The Fear Paradox Read online

  By 529 AD, Justinian, the Emperor of Rome, officially closed the Academy in Athens. Education was limited to the religious, as were virtually all texts written at this time.87 Book production dropped dramatically while the Church was gaining power through the assimilation of pagan culture. Knowledge, unfortunately, was linked to the pagan. The many gods of Greece and Rome became the one God; a God that Augustine claimed didn’t want us to know too much.

  Although Augustine’s views on the sinfulness of curiosity were highly influential in the evolution of Western culture,88 it would be an overstatement to attribute the vast changes in our relationship to knowledge, culture, and the mind solely to the effects of his writings. Much was changing societally and culturally leading up to that moment, and not all of it was visible. Augustine’s pronouncement on curiosity may have merely ridden the wave of change already in motion. Something was shifting in the very fabric of society. And even though we can view these new societal constraints through many lenses, from a psychological perspective, what happened following the decline of Rome was a critical moment in the evolution of Imagination.

  In many ways, the devastation during the Middle Ages is not so different from what happens to all of us at times within our own minds. Augustine and the Church struggled to confine the natural urges of curiosity and desire, and ultimately, the mind itself. They justified this confinement with religious law—a fear-based law that was intended to bring us closer to God and to avoid the risk of damnation that followed sinfulness. This fear-based confinement was meant for our own good; limit curiosity, limit desire, keep the mind small. But as we see in our own lives, the cost of safety can be quite high—the ideas we never follow, the feelings we never express, and sadly, the person we never become.

  What we now need to explore more fully is what makes us as human beings so vulnerable to Fear. What happened along the way to our becoming human that promoted such a state? And why is it that other animals don’t have these problems?

  Natal Inferiority

  I will never forget the cat I took off the street in Hell’s Kitchen, in New York City. She was feral, and I was surprised that the rescue crew was able to catch her. I found out why a few days later when the vet told me she was going to have kittens. Within weeks, I was the proud father of six adorable kittens who very quickly learned to run as a pack full speed down the length of my tiny railroad apartment.

  What stands out most to me about that experience is the lengths to which the mother cat went to care for her kittens. Coming to know her as I did, I saw that she was still wild, fiercely independent, and always cautious about human interaction. I remember the first time I tried to pick her up. At first she was very still, and then, once I got her up into my arms, she began to flail her limbs with claws extended, slashing my arms, chest, neck, and face. The fact that this feral and possibly traumatized cat allowed herself to be captured and put into a cage awaiting adoption was, to my mind, a selfless act of submission driven by the maternal imperative to find a safe place to deliver her kittens.

  Giving birth was no different. From the moment I saw a sac emerge at two in the morning, she was a birthing machine. She assiduously opened each sac, cleaned the kitten, ate the sac, and then rested, panting, until the next kitten emerged. After five of these deliveries, she was clearly exhausted. I thought she was done. It didn’t seem possible that she could do any more, but then one more sac emerged. And before she allowed herself to rest, all six kittens were cleaned and nestled up to the soft warmth of her belly.

  After that, she refused to leave her nest in my closet for two days. I brought her food, but she didn’t eat. Evidently, the protein from the sacs was sufficient nutrition to get her through this initial period in which she protected her newborns following delivery. And in the day-to-day care that followed, she was present, efficient, and seemingly free of her own needs.

  In contrast, the second thing that stands out in my memory of her is the subtle process by which she began to separate from her kittens. On the surface, this almost looked like boredom, or lack of maternal care. As the weeks passed and the kittens began to eat on their own, she would feed them less meticulously. Almost without rhyme or reason, she would sometimes randomly get up and walk away from them. This is not to say that she lost warmth in her mothering, but she was more selective in her giving of it. At night, mother and kittens would still lie together all in one big fur ball, but during the day, she might leave them and do her own thing. Her mothering was remarkably unencumbered, and it allowed her kittens to mature and play freely. She had brought them to near self-sufficiency, and she was allowing them to fend for themselves. But more than this, she intuitively knew when it was time to set them free.

  For us human beings, it is a bit different. Rather than a mother staying committed and attached for two short months, we need our mothers and/or fathers to stay vigilantly connected and attentive for many years.89 Human babies, more than any other species, come into the world with a profound natal inferiority. We are helpless for much longer than other animals. And without the capacity of our caregivers to remain connected and caring for this extended period of time, none of us would have survived.

  How Big Is Too Big?

  The evolution of our brain is very much tied to the question of when we first can be called human.90 Homo habilis is believed to be the first species with rudimentary language. Does this warrant the status of first human? From the fossil record, we can determine that the brain of Homo habilis three million years ago was approximately six hundred cubic centimeters. This brain size is close to what we find today with chimpanzees. But from that point in our evolution, brain size increases dramatically. About a million years after Homo habilis, Homo erectus possessed a brain almost twice as large. What is striking in this development is that this increase in brain volume takes place without a commensurate increase in body size. Homo sapiens’ brain today is about 1,400 cubic centimeters, and much of this expansion occurred in the last five hundred thousand years. Also of note is that the paleocortex, the older cortical brain, is virtually the same for us as it is for many other mammals. What increases so dramatically for us is what is called the neocortex. That’s the good stuff.

  Paralleling this development in brain size was the already-mentioned shift toward bipedalism. Homo ergaster/erectus walked in an increasingly upright manner, and this shift required some changes in our biomechanics. Principal among these changes was the narrowing of the pelvis and lengthening of the legs. This facilitated walking upright for longer distances and allowed for greater migratory possibilities. What emerged from these shifts, however, is what is sometimes called a pelvic constraint. How do you birth a big-headed baby and keep it alive long enough for its big brain to develop?

  This problem was solved by extending intrauterine brain development over a longer period of time. Gestation across species is linked directly to brain size, from twenty-one days for the rat to 165 days for the macaque monkey to 280 days for the human being.91 But even this extension appears to have not quite done the trick. A chimpanzee’s brain at birth is about 45 percent of its eventual adult brain size. The macaque monkey’s brain at birth is 70 percent of adult size, but woefully, the human infant is born with a brain that is just 25 percent of adult brain volume. And what we then discover is that, during the first year of life, the chimpanzee acquires 85 percent of its adult brain size. The human infant will require approximately six full years to reach this same 85 percent of its adult brain capacity. The implications of this neurodevelopmental need cannot be overstated.

  Because our brains got bigger and our pelvises got smaller, the solution required a postnatal process that would allow our brains to develop outside the womb. Without the natural protection of the womb, how then were we to keep the newborn alive long enough to reach an independent viability?

  Given the vulnerability of the human infant at birth, as well as the years required for that child to be able to
manage their own security, evolution required something creative. Building on the basic primate systems for maternal care, humans developed a neuro/psycho/physiological system that would keep mother and child locked together. This system, as noted earlier, is called “attachment,” and it is what keeps a child connected to a caregiver long enough to reach a relative state of autonomy.92

  In essence, this attachment system of relational connection monitors and maintains an optimal proximity between caregiver and child. When the distance becomes too great, the infant and/or child experiences distress. This is part of the alarm system we talked about in Chapter Two that activates anxiety, fear, and panic. The cries of an insecure infant alert the mother to close the distance between them and to soothe. With age and maturity, the tolerable distance for the child increases until, eventually, the child becomes able to exist securely and separate from the caregiver. This presents another unique challenge for both mother and child, negotiating the need for closeness and equally the need for freedom.

  I have watched my wife meet this delicate balance with our son. Quite simply and beautifully, she expresses the work of a mother as “needing to figure out just how much to let go every day.” Not an easy task. She does it well.

  In the earliest stages of this negotiation, infant security is maintained through both tactile and visual means. Much research and theory has gone into understanding the ways in which the gaze between mother and infant aids in emotional regulation and the furthering of security. Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk, working together at Cornell University in 1960, devised an ingenious experiment to look at how juvenile animals and human infants use their mothers to negotiate depth and the dangers of height.93 The experiment came to be known as the Visual Cliff. Taken up later by James Sorce and Robert Emde, the experiment eventually began to look not just at how juvenile animals come to learn the dangers of height, but ultimately, how infants use maternal signaling to learn what is safe and what isn’t.94

  The experimental situation consisted of a platform half of which was covered with checkerboard tiles. At the midpoint, the tiles changed to clear plexiglass. Through the plexiglass could be observed a drop of three feet to a floor that again had checkerboard linoleum tiles. The infant was placed on the checkerboard end of the platform and given toys to play with. After a few minutes, the toys were moved to the far end of the platform, where there was clear plexiglass. The mother was also at the far end of the platform. The infants, wanting to get to the toys, would start to crawl toward the toys and thus toward the clear plexiglass. Invariably, when the infants reached the plexiglass, they would freeze, evidently confused and unsure of their footing. What is most notable, however, is that when faced with this uncertainty or ambiguity, the infants looked to their mothers’ faces. Prior to the experiment, the mothers were assigned to one of two groups. The first group was given instructions to have an encouraging look on their faces, and the second group was instructed to appear fearful (or angry).

  The results of the experiment revealed that, when the mothers had encouraging and relaxed expressions, the babies resumed crawling and reached the toys. But when the babies looked up and saw fearful expressions on their mothers’ faces, they froze and would not proceed. These results, which have been replicated repeatedly, indicate that infants at about ten months of age are using their mothers’ facial expressions to guide their actions. But more than this, we see how our inclinations for curiosity and exploration can be directly shaped by social determinations of what is safe.

  The fact that we are hardwired to be sensitive to what is going on in the face of a caregiver may not be a surprise. I think we have all experienced the ways in which a well-timed look from our mothers can seemingly stop us in our tracks. Perhaps more important to us here is the awareness that this system of restriction is far more ubiquitous than we might have previously imagined.

  The messages we receive as infants and children about what is safe and what isn’t are both explicit and implicit. They are coming at us in a continual stream of permission and restriction, looks of encouragement and discouragement—how we eat, how we play, how we sleep, how we walk, how we run, how we study, how we use the bathroom, how we deal with illness.

  These messages are all shaped by the subjectivity of our parents, our communities, and our societies. Unfortunately, the cumulative effects of these subjective restrictions not only alter our behavioral freedom to follow our interests, but they also affect the very fabric of our selves and minds.

  The limitations on exploration and play that fear produces in mammals are particularly problematic for human beings. Our brains and minds evolved into self-organizing systems that are less like a computer and more like a playground. Much as with the role of play that we explored in Chapter One, here we can say that play is the work of a healthy mind; and further, that a healthy mind is the foundation for a healthy self. This is what D. W. Winnicott, one of the early psychoanalytic pioneers in infant and child development, meant when he said, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality. And it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”95

  Injecting overwhelming or chronic relational Fear into a child’s life not only inhibits their play activities, it literally inhibits the playful functioning of their Imagination, and in turn, their ability to be who they might become.96

  For much of her life, Robin considered herself a people-pleaser, someone who liked to be liked and worked hard to be a good friend and eventually, a good partner in marriage. Her husband had been in therapy before, but Robin had never done any work on herself. Her husband suggested she go into therapy to work on her explosive anger that came out when they argued. The way Robin described it was that everything would be fine, and then all of a sudden, “it would all come out.” And unfortunately, the words she used weren’t just angry, they were mean.

  Our initial work centered on helping Robin to become more in touch with her feelings, to notice the tiny moments of emotion, sensation, and feeling. This work proved valuable to her, and she felt hopeful. But as we began to look beneath the surface, Robin realized that she had no idea who she was. She didn’t know what her favorite movies were, what music she liked, or even why she had come to live in New York City.

  With this emerging reality, we wondered together about where those feeling states of individuality were, why they were not known to her, and whether they even existed at all. Small moments of unacknowledged disappointment and emotional hurt led us to realize that she was missing important aspects of who she was. She wasn’t sure if she was dismissing them, rationalizing them away, or just not noticing them. But regardless, they were not available to her.

  With time, as Robin began to check in more with her inner experience, she described the feeling of walking on eggshells with her husband. It was subtle, she told me, not so obvious—to her or to anyone else. She described a sensitivity she had to the needs of her husband, and to others more generally. She prided herself on being able to meet those needs. This could take the form of thoughtful actions, such as remembering to pick up her husband’s favorite cereal or sending a thank-you card to his mother. But in many ways, we discovered this “eggshell” experience was primarily an attempt to attune to her husband’s emotional state. She said that he wasn’t always so easy to read and that she considered herself pretty good at reading emotions, but not always his.

  What began to unfold, in the work between us, was a growing awareness that somehow the “good childhood” she remembered was also a childhood in which she experienced a significant degree of restrictive fear. In her early childhood, she remembered that she had trouble sleeping alone and would often wake her mother for comfort. Her mother was reassuring and would sit with her daughter in her bed till she fell asleep. Robin also remembered having fears of burglars breaking into the house and kidnapping her. She worried about getting lost when t
hey traveled and wanted to hold hands with her mom in public spaces up until she was at least twelve years old.

  As we explored the nature of these memories one day, Robin had an image of her mother’s face come to mind. When I asked her to describe it, she had some difficulty. She could see the hair and the outline of the face quite clearly, but the eyes, mouth, and facial expression were all out of focus. Was her mother happy, sad, angry, frightened? For some reason, Robin had difficulty identifying the emotional state of her mother in that image. And as we sat with this experience, Robin began to cry. “I don’t know what she’s feeling. What is she feeling? What are you feeling?!” she yelled in desperation.

  Little by little, Robin came to remember that much of her early life was spent unconsciously trying to figure out what her mother was feeling. She and I began to piece together the sense that, in those early years, her mother was undoubtedly depressed. Not only was she hard to read, but often what was on her face was frightening to Robin. Parental depression can have significant impact upon a child’s sense of security. The inability to reach a depressed parent emotionally evokes a feeling of uncertainty and unpredictability. Not only was Robin’s mother inscrutable, her depression made meaningful connection difficult for her. This undermined the very systems that might have helped Robin know how to respond, when to be afraid and when to relax. Instead, Robin was reduced to a relentless hypervigilance, desperately attempting to read her mother and wondering how to reconcile the experience of her mother as both present and abandoning in the same moment. And all the while, Robin hid her feelings of fear from herself and her family beneath the persona of a “good girl.” This disguise made it easier for her to remain positively attached to her caregivers.

  So dominating was this pursuit that anything that even remotely interfered with this vigilance needed to be eradicated. On an unconscious level, the parts of Robin that needed security had figured out an adaptation to her problem. She needed to eliminate anything that might distract her from the vigilance required. What appears to have been most distracting to her, what interfered most directly, were her own individual needs and desires. It is as if her mind slowly began to turn down the volume on these internal longings until eventually she stopped noticing them. Without awareness of these, Robin remained stuck in a form of unhealthy attunement to her mother.