These stories regulate our emotions, by determining the significance of all the things we encounter, and all the events we experience. We regard things that get us on our way as positive, things that impede our progress as negative, and things that do neither as irrelevant. Small irritants interfere with our plans. We do not like irritants, and will avoid dealing with them. We benefit, become stronger, in doing so.
Unresolved irritants accumulate, rather than disappear.
Catastrophes, by contrast, interfere with the integrity of our whole stories, and massively dysregulate our emotions. As a consequence of this adaptation, this capacity for resolution, catastrophe can rejuvenate. It can also destroy. The more ignored irritants in a given catastrophe, the more likely it will destroy.