Rational Fear?

I was reading an account by a sailor who traded on China in the 1820s.  On their way up through the Philippines, they ran into a storm, their anchor ropes burst, and they drifted through the night, fearing that they would land on some reefs that would have torn out the bottom of the ship.  As I can tell you this story, you can deduce that they survived the ordeal.

Melissa Hughes is not that happy about dentists, and Yonason Goldson warns us to not be afraid of fear itself but to use it as a guide.

What are you afraid of? 

When I was a little girl, I was sure a lion lived under the staircase going down to the basement. Our house had an odd floor plan where the basement was not below ground but opened directly out to the backyard.  And because of this, a lot of things happened in the basement: the guest room, a pantry, and, not the least, the bonus room with the piano where I was supposed to practice.  (You can imagine how eager I was to do that with a lion living under the stairs.)

But I challenged myself because, despite my fear, I knew that under the stairs were two big boxes of toys that we had outgrown and yet not ready to let go of – and every time I looked, there was no lion.  My knowledge was an anchor that let the storm of emotions wash through me without pulling me towards the reefs.

Today, I am not afraid of the dark, and I don’t suffer from leophobia; I have even petted a lion cub.  It is not that I want to be exposed to predators unleashed, but that can hardly be said to be an irrational fear.

Fear is ³⁾ an emotional response to ²⁾ a physical reaction to ¹⁾ a stimulus.

The physical reaction is increased heartbeat; release of cortisol in the bloodstream; widening of pupils; blood running from the organs and skin to the main muscles, getting the body ready to run or fight.  The stimulus can be whatever – like my childhood’s staircase in a remote part of the house or your dentist.

Some fears are inborn. Fear of falling is inherited from our ape ancestors and the reaction is one of the tests a baby goes through right after birth along with testing their reaction to a sudden loud sound.

Some fears come to us through exposure to unpleasant situations – like me putting my four-year-old palm on a still-hot burner after the pot had too recently been removed.  Or my sister being run down by a big dog when she was two.  Or Calvin being thrown from his bike.

And finally, other fears are directly or indirectly taught by our more immediate ancestors and other members of our “tribe”.

Basically, fear is supposed to stop you from doing something that can kill you and prepare your body so your chance of survival increases.

A baby ape must grab his mother’s fur, or he will not survive when she scampers up in a tree.  In wild nature, a sudden sound may be a predator or a falling tree, and you must react or you will likely not survive for very long.

But stoves, dogs, and bikes are all something we humans have invited into our lives. They are not dangerous per se – only when we don’t know how to behave with them.  While I learned not to put my hands on hot burners, I have also learned to cook.  My sister is no longer afraid of dogs after having had enough nice exposures with her own dogs to negate her original shock. And most Calvins eventually treasure the freedom to roam that comes with a pair of wheels.  Their desire is stronger than their fear of bruises.

I think these three examples illustrate something central about fears:  They can be diminished to a controllable point or disappear if we are gradually exposed to positive experiences.  And if we are motivated enough and know how to anchor ourselves enough to stay with the emotion instead of running away from the situation every time it comes up.  The latter may require professional help; exposure therapy and mindfulness are normal treatments for phobias.

What is left is the fear that we learn or pick up from others.

Some things we are taught to fear:  don’t run with a pair of scissors, or with a pencil in your mouth; look to both sides before crossing the street; don’t eat those berries; put on your seatbelt; only walk out in the water to your knees…

Still, the reasons can be easily explained: “or you may get cut/ punch a hole in your brain/ get run over/ get poisoned/ get killed in a car crash/ drown…”

The parent fears losing the child.  Typically, the child is not afraid at all.

Were you ever afraid of something somebody told you was dangerous just because they told you?  Or did you have to touch the electric fence yourself?  (A wet blade of grass is excellent for doing that. Don’t pee on the wire.)

Having experienced the loud screeching of a car braking or the pain and stitches that may be the result of running with scissors creates the fear – not the warnings.

The fear is of the wrath of the parent implying directly or indirectly that we will be shunned if we don’t do as we are told.  That is a real death threat to a two-year-old – and we all have one of those living inside us, afraid that our belonging will be severed.

Personally, I don’t recall my parents ever having voiced that I could be sent back to where I came from or given up for adoption or that they didn’t know how somebody like me could ever have become part of the family.  Others have gotten this message more directly from exasperated or cruel parents or scheming siblings.

My parents only read Hans and Gretel and other Grimm tales that could scare the fear of God into anybody.

Mind you, that is why those tales exist in the first place.

Some dangers are hard to explain to kids: walk straight home from school; lock the door; don’t sit like that; don’t dress like that; don’t talk to strangers.  Girls get different messages about how the world is a dangerous place than boys. It is a balancing act to let children know about bad people without giving them so much fear that they can’t function in society.  Maggie Smith’s Good Bones poem resonated with so many that it ruined her marriage.

Where I grew up, we lived close to a state hospital and a harbor where some of society’s more colorful characters gathered on the benches and left empty bottles and trash.  When one had sneaked in through an unlocked basement door and came up the stairs, my mother had a cow.  He got out the front door faster than he got in through the basement and an alarm was placed on the back door.  Her fear – and anger – was palpable and the best lesson we could have gotten on this subject.

Our parents’ fear is transmitted much better through their actions than through their words.

But otherwise, my parents didn’t go into details of why we should not trust strangers and not open the door when we were home alone.  They just read Little Red Riding Hood.  That left me with nightmares of wolves for the next 20 years – some of which I still remember to this day. And who knows, perhaps my lion under the stairs was a wolf in a lion skin… Not so irrational a fear, after all, come to think of it.

History repeated itself many years later when my sister and I took a trip to Greece.  In the middle of the night, one of our neighbors at the hotel had decided to climb from his balcony to ours and he came very intoxicated into our room, fortunately tripping noisily over the suitcases.  My sister woke up with a scream and froze up, whereas I apparently “channeled my mom”, flew out of my bed, opened the door to the hallway, yelled at him to get the H… out – and I am sure I had literally thrown him out, had he not left voluntarily.  He seemed sure of that as well and fled.

I wish I could say this was when I stopped dreaming of wolves but not quite.  The story is, however, an illustration of the fight, flight, and freeze responses typical as a reaction to fear.

One more response, fawn, is often associated with “better them than me” situations.  All statistics indicate that most of the “stranger dangers” are more likely to come from somebody the child already knows and whom the parents either trust or are too spineless/cowed to call out.  The latter, going along to get along, is a fawning response to a threat.

At the beginning of this post, I wrote that fear was an emotional response to a physical reaction, a chemical change in the body.  The same physical reaction happens when the body gets aroused.

Whether we are afraid or excited depends entirely on whether we expect a good or a bad outcome from the situation that caused the change in body chemicals.  It can be useful in many situations where we actually do have a choice, to reframe out thinking to how excited we are to make a presentation/ try something new/ learn.

Regardless of whether we are excited or afraid when the situation has passed, we need to get the chemicals out of the body again.  Deer shake all over when a danger has passed.  You know how parents release when their child has scared them by doing something dangerous: they scream like crazy to try to ensure that the kid will never do whatever again.  You probably shouldn’t scream at your coworkers when you have been through a presentation, but doing some deep breathing or jumping jacks can work.  Because it is unhealthy to walk around in a state of physical arousal all the time.

When fears are overblown, we talk about irrational fears.  Phobias are emotional disorders.

But they are usually rational in the head of the person suffering from them because of their experiences – some of which they may not even recall because the brain is really good at blocking out unpleasant memories.

Some fears come from stories we tell ourselves about expected chain reactions.  If this happens then that is going to happen next and consequently, I will be dead or even worse, not belong and/or lose dignity.  Catastrophizing is taking an event to its worst possible outcome, however unlikely that outcome may be.

Minimizing is not allowing somebody else to feel what they feel – often because we can’t or are not inclined to do anything about the source of their fear.

I attended a talk by a leading psychologist from Palo Alto University and it was mentioned that Fear of Climate Change was a new disorder some psychologists began to see in their consultations.

After years of drought, flooding, wildfires, tornados, and hurricanes at times, places, and scales way outside those of historic memory, it can be argued whether fear of Climate Change is a rational or irrational fear, the subject of this article.

Just as important, one of the most prevalent sources of calm is to go into nature and be still. If that nature is threatened with wildfires, drought, flooding – and not the least awareness of wildfires, drought, and flooding – can it still function as a source of calm – or do we risk it becomes a trigger in itself for the young generation who seems much more anxious about the future of the planet than members of the generation who are not going to be around 30 years from now, anyway?

Who are we to minimize their fear?