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 economic 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