‘This sounds crazy, I know, but inside I feel I don’t exist without other people. If they all went, I’d just disappear.’
What Lisa had yet to discover was that this was terror left over from childhood, baggage that she no longer needed to carry with her. Until she discovered that when she was alone she would not disappear, she would go on dealing with her fear of being abandoned by always feeling anxious and by worrying that every person she knew would one day reject and abandon her.
Not everyone experiences the greatest fear as fear of being abandoned. There are just as many people who experience it as fear of loss of control. One way of keeping anxiety, worry and fear at bay is to work hard and keep everything under control.
Dan said, ‘I never worry. I just make sure that I’ve got everything organized and under control.’ Dan and his wife Mary had come to consult me, not about themselves (there was nothing wrong with them – Dan had seen to that), but about their 24-year-old son, Danny, who was depressed and unable to work. Actually, the problem they were presenting to me was not the absent Danny but their difficulties in dealing with Danny. Mary felt that Danny needed looking after, while Dan thought that such molly-coddling was wrong. The boy should pull himself together, find some goal, and go for it. Organizing your life around goals was the right and proper way to live. Dan had always done that, and see where it had led him – a flourishing furniture business, a handsome house, and a fine family (with the present exception of Danny).
Mary bore out Dan’s claim that he never worried. He just worked extremely hard. ‘He always knows what’s best for us’, she said, drawing a picture of a kindly but authoritarian man who abhorred disorder and doubt and who kept his staff and family firmly under control. His staff and family always obeyed him, even Danny, until this dreadful depression had made him so difficult and disobedient. For Dan, the worst feature of Danny’s depression was that he was no longer open to Dan’s guidance.
Six months passed before I met Dan and Mary again. Two terrible disasters had befallen them. A fire had destroyed Dan’s furniture emporium and the police suspected that it had been started by a disgruntled ex-employee. Then the stress of the fire and the arguments with the insurance company led Dan to have a heart attack, not a severe one, but severe enough to face the fact of his own mortality.
Dan had changed. He had become older, and much less secure and controlling. He described how even as he had watched the fire engulf his business he had been busy planning how to deal with the consequences, beginning with contacting the insurance company through to selling the site and rebuilding in a more advantageous part of town. It was not till a few days later when the police were talking of sabotage and the insurance company were delaying in living up to their promises that the full horror of his situation hit him. He had thought that he had everything in his life under control when in fact he had not. Now he felt that everything was slipping out of his grasp, that his world was crumbling, and that instead of having his feet firmly planted on solid ground he was falling through bottomless space. This terror and a sharp physical pain suddenly became entwined.
The ambulance and hospital seemed like a dream, and it was not until later that he saw with absolute clarity that he had encountered death. Again he felt that fear, for all his life he had told himself that he had death under control and now he knew that he did not. ‘I felt,’ he said to me, ‘that my whole being was shattering. I hadn’t felt like that since I was a kid and my father died.’
Good fortune had not entirely deserted Dan. It was while he was in his most frightened and shattered state that Danny came to see him and, for the first time in his life, Dan asked Danny for help. For once, instead of ordering Danny to do something, Dan said, ‘Please would you help me? I can’t manage the business on my own.’ Danny, instead of going silently away, said, ‘Yes, Dad’, and took over the running of the business.
Mary said to me, ‘Now Dan’s getting better he’s showing signs of slipping back into his old ways of working too hard and bossing us around. I have to remind him to take things easy and to say, “Please”.’
Dan and Danny still had many things to sort out individually and together, but one thing Dan had realized was that all his life he had felt that to keep himself safe he had to have everything organized and under control. If he did not do this his outside world would become chaotic, dangerous and strange, and he would feel that his very self was shattering. He would become nothing but a pile of rubble. The fire and his heart attack showed him that his organization and control were nothing but an illusion.
We can think we have everything organized and under control, but in fact everything that exists in our universe is in constant movement and change. If we fail to recognize this then one day our universe will show us that it is so.
Dan was faced with three choices.
He could go on being terrified by the discovery that the world was not the way he thought it was. Such terror is physically exhausting and, in his case, would almost certainly lead to further heart attacks.
or
He could do what Pat had done, bring the terror to an end by locking himself in the safety of the prison of depression.
or
He could accept that everything is in constant change and that we can control and organize very little of the universe, and then only for a little time, and that this is not something to fear but something to welcome and enjoy, for it is out of this constant movement and change that we gain what makes our lives splendid – spontaneity (including the spontaneity of love and forgiveness), hope, freedom and our capacity to change.
Each of us in the way we experience our sense of self and the threat of the annihilation of our self is either like Lisa or like Dan. Each of us experiences our greatest fear, the fear that our very self will disappear or shatter, either as being rejected or abandoned and being left entirely alone, or as losing control and falling into chaos. Each of us experiences our sense of self either as being a member of a group or as the development of individual clarity, authenticity and achievement.
Most of us would say that we want both to be a member of a group and to achieve as an individual. It is often not until we are in situations of danger that we realize what is most important to us and how we see the greatest threat.
Finding the Source of Our Greatest Fear
Whenever someone consults me I try to establish in our first conversation how that person experiences his or her sense of existence and perceives the threat of the annihilation of their self. When somebody tells me something that sounds important I ask,
‘Why is that important?’
When I was in California I met two people, George and Ruth, each of whom had encountered many difficulties in their lives.
George was sixty-two and recently retired. He was very courteous, ready to tell me his story, but his eyes looked tired. He had been diagnosed as having ‘dysthymic disorder’, but an inability to have a good night’s sleep and to concentrate were, he said, his main problems.
George told me how his first wife had left him. That, he said, ‘was not the kind of thing I could take easily. I don’t think I ever got over it. With my present wife things have worked out quite well, except that there’s a total lack of affection. Life is difficult for me. The reason I can handle all these things, and the reason I haven’t said forget it, is because of my religious belief. That allows me to cope with all these things.’
‘Can you tell me what your religious belief is?’
‘We’re Christadelphians. I believe that God is who He says He is, that there is a God. I can’t, try as I might, see any sense in Darwinism. I feel that there’s a power behind all of us. The Bible is His instruction to us and therefore we must find what He wants of us and what He’s