The Fear Paradox Read online

  This is the manifestation of the movement Leslie traced from pretense to mind. It is a state in which each of us is capable of containing, in our minds, new worlds and new possibilities. And, as the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey conceived of it, this acquisition of mind bestowed upon us an inner vision that he called “the inner eye.” He related this to our evolution and to the value it brought to our ancestors—that first moment when something was different for us.51 The moment we became sapiens; the moment we discovered that we could imagine.

  In the context of evolution, this was an extraordinary breakthrough. Think of the benefits this brought to the first of our ancestors—to be able to make realistic guesses about what might lie around a blind corner or, more importantly, what might exist in the mind of another. The way was laid open for a new deal in human social relationships. We acquired sympathy, compassion, trust, and equally, treachery, double-crossing, and suspicion. We learned how to dream and we learned how to imagine.

  Let’s take a look at where we are so far. About fifty thousand years ago, our minds acquired the capacity to use metaphor. The dark that was unknowable revealed its secrets to us through the associational wonder of speculation and suspicion. We began to predict and imagine what might be waiting in the dark. The realms of prediction grew exponentially with experience. But what was most meaningful in this evolution was the emergence of the concept of the dark as a metaphor for all that was unknowable.

  Beginning in the concrete experience of the night, our minds began to conceptualize the abstract notion of uncertainty. And what was applied concretely to the state “when the sun goes down” could now be applied metaphorically to all sorts of things. The world around us, that we thought we knew, took on a double life. In addition to the observable, we soon realized that within each moment of what we thought we knew was a parallel moment of the unknown. Imagination allowed us to fill in the blanks. We acquired the capacity for curiosity, wonder, doubt, and ultimately, distrust.

  Seeing into the dark, both concretely and metaphorically, offered us vastly improved abilities to anticipate danger and predict threat. The problem with these abilities, however, is that our security was built, not on an accurate appraisal of reality, but merely on possibility. This is where we can think back to Leslie’s wondering about why pretend play became so embedded in children’s early development. From this, we might even consider paranoia to be less a symptom of mental illness, and more a testament to the strength of our drive to survive.

  If imagining a danger allows us to preemptively protect ourselves, then what difference does it make if that imagining is real or not? Evolution here seems to follow a simple logic. “Better a false positive than a false negative,” and “Just because I am paranoid, doesn’t mean someone isn’t trying to kill me.” Imagination became a welcome stand-in for a sense of sight that failed to keep us safe.

  Note: Similar to the way in which I am noting the difference between the emotion fear and the comprehensive system of Fear, I am differentiating here between two uses of imagination. From this point forward, if I am referring to the comprehensive experience of curiosity, wonder, envisioning, and invention, I will be using the word “Imagination” in capitalized form. If I am referring to just the simple cognitive function of envisioning, I will use the word “imagination” in lowercase form.

  Chapter Four

  The Future of Anxiety

  “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”

  —Virginia Woolf

  Early in my career as a psychologist, I encountered a patient named Sherry, who was experiencing severe anxiety. She was continually occupied with a vague apprehension that something bad was about to happen. Her principal symptom was a relentless worrying, but this was accompanied by irritability, sleeplessness, and muscle fatigue. She was an obsessive planner and list maker and talked so fast that I could barely keep up. There were no pauses in her speech patterns, and if I wanted to get a word in, I literally needed to interrupt her.

  Sitting with her was difficult. She seemed to vibrate and give off an almost electric energy. But what was most surprising, and frustrating, was that she hadn’t come for treatment of her anxiety. Rather, at twenty-three, Sherry, a very accomplished young woman, believed that she had so much untapped potential and need for improvement that, if she didn’t hurry up, she would literally miss the future that she was “intended” to have. Needless to say, as a rookie therapist, I had no idea how to proceed.

  For many of us, anxiety is a crippling ailment that restricts freedom and saps vitality.52 As we learned in the introduction, anxiety affects nearly one-third of all adults over the course of their lives. This represents a significant portion of our society. Falling under the rubric of anxiety, and included in these statistics, are disorders such as phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. If left untreated, severe forms of anxiety such as these can render someone powerless and victimized. Engagement with life, self-esteem, and self-determination all seem to diminish.

  Interestingly, anxiety appears to be something that exists in all cultures. Although current lifestyles in the West have exacerbated anxiety, research suggests that anxiety exists at much the same levels in the East and in developing countries as it does in the United States.53 The differences that appear cross-culturally are related more to the content and form of anxiety and less to the amount of underlying physiological and psychological distress.

  For example, in 1967 in Singapore, a strange anxiety gripped the culture. Many men began to have the intense worry that their genitalia might begin to retract into their abdomen. The worry was so intense and pervasive that clinics were swamped with anxious men afraid that they might contract the “disease” and die. What prompted this epidemic remains a mystery.54

  But what most of us think of when we hear the term anxiety is what we saw with Sherry. Like Sherry, many of us suffer with what is called generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This is the type of disorder that most captures the central difference between Fear and anxiety. Whereas Fear is a neurobiological defensive response to an observable threat, anxiety is, instead, an objectless fear, one in which the threat is either vague or hidden.

  In my professional experience, GAD is a condition that exists across a broad spectrum, from the more severe forms such as Sherry’s to milder forms that don’t quite meet the diagnostic criteria. The latter is what many of us live with and is often felt to be the natural outcome of contemporary life.55 This is the anxiety that is often treated informally with a glass of wine at five o’clock, a couple hits of pot after the kids are in bed, or even a Xanax on a rough day.

  Given the high-pressure demands of Western society, it’s almost inconceivable to many of us that anyone could be free of this type of anxiety. More so perhaps than depression, anxiety has a vital and non-pathological existence for us. I would be hard pressed to even guess at the number of times I have heard a patient say, “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m just a little anxious.” It is often said to indicate that the state of distressing arousal and worry they are suffering with is nothing to be concerned about. And while I do believe that these somewhat dismissive statements are often defensive, i.e., a way to devalue or avoid what is beneath the anxiety, there is also something undeniably honest about these words. But Sherry’s level of severe apprehension and worry was quite another matter.

  All of my attempts to get Sherry to consider her anxiety to be a problem were dismissed. Any time I would ask her to slow down, to sink into the experience of her body, or to get in touch with her inner emotional life, she would resist defiantly. Sherry was someone more devoted to her anxiety than I had ever before encountered. She continued to pressure me to help her reach her potential. She was honestly worried about the future and, particularly, her inability to meet whatever demands might arise.

  For my part, being a novice, I would get
caught trying to convince her or reassure her that she was above average and had nothing to worry about. I would try to cautiously suggest that maybe something deeper was troubling her, something we didn’t yet understand. But all of my efforts fell short. She persisted in tormenting herself with harsh self-criticism that only made her feel more anxious. And when all was said and done, Sherry was certain that her anxiety was warranted.

  I remember one day, when I asked her what she imagined would happen to her if she weren’t so anxious. She looked at me, smiled, and calmly said, “I think I would probably die.”

  What’s Bugging Us?

  Before looking deeper into Sherry’s self-prognosis, it might be good to acknowledge that her valuation of anxiety was not totally unfounded. Studies of performance going back more than one hundred years all seem to indicate that anxiety can improve performance.56 Howard Liddell, an early anxiety researcher, suggested in 1949 that anxiety was the “shadow of intelligence,”57 and thus an unavoidable accompaniment to an educated and cultured life. David Barlow, who has arguably written the bible on anxiety, goes further in this vein: “Without anxiety little would be accomplished. The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.”58

  To my mind, Barlow goes too far in this assessment of anxiety’s place in society and culture, particularly in his belief that, without anxiety, creativity would dry up. But even in the face of his hyperbole, there is something meaningful we all recognize in what he describes.

  Like Sherry, many of us find ourselves in a perpetual state of apprehension and worry, yet still maintain some movement toward accomplishment. Unlike Fear, where the “action tendency” is primarily to pull away from the source of threat, anxiety seems to possess a strange mix of push and pull. Out there in front of us is a threat, and we feel the apprehension. But as Sherry suggests, anxiety strangely possesses some valence that paradoxically moves us toward life and, ultimately, the future.

  Into the Future

  Looking back as we have with regard to our ancient vulnerability with the dark, we can imagine the benefits an enhanced Imagination had on our ability to improve security. Only a mere fifty thousand years ago, perhaps, we went from reactive fear responses in the moment to preparatory responses that reduced the possibility of risk. In addition to greater sophistication in tool use, long-term solutions such as the accumulation of weapons, the erection of permanent walls, strategic planning, and the establishment of agricultural settlements, emerged as forms of long-term defenses.

  Beyond the value these tools and approaches had for us, there was an even more groundbreaking achievement that came with the advent of Imagination. What was truly revolutionary, in my view, and the principal “invention” that most came to define our unique existence as Homo sapiens, was the invention of the future.

  Within our minds, a place opened that allowed us to envision future possibilities and play out probable outcomes. This new vision within the mind’s eye is part of what Thomas Suddendorf of the University of Queensland calls “time travel.”59 In his study of the differences between human and non-human animals, Suddendorf has conceptualized this capacity for time travel as what most makes us human. Moreover, I would add, this is the foundation for our sense of self and what allows us to hope and dream.

  Much of the research on time travel by Suddendorf and others focuses on the ways in which episodic memory is central to this capacity. Episodic memory is what allows us to create an experiential awareness of ourselves in time and place. For example, “I am living in the twenty-first century; I grew up in the United States, and I plan to take a vacation in February.” This is different from what is called semantic memory, the memory of facts, as in, “The capital of New York is Albany.”

  According to Suddendorf, episodic memory was a prerequisite for time travel. It provided the cognitive framework that allowed us to move “forward” into the future. I see it as an experiential template that allowed us to extend our “felt sense” of the present back into a remembered past and forward into a possible future. With this, we evolved beyond a standard repertoire of responses to a predictable environment—behaviors that evolved over millions of years—and into a new era in which we took evolution into our own hands. More than any other species, we Homo sapiens acquired the capacity to adaptively evolve and, with this achievement, the future became ours to shape.

  What we need to remember, however, is that when Imagination spawned the future, it did so in the service of Fear. The very legitimacy of the future’s existence was dependent upon its ability to act as a placeholder for a suspicious mind. For all its potential value, the benign future of unlimited possibility is also the malignant future of infinite terror.

  Imagination’s success in helping Fear solve the problem of the dark rested upon its predisposition toward suspicion. For this reason, the future that we are so dependent upon appears to inherently carry with it the imprint of impending danger. Further, the future that all of us face is a time and a place that has no substance. The unformed hope that Virginia Woolf expresses in her quote at the start of the chapter mocks us with the reality that who we are in the future is an illusion. In this way, the security of being that we all seek is undermined with every breath we take.

  In fostering a solution to the dark of the present, Fear and Imagination brought to life a new form of darkness. And it is this new, future-oriented darkness that I believe contributes to much of the psychological distress that we today call anxiety.

  This, to my mind, is why Kierkegaard, Rollo May, and other philosophers have found the source of anxiety to be in the dissolution of existence and meaning. For how can we have a certainty of existence when the future that we so desperately run to slips through our fingers each time we try anxiously to hold it?

  Worry as a Bridge to the Future

  For most of us, worry is an unavoidable experience in preparing for the future. It is how we manage the what-ifs of life. But worry is also an unreasonable obsession that demands we prepare for the worst, over and over and over again.

  What becomes clear when we look more closely at worry is that, when worry is guided by an overactive sense of perceived threat, even if that threat is unlikely or fantastical, the mind seems driven to try and resolve the threat.60 But, as we all know from experience, worry rarely leads to practical problem-solving.

  In looking at theories on anxiety and pathological worry, there is little consensus as to what fosters and maintains worry.61 One view on the origins of worry suggests that it is a means to avoid the “contrast” between alternating emotional states. From this perspective, people vulnerable to pathological worry would rather maintain the negative state of worry than risk shifts between positive states and negative states. For them, it is not the negative state that is to be avoided, but the shift between states.

  This view fits quite well with the anecdotal evidence of how we at times buffer ourselves against disappointment. Certainly, we have all found ourselves tempering our excitement for the future by bracing for disappointment. It is essentially what cynicism is all about. “Better to expect the worst, then you won’t be disappointed.”

  A second theory posits that worry is a way to avoid the unwanted emotions implicit in the object of our dread. Given that worry is primarily a verbal/linguistic activity, it differs greatly from the emotional distress of Fear and anxiety. One researcher who supports this model, Thomas Borkovec, describes worry as a form of “talking to oneself.”62 And thus, by occupying the mind with linguistic “worry” activity, the awareness of emotional distress is lessened. This model proposes that worry’s value lies in its ability to distract us from our distress.

  What I would propose here i
s that worry, as the primary vehicle for anxiety, is an attempt to reinforce the shaky bridge between the “us” of the present and the “us” of the future. Worry may have come to exist for us as a way to cognitively compensate for the absence of emotional security in a future we cannot control. Could we say, then, that worry is both a symptom of the problem and an imagined solution?

  In the years of work with Sherry that followed our somewhat rough beginning, I learned a great deal more about her relationship with her mother. I had known from the very beginning of her therapy that her mom had left the family when Sherry was about five, never to see her again. But what I didn’t know was that Sherry had maintained an obsessive imaginative relationship with her mom that centered around a reunion in the future. The imaginings were so real to Sherry that they felt to her like “future memories.” As she began to explore these “memories” in sessions, Sherry accessed emotional connections to herself and her imagined future. From these new “bridging” connections, her anxiety transformed into pain and grief. With this, she was able to begin her process of healing.

  When Sherry ended therapy, she was still a somewhat anxious woman. No longer, however, was she ruthlessly driven to better herself, and her self-esteem was greatly improved. She laughed more easily, enjoyed the absurdity of life, and found a way to have greater compassion for herself. But what is most important is that when she began to deal with her pain, she was able to reconnect to herself, to her dreams, and to her Imagination. Sherry discovered that she enjoyed volunteering at an adult reading program, and she was amazed at how good it felt to give back to people.

  Chapter Five