire from a distance, but as choices made one exchange at a time.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood” (Stephen R. Covey). That principle has never mattered more than it does right now, when so much of what divides us is not disagreement but a failure to actually see one another.
If you recognize yourself somewhere in this grief, in the bargaining, the anger, the exhaustion of watching character erode in real time, rebuilding your own character starts with one honest step: knowing how you are wired to communicate and connect.
You can discover your primary language through the Life Languages™ Mini Profile, then go deeper with a full Communication IQ™ Profile to understand your own character strengths and the character you are being asked to develop right now, with far more clarity than reflection alone can give.
Sit with what you cannot undo. Ask it what it came to teach you, not what it should have prevented. Then take that answer into your next conversation, your next decision, your next act of character, and let it move you from grief toward something you can build.
“Raise your Communication IQ to raise humanity, one conversation at a time.” – Dr. Veronica Powell
Key takeaways
Counterfactual thinking, the mental habit of imagining how things could have gone differently, is a normal cognitive process, not a flaw, and it intensifies naturally around events that feel abnormal or avoidable.
The “if only” thinking many of us carry about greed, corruption, and eroding accountability is a form of bargaining, one stage of collective grief for the freedom, autonomy, and trust we assumed were permanent.
Suppressed patterns do not heal on their own. They resurface until confronted. This particular pattern, power protected by silence, has been repeated for centuries, but this generation is the first to have the documented history, behavioral science, and instant communication needed to interrupt it rather than simply repeat it.
Each Life Language™ processes this reckoning differently, through action, feeling, or thinking, and this moment is asking all seven to develop the character qualities innate to them.
Distress in counterfactual thinking comes from rumination, not the thought itself. Naming the stage, using downward comparison for perspective, and redirecting upward thinking toward action move a person from bargaining toward acceptance.
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Read more from Dr. Veronica Powell
Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, PC, Founder & CEO
Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, is a licensed clinician, industrial-organizational psychologist, and communication coach. As the founder and CEO of Measures4Success Academy, she empowers individuals, leaders, and organizations to master communication through Kendall’s Life Languages™ Framework, also known as Communication Intelligence (CIQ). Dr. Powell is a Senior Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine and the creator of the Communication Matters Global Movement, where she teaches professionals how to build trust, empathy, and relational intelligence in every conversation.
References:
[1] De Brigard, F. (2025). Counterfactual thinking. MIT Press Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
[2] Roese, N. J., & Olson, J. M. (1995). Counterfactual thinking: A critical overview. In N. J. Roese & J. M. Olson (Eds.), What might have been: The social psychology of counterfactual thinking (pp. 1–55). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[3] The Decision Lab. (n.d.). Hindsight bias. Retrieved September 18, 2026.
[4] Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. Simon & Schuster.
[5] Acton, J. E. E. D. (1972). Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton. In G. Himmelfarb (Ed.), Essays on freedom and power (pp. 335–336). Peter Smith. (Original letter written 1887)
[6] Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101, 34–52.
[7] Life Languages International. (2020). Foundations of the Life Languages™: Certified Communication Coach manual. Life Languages International, Inc.
[8] Horgos, P. (2025). Rewriting reality: Cognitive and affective relationships of counterfactual thought. RANGE: Undergraduate Research Journal, University of Utah.
