The Fear Paradox Read online

  What we have discovered as clinicians over these 120 years, since Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung turned our attention to the unconscious, is that patterns from our early development tend to be the raw materials from which we build our imaginative perceptions of others.6 These “projections” are something we all experience. In essence, they are the building blocks of our subjectivity.

  In using the term imaginative to describe this type of cognition, I am highlighting a model of the mind that we will be exploring more in Chapter Three. Imagination, in this model, is less of a conscious creative act and more of an unconscious one. It is something creative that is continually being produced within our minds, something we only tangentially participate in. The psychologist Steven Pinker refers to this as the basis of intelligence, a process of “metaphor and combinatorics.”7” So, when April became curious about why I have a collection of turtles, it was an opportunity for us to understand just a little bit more about her and where her mind spontaneously would take her.

  April is a thirty-two-year-old single woman who has lived her entire life in New York City. She grew up with a narcissistic father who was quite emotionally demanding. Currently, she works as an actuary in the insurance industry.

  My experience of April is difficult to describe. She is pleasant and attractive, in a down-to-earth sort of way. She is socially adept, but there is a remote quality to her that is always present. There are moments in the midst of her speaking when she will look downward in such a way that her eyelids seem to close. These are moments of quiet distance in which April seems far away, on what she calls her “secret island.” So I wait. I wait for her to return. And when she does, it is almost as if she is surprised to find me still there. That’s when I see the fear.

  April grew slowly into her fear, it seems. Little by little, her father’s expectations, demands, and subtle coercion began to shape a pattern of threat recognition around love and relationship. She slowly receded from dating and romance, and by the time I first met her, she had been alone for a number of years.

  As I began my explorations to understand these relational movements of fear and defense, I quickly discovered that human beings seem to be the only animals that suffer with fear in this way. I am not talking about fear limiting behavior or restricting exploration; that is a part of fear’s arsenal that serves all animals, protecting them from harm. I am talking about a deeper impact upon our humanity, some way in which fear seems to turn against us. What we will see, going all the way back to the first moments of life, is that there is something quite unique about us as human beings, and that this difference alters the way fear operates within us.

  The Birth of Fear

  As babies, we come into the world utterly helpless. Not only do we rely on our caregivers for protection and physiological nurturing; we rely on them for more complex psychological development as well. This is where we part company with other animals. Later in this book, we will drill down a bit deeper into the particulars of how evolution brought us to this place, but for now, let it suffice to say that Homo sapiens come into the world with significantly higher degrees of dependence than other animals, including our primate relatives. Coming into the world with vulnerability such as this opens us up to a broad range of potential psychological troubles. And yet, our vulnerability and dependence often go unnoticed—that is, until something goes wrong.

  Following the bombings of London in World War II, countless children and infants were orphaned and housed at the London Foundling Hospital. Working there at the time was an Australian physician and psychoanalyst by the name of Rene Spitz.8 What struck Spitz initially was how quiet it was in the nursery at the hospital. Even though these many infants, under one year old, were abandoned and alone, none of them were crying. Spitz began to study these infants and started the world on a path toward understanding the needs of infancy and the importance of maternal love.9

  Spitz came to understand what happens to a baby that is systematically deprived of love. Severe neglect, such as these infants experienced over many months, began to turn them into mere shells of human beings. The physicians called this condition “anaclitic depression,” a depression that occurs in the first year of life, stemming from trauma such as this.

  To get a better idea of what these withered infants were like, I recommend that you Google the videos of Rene Spitz and the “Foundling Infants.” You will see how the life force within these young human beings receded back into some deep reservoir, and all that was left was dark and vacant. These neglected infants no longer responded to the world with need, and no efforts from the world seemed to get through to them.

  Without much difficulty, we can see something of April’s struggle in these infants: when the world is too threatening, retreat is the only answer. And if retreat is physically impossible, then isn’t it amazing that our nervous systems found a way to retreat while remaining physically present? Of course, these infants did not fare as well as April. Extreme forms of deprivation, such as these infants experienced, are hard to come back from. But what is similar is that, beginning in the first moments of life, our well-being is in the hands of others. And if those others do not handle us with love and care, we suffer deeply. Ours is a dependence from which there is no safe retreat.

  One of the marvels of childhood development is the way in which children are able to remain aligned with their caregivers, no matter what happens to them. Not only are we biologically programmed to maintain physical proximity to our caregivers, an aspect of what we call “attachment,” but human attachment also psychologically programs us to “love and trust” our parents. When “bad” things happen to us as children at the hands of a parent, it is not the parent who gets the blame. Children have a simple logic: “If I am good, I get the candy, and if I don’t get it, I must be bad.” Ronald Fairbairn, an early psychoanalyst following Spitz, called this the moral defense.10 The parent is viewed by the child as morally superior. If actions of the parent cause pain to the child, or if the child fails to receive what they need, the child places blame for this, not on the parent, but on themselves. “It must be what I deserve.” In this way, the child is able to maintain a better connection to the caregiver. If they take the badness into themselves, then the parent is preserved as good, and this allows the child to stay more easily connected. It’s hard to love a bad parent. It is easier to be bad and love a good one.

  What I want to highlight here is that we have evolved ways to stay connected even when a parent is highly dysfunctional. This is both amazing, from an evolutionary engineering standpoint, and extremely sad, from a human point of view. Too often, those who should be protecting us become those who threaten us most; a childhood that is designed to be full of play becomes a perfect petri dish for the cultivation of fear.

  Playing Matters

  Play, fear, and vitality are meaningfully interwoven within the animal world. Research on species as diverse as tortoises and rats indicates that, when play is absent from the life of an animal, well-being becomes compromised.11 For human beings, there are further indications that absent or constricted play is associated with higher levels of psychological dysfunction.12 And in considering the causes of constricted play, fear emerges as the primary culprit.

  In one series of studies,13 researchers looked at the backgrounds of men who were incarcerated for homicide. Two findings stand out. In the homicidal group, there was significantly more physical abuse than in the control group—and with abuse comes fear. What is even more surprising, however, is that the homicidal group also had a startling absence of play reported in their childhoods.

  The lead researcher on this study, Stuart Brown, later became aware of the work of Jane Goodall and contacted her to share his work. He had become intrigued by the 1976 report on Passion and Pom, the mother and daughter chimpanzee duo who systematically and cooperatively murdered and cannibalized infant chimpanzees in their community. Jane Goodall related to him that Passion
and Pom had both experienced ineffectual mothering and exhibited profound distortions in their play as juveniles.14

  In thinking about these curious findings, we need to be as parsimonious as possible. The simple existence of a correlation between the absence of play and murderous tendencies does not in any way prove that they are causally linked. But, for our purposes here, it is meaningful to consider the importance of play in mammalian life, and further, to wonder about the ways in which play is part of a much larger symphony in which we negotiate our relationship to fear.

  Play and Risk

  For most juvenile animals, play takes shape primarily in the form of rough-and-tumble. For human beings, rough-and-tumble is just one part of a wider spectrum of play that includes object play, symbolic/fantasy play, rough-and-tumble, and games with rules.15 Risky play, related to rough-and-tumble, is generally identified as any play that brings the participant within a meaningful distance of danger. This is the type of experience I described in the introduction, riding waves with my son. It is often divided up into play with heights, play in proximity to dangerous objects, and play with speed.16 We climb a tree to the thinnest branch that can hold us, walk along the edge of a narrow ledge, play with fire, or ride our bikes as fast as we can down a hill and then take our hands off the handlebars.

  Research on this form of play has been important in understanding how to keep children safe and define policy. Recent trends have moved our families and communities toward a dramatic reduction in what we view as potential risk for children. Much of this has to do with increased supervision, and as we all know from our own childhoods, increased supervision means decreased fun. But the increased safety is also a function of a reinvention of outdoor play equipment, replacing the hard impact of metal and concrete from the past with the padding of a softer landing.

  Recent research by Scott Cook of the University of Missouri looked not just at what children do in risky play, but also at what they feel.17 In this research, risky play is not just the result of inadequate risk assessment, attention-seeking, or an impulse for self-harm. It is a developmental experience of exhilaration that has emotional and biological validity for the developing child. Supporting this is the neurodevelopmental research on adolescence that has found very particular areas of brain development that are promoted by risk-seeking behavior.18

  One element that stands out in research on risky play is that there is an edge between safety and danger that best promotes exhilaration. As we might imagine with my son, when he turned and saw a wave forming that was far bigger than the six we had ridden previously, he froze. The balance between safety and danger had been crossed. Fear held him, and he braced himself. Unfortunately, he was no match for the strength of the wave. The only way to survive that wave was to playfully surrender to it.

  Fear has a constrictive effect on play, and yet dangerous play, play on the edge of fear, brings with it an evolutionary derivative of joy.19 Has this strange evolutionary cocktail been mixed to help us learn how to more easily approach fear? Is it an effort to calm our inherited terror by giving us a sense of mastery over fear? Or is it possibly a joy that comes when freedom from fear becomes possible?

  A clue to this connection lies with our animal relatives and their use of rough-and-tumble play. Rough-and-tumble is the rolling, wrestling, and pinning that we see in animals from mice to puppies to human beings. Early understandings of play such as this stressed its value as an educative tool. This is the model of play fighting as preparation for real fighting. Today, understandings of play fighting center on notions of relational learning.20 What stands out in these theories is the idea that, through rough-and-tumble play, animals learn to adapt to unpredictable social circumstances with flexibility—an education in assuming varying social roles. And in these changing roles, stress and fear are managed within non-threatening situations. Additionally, these social roles pivot on the axis of social dominance. In rough-and-tumble play, juveniles learn to assume both submissive and dominant positions.21

  It is this last element that I believe is most important for us in understanding the connection between risky play and fear. There appears to be something quite meaningful in our relationship to submission—so important, perhaps, that these behaviors of play in the realm of dominance and submission have become hardwired into the DNA of mammals, including us. And, as we will come to learn, our fear of being dominated by another of our species is so terrifying to us that we will do anything to avoid it.

  As many of you might be aware, animals held in captivity are prone to develop behaviors called stereotypies. These are repetitive movements without apparent function or purpose. Examples range from the pacing of a large cat in a relatively small enclosure to the chewing behaviors of a horse on the wood of his stall. Zoo personnel have come to use these behaviors as markers to identify situations in which animals might be experiencing “poor animal welfare.” This might include situations in which animals are severely neglected, abused, or exposed to unhygienic conditions. The issue of stereotypies is no small matter. It is estimated that eighty-five million animals worldwide suffer from this condition.

  What emerges from the research, however,22 is evidence that stereotypies occur not only in toxic environments, but in more neutral environments as well.23 This is not to say that this second group of animals is free of distress, but that the distress is not always so evident. There is some thinking that stereotypies are a result of the thwarting of the animal’s natural instincts. And, of course, all captive animals are subject to this. What could be more of a natural instinct than to be free? We find this thinking not only in animal welfare, but in prison welfare as well. Activists fighting inhumane treatment in prison systems have spoken out against the use of excessive isolation.24 The common denominator within these varied environments is lack of freedom, social inhibition, and sensory deprivation.

  Fear not only robs us of our capacity to play; it also holds us in a form of confinement that restricts the freedom of our minds. Fear, metaphorically, is the great captor, and—just as in more literal forms of captivity—its effects are devastating to our vitality and well-being.

  Submission and Freedom

  “Never tap out.” This is a phrase that came from a patient of mine who wrestled for sport beginning in high school. She came to see me when she was thirty years old. Her name was Janie, and her experience with wrestling came to be quite meaningful to our work.

  Never tapping out, as I came to learn, was what Janie’s high school coach had demanded of her. Tapping out was like saying “uncle.” It was an admission of mental defeat, a recognition of fear’s power to make you run away. Her coach required that his wrestlers never give up. He would say, “You keep fighting until you can’t fight anymore. You don’t let yourself get pinned.”

  For Janie, never tapping out represented an unconscious refusal to admit that someone had the power to make her submit. What I came to learn was that this battle against submission began early in her relationship with her mother. Being apart from her mother was unbearable for Janie, even up to her teens. Early on in our work, Janie talked endlessly about how wonderful her mother was, how caring, thoughtful, and giving she was. Janie’s mother’s love, however, was narcissistically suffocating, fostering helplessness, dependence, and ultimately, submission. Although I could easily see there was something unhealthy in this dynamic, it took Janie a long time to realize this.

  Submission, we discovered, was a complicated experience for her. This is true for all animals, but particularly so for human beings. In my view, it is a strong contender for what we as a species might fear most—not only biologically, but psychologically, as well. In speaking of the experience of submission, it is impossible to conceive of it without invoking an “other.” We submit to someone, or because someone demands it of us. It is what happens when a person persuasively asks that we hand ourselves over to them. And it is activated in us equally in experiences of “love�
� and domination.25

  In submission, there is something being done to us that overpowers our humanity and renders us mere animals fighting for our lives. We are, however, a very particular kind of animal—one that appears to be sensitive to loss of freedom, not just in terms of physical confinement, but in terms of psychological confinement as well.

  Related to the human experience of submission is the neurobiological response of tonic immobility. Under extreme stress and fear, when the life of an animal is at stake, its nervous system can literally shut down. In laboratory settings, this experience can be induced by repeatedly flipping a frightened animal onto its back and holding it there. Eventually, the animal will stop fighting and go limp. It is a shutting down of the nervous system. The evolutionary value of this particular response to trauma is worth considering. From one angle, it is a form of playing possum, of fooling a predator into thinking that you as prey are dead. But it is also, potentially, a way to keep the nervous system from becoming overwhelmed by terror.

  As human beings, we have our own version of this. It happens during violent sexual attacks and is sometimes called rape paralysis. Similar to tonic immobility, it is a fear response that occurs at the height of threat, when escape is impossible. In some cases, this type of fear response has prevented the completion of the act—cases in which, without the fight and violence of the act, the rapist loses interest or is unable to finish.

  Not surprisingly, victims of rape who have experienced this form of paralysis feel shame about what has happened to them. The inability to stop this terrible thing from happening, the feeling of responsibility, and the sense of worthlessness that comes naturally when someone is treated with such contempt, all form the bedrock of this shame. The shame attached to this protective neurobiological strategy is cited as one of the reasons victims of sexual assault do not come forward to report what has happened. Loss of freedom, powerlessness to stop abuse, and the experience of someone being robbed of their personal sovereignty combine to make them feel less than human.