The Fear Paradox Read online

  Praise for

  The Fear Paradox

  “A delightfully fearless and deeply sensitive examination of that most primal and formative human experience. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time to come.”

  —Alan Burdick, author of Why Time Flies: A Mostly

  Scientific Investigation

  “Frank Faranda is an accomplished student of the mind, and especially of the interplay between fear and imagination. He’s not only a great thinker and writer, but also a terrific storyteller, keen observer of humanity, and gentle mentor on how we can do better.”

  —Douglas Rushkoff, bestselling author and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens

  “A tour of psychoanalytical thinking around anxiety and how fear drives us, this is an insightful and informative book that challenges us to face our vulnerabilities so that we can be better and wiser.”

  —Dr. Stephen Joseph, psychologist at the University of Nottingham and author of Authentic: How to be Yourself and Why It Matters

  The Fear Paradox

  How Our Obsession

  with Feeling Secure

  Imprisons Our Minds

  and Shapes Our Lives

  Frank Faranda, PhD

  Coral Gables

  Copyright © 2020 by Frank Faranda, PhD

  Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

  Cover and Interior Design: Jermaine Lau

  turtle by anggun from the Noun Project

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  The Fear Paradox: How Our Obsession with Feeling Secure Imprisons Our Minds and Shapes Our Lives

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020933477

  ISBNs: (p) 978-1-64250-057-8 (e) 978-1-64250-058-5

  BISAC: HIS035000, HISTORY / Study & Teaching

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my wife and son

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Fear as a Threat

  Chapter One

  What Fear Can Do to Us

  Chapter Two

  The Security Alarm System

  Chapter Three

  When Fear and Imagination First Met

  Chapter Four

  The Future of Anxiety

  Chapter Five

  Fear of Our Own Minds

  Chapter Six

  Can You Imagine?

  Chapter Seven

  Imaginative Revolution

  Chapter Eight

  The Fear Paradox

  Chapter Nine

  A Turtle

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography and Suggested Reading

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Fear as a Threat

  “Fear can transform us in ways that fundamentally alter how we perceive our world.”

  —Henry L. Chambers Jr.

  One summer, not so long ago, I got a taste of something long forgotten—the joy of riding waves. I’m not talking about tame little crests, I’m talking about waves that slam you into the sand and carry you for twenty yards. This was what I found one afternoon at Marconi Beach on Cape Cod, riding waves with my twelve-year-old son.

  I was already familiar with the waves at Marconi. I had spent a summer on Cape Cod when I was in my twenties, and rode those waves many times. In those days, I was much stronger, but even coming back as an older man, the same excitement drew me in. To my surprise, my son ventured into the water with me. He doesn’t typically like riding waves, but I think he could see everyone’s enjoyment and decided to jump in. People from age ten to sixty were out there having a ball. I wasn’t consciously thinking that the joy I was feeling riding those waves was a result of the proximity to danger, but in hindsight, I suppose it was.

  For me, with my son, I was in heaven. We had each ridden about six waves when, all of a sudden, we looked out toward the horizon and saw a huge swell emerging. Along with this swell came a powerful undertow that made it difficult to move. I looked over at my son, and he was preparing to ride. I dove into the wave as it came crashing in on me, and I rode it to the shore. It was big and it threw me about. When I was able to get up, I looked over and saw my wife standing on the beach, pointing at my son. Slowly I made out her words: “He’s hurt!” She was pointing and I was trying to wipe the water from my eyes to focus. I looked at my son. He was standing upright, holding his arm. That was when I saw it. His arm was bent at the elbow, but bent the wrong way. I ran to him and saw the bulge on his elbow. I saw his face: the pain, the fear. The exhilaration in me turned sour in my stomach, and after that it was simply one step after another in a desperate, terrified fog.

  The arm was eventually set without surgery, and, after a couple of difficult months of rehab, my son was good as new. My wife and I talked to him at various points in the months that followed about what had happened and his feelings. But the one emotion that I never mentioned having was the joy I felt before that last wave hit. It felt wrong to associate joy with such a frightening experience. I couldn’t have imagined discussing it with my wife, let alone my son. After about a year, however, he and I were in the car, and it came up. I don’t remember what prompted it, but there it was. I confessed that riding those waves had brought me a joy that I had not felt for a very long time. We stopped at a light, and I looked across at him cautiously. He turned to meet my gaze. A smile slowly edged up his face, and he nodded. “I know,” he said, “me too.” That was it. That was all we needed to say. Even though we both knew the result of that day, we could not deny the exhilaration that had preceded it. Joy had unfortunately brought us just a little too close to danger. But why had it? Why does joy often come when we are nearest to the edge of fear?

  For us as human beings, fear is a complicated phenomenon. Much of why I began to study fear was an attempt at unraveling these mysteries, both for myself and my patients. As a psychologist, I sat every day listening to the stories of suffering caused by fear, and I began to see that fear was far more devastating than I had ever imagined.

  Unlike other animals’ fear, human fear comes in strange shapes and sizes. Something about who we evolved into has dramatically changed the role that fear plays in our lives—not only personally, but historically and societally as well. Rather than the trusted ally in survival that fear is for other animals, fear, for us, is often something we guard against.

  In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt cautioned us about fear. He spoke those now famous words in his first inaugural address to a nation crippled by despair and longing for hope. The recovery from the economic collapse of 1929 had stalled, and FDR knew that, if the country was to get out of its current economi
c morass, it needed to come to terms with the emotional underpinnings of such a collapse. FDR understood that fear played a prominent role in both the despair and the potential for recovery. He knew that, at times, fear cripples and corrodes, even if the perception of danger is ultimately irrational. FDR spoke to this quite eloquently when he said, “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

  This paralysis of which FDR spoke is something most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. This is what countless self-help books attempt to free us from. But what I have come to wonder about is why fear is so difficult for us in the first place, and how it became so different for us Homo sapiens. To find answers to these questions, I looked first to my patients. From there, I began a long journey that took me deep into the history of how we became who we are today. Neurobiology, history, sociology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychoanalysis, and comparative psychology all contribute to what I am exploring here. This book is not a “how to,” but a “how come?”

  There is a scene that plays out daily on any street corner. I’ve watched it many times. A toddler dawdles on a sidewalk. His mother waits nearby with an empty stroller, evidently ready to go home. She has said a dozen times, “Come on, it’s time to go, we have to go…ready to go?” And then those terrifying words just seem to come out of nowhere: “I am leaving.” Just three simple words in that hauntingly singsong melody, “I am leaving.” Immediately, the child freezes, turning, locked on his mother as she takes that first step away from him. And without missing a beat, the child screams, “No! Wait!” He comes running to her side, frightened, obedient, compliant.

  Beginning early for us in tiny moments of relational fear, our core experience around uncertainty shapes not only our personal psychology but the very fabric of our society. So much so that it is no wonder great thinkers such as Alan Watts and Paul Tillich have described our time as an age of anxiety.1

  More than fifty million people in the US ages eighteen to fifty, or 19 percent of the total adult population, are estimated to suffer from some form of diagnosable anxiety disorder during any given twelve-month period.2 These statistics include generalized anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, social anxiety, agoraphobia, and PTSD. This already high proportion jumps to about 31 percent when we look at lifetime statistics. To my thinking, that is near epidemic proportions. And when we consider the number of us who suffer from high levels of anxiety, but who fall just short of the diagnostic criteria, the statistics become even more startling.

  Needless to say, a great deal of our personal and medical resources are going into managing and treating the effects of anxiety and its ultimate source, fear. Emergency rooms are filled with panic-disordered patients mistakenly believing they are having heart attacks, and the pharmaceutical industry is getting rich medicating our generalized anxiety.

  But in addition to these symptoms and costs, there is a more subtle and pernicious effect that haunts so many of us. Vast areas of our lives are unavailable to us due to this fearfulness: our freedom is constricted, our well-being is diminished, and our ability to actualize ourselves—to bring forth who we are and who we wish to become—is lost to us. And as we will come to see, one of the particularly problematic aspects of fear is that it possesses a marvelous ability to operate within us unseen.

  This is what I came to witness with one of my patients, by the name of Tim.3 When he first came to see me, Tim seemed quite content. He was comfortable in his current job and had a good relationship with a woman he liked; the only conflict they had was related to his lack of ambition. Unlike his girlfriend, Tim was content; he didn’t pursue new work opportunities or look for ways to express himself, either personally or professionally. This difference was a source of conflict between them. So much so that she made him promise to go into therapy to fix “what was wrong.”

  Although I value creativity and personal ambition, I do not believe that everyone needs to pursue such interests. To my mind, there is nothing pathological in living one’s life contentedly, simply getting by. But that is different from someone taking the path of least resistance because they are afraid.

  Up to that point, what I knew about Tim was that he had no interest in pursuing advancement in his career. He specifically told me that, if he did feel that desire, he would pursue it, that it wasn’t fear that was holding him back; it was a lack of desire. He said, “What am I supposed to do? I just don’t feel it.”

  This was where we left it, until one day Tim revealed to me that he had not cried in fifteen years. I was struck by a deep wave of sadness and compassion. He told me that he had forced himself not to cry, and that it had worked. The last time he had cried was following a humiliating episode with a girl in high school. What we discovered, as we spent time with his pain, was that when he cut off his feelings of hurt, he also cut off his feelings of desire. Desire, it seems, was what got him into trouble in the first place. Parts of him that sought to protect him from future hurt began to systematically condition him not to want anything. Fear of hurt, humiliation, and pain forged a very particular protection. It was a protection that remained completely out of awareness, and in its invisibility, it was wildly successful.

  Given the pernicious life of fear in our society, it is perhaps no wonder that we fight fear on every front. Empowerment gurus and self-help authors have engineered countless systems and programs designed to free people from the vulnerability they face with fear and anxiety. In any number of ways, such leaders in this world of empowerment help their clients and readers face fear head-on and make choices that support other needs besides security.

  And let’s not forget Oprah and her walk across the hot coals. Although co-opted by the New Age movement, fire-walking has roots that go back thousands of years.4 Rituals such as this have been woven into Western cultures from ancient Greece to the United States. Regardless of the science behind this phenomenon (which makes it humanly possible), fire-walking is a ritualized experience that gives the participant a new sense of power in relation to fear. People report a renewed vitality in their lives and a freedom to express themselves. Sadly, however, such renewal rarely lasts for long.

  Cultural avenues for temporary renewal from fearfulness are present in many forms. From the pride we feel when our valor is rewarded with a medal pinned to our chest, to the answers we find waiting for us in the self-help sections of our book stores (online or otherwise), our culture is rife with possibility. Title after title reveals our longing to acquire courage and to escape our fears. Thousands of books each year promise such relief. And, if there is one thing all these books agree on, it is that fear is the culprit in the loss of vitality and self-fulfillment. Overcoming fear, it seems, has almost universal support in Western society. Emerson himself expressed this as a recipe for life. He wrote, “He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”5 Courage is a commodity we all seem to value.

  Following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, we got a first-hand glimpse of the repugnance we feel in relation to the cowering effects of fear. The image of deputy Scot Peterson, an otherwise sound member of the sheriff’s department, standing frozen outside the entrance to the school while children inside were being killed was both shockingly flagrant and sadly understandable.

  What intrigues me about courage, and the lack of it, is not whether it works in overcoming fear, or whether it is something we can acquire, but instead, why it has become necessary in the first place. Why has our culture, and countless cultures before it, built so many rituals to support the attainment of courage? Courage, it seems, is a bit like a winter coat. Although it might be quite attractive, we certainly wouldn’t own it if it weren’t so damn cold. What is it about fear that requires such drastic countermeasures? Isn’t fear desig
ned to alert us to what is dangerous? Why would fear, something so crucial to our survival, evolve within us to become such a threat?

  Chapter One

  What Fear Can Do to Us

  “Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.”

  —Rilke

  Every so often, a patient of mine asks me about the turtles. I have a lot of them. They sit on several shelves in my office, along with my books. I don’t remember how I started collecting them, but I do remember when I got the first one.

  I was cleaning out my mother’s apartment after she died. There it was, in a little curio cabinet. I remembered this turtle from my childhood. It was a goldish-colored metal, and its shell opened to reveal a hidden compartment. I took it down from the shelf and sat wondering what I might find inside. Would it be some clue to my mother’s life or to my childhood? Perhaps something long forgotten: a lock of hair, an antique ring, an old penny. When I opened it, however, I was surprised to find it empty. I think I was disappointed, but it is hard to know, given the grief I was in.

  When patients ask me about the collection, I am open to talking about it. I have never told anyone about the connection to my mother; I simply say that I started collecting them a while back and that I find turtles quite fascinating. I often say something about how they remind me of people, the shells we have and the ways we hide.

  I believe I said something like this to April. She and I had been working together in psychotherapy for a relatively short time, maybe six months, when she asked about them. Most likely, before I told her what the turtles meant to me, I inquired about what she imagined.

  In depth psychotherapy, the relationship of patient and therapist is both real and imagined. It is real in that, as a therapist, I work to be present and emotionally truthful. But it is imaginary in that, as a therapist, I come to inhabit roles for my patients—and they for me—that are infused with subjective imaginings. This, in the work of depth psychotherapy, we call transference and countertransference.