BEYOND FEAR EPUB ED EB

Dorothy Rowe

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780007246595
• eBook ISBN: 9780007369140
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dorothy Rowe shows us how to have the courage to acknowledge and face our fears – only through courage can we find a sustaining happiness.

'Beyond Fear', first published in 1987, has changed the lives of thousands of people. In this edition, the renowned psychologist Dorothy Rowe examines the changes in the psychiatric system since 1987 in the context of showing how most of our suffering comes from our greatest fear, that of being annihilated as a person, when we shall disappear like a puff of smoke in the wind, never to have existed.

We feel this fear whenever others humiliate or belittle us, or whenever we discover a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. The greater our fear, the more desperate our defence against it, the most desperate of defences being what psychiatrists call mental disorders. Yet, by knowing ourselves we can go beyond our fear and face life with courage.

Fear and the Fear of Fear

Chapter One
The Nature of Fear

Fear comes to us in many guises. It can come as a shiver in the delight of anticipation; or as the drenching, overwhelming, annihilating terror known by the inadequate names of existential anxiety or dread. It can come suddenly, life-savingly, in situations of danger, when it is known purely as fear; or it can gnaw away endlessly with little apparent cause, and we call it anxiety; or it can come with a sense of having the eyes of the world upon us when we are naked and alone, and we call it shame; or it can loom darkly, threatening punishment, and we call it guilt.

Fear, like death, is the great unmentionable. We maintain a conspiracy of silence so as to pretend we are not afraid. In the aftermath of great physical danger or terrible disaster everyone claims that everyone was brave and no one panicked. In 1985, when I was living in Sheffield and writing this book, at nearby Manchester airport a British Airways plane loaded with holidaymakers caught fire as it was about to take off. Those passengers who survived spoke of terror and panic and the rush for the exits as smoke filled the rear of the plane, but they soon ceased to be reported in the newspapers as other people, important people who were not aboard the plane, made their statements commending the passengers for their bravery. These important people would have had us believe that everyone aboard that plane acted with courage and decorum. Yet would not anyone, trapped in the narrow space of a crowded plane, watching the flames and breathing the acrid smoke, feel afraid and try desperately to escape?

Sixteen years on and another, even more immense, tragedy occurred in New York on 11 September 2001. Across the world millions of people watched the television pictures of these events that day and over the next few days. We saw how again fear became the great unmentionable. When the two planes flew into the World Trade Center and the buildings collapsed, television crews filmed and interviewed some of the people who had escaped death. These people showed their fear and spoke about it, and such interviews were repeated in news bulletins later that day and evening, but by the next day such interviews had disappeared from our television screens. They were replaced by stories about the bravery of the firefighters and other rescue workers. The courage of the Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, was praised, as was the courage of Americans generally. By then Americans had turned to patriotism and religion. The symbol of the USA, the Stars and Stripes, became a badge of courage and determination, while churches, synagogues and mosques were overflowing with worshippers. Americans were still afraid, very afraid, but this fear could not be mentioned.

The memory of such fear can stay with us for the rest of our lives, leaving us unable to enter any place which will remind us of our fear, or returning in dreams of terror when we find ourselves re-enacting, helplessly, the scenes where we once successfully escaped destruction. Some people, to give themselves freedom to go and do what they wish, put themselves through the painful process of therapy, in the hope that relearning a skill or talking about the events will remove the fear, and with that the shame of being afraid. Most people, however, adapt their lives to avoid certain situations and activities, by never entering an enclosed space or flying again, or they fog their sleeping brains with drugs to blot out dreams, or become what is known as ‘a light sleeper’, someone who is often awake while others sleep. They invent all sorts of excuses for not doing certain things - proneness to illness, or allergies, logical reasons for following one course of action rather than another - all to hide the fact that they are afraid. They must do this because they know, correctly, that to be afraid is to be scorned.

The fear we feel when faced with an external danger - fire or flood or a terrorist bomb - is bad enough, but what is far, far worse is the fear we feel when the danger is inside us. When the danger is outside us we know that at least some people will understand how we feel, but when the danger is inside us, when we live our lives in a sweat of anxiety, shame and guilt, we find ourselves in the greater peril that if we tell other people about our fear they will think that we are weak, or, worse, mad. So we take drugs to drown our fear and maintain the conspiracy of silence.

Edith was a very good woman who had devoted her life to others. She often acted as chauffeur for one of my clients, and while this client was talking to me Edith would visit some of the elderly patients in the hospital. One day she phoned me and asked whether, when she came the next day, she could have a quick word with me. I agreed, and so the next day she came into my room, apologizing for taking up my time and sitting nervously on the edge of her chair. What she wanted to know was whether she was going mad. The evidence that she might be was that she would often wake at 2 a.m. and lie worrying. The fear that pervaded her being manifested itself as the fear that no one would look after her when she was old. What if she became senile and incontinent, like the old women she visited on the psychiatric ward? She had done enough nursing to know that I could not truthfully say that her old age would not bring indignities and inadequacies, but there is one truth I could tell her.

Waking in the early hours of the morning in a sweat of terror is an extremely common experience. All across the country people are experiencing that terrible loneliness of being. They have woken suddenly to the greatest uncertainty a human being can know. There is no shape or structure to hold them. They are falling, dissolving; totally, paralysingly helpless without hope of recovery or of rescue. Sickening, powerful forces clutch at their hearts and stomachs. They gasp for breath as wave after wave of terror sweeps over them.

We all knew such terror when, as small children, we found ourselves in a situation which filled us with pain and helpless rage. We screamed in fear and in the hope that our good parents would rescue and comfort us. Now grown up, we know the extent of our loneliness and helplessness. Some of us wake, like Edith, completely alone. Some of us have another form sharing our bed, but it is effectively insensate, a log refusing to acknowledge our misery. Others of us, more fortunate, share our bed with a kindly person who switches on the light, makes us a cup of tea, and holds us close. Such love can make our terror recede like the tide, but, like the tide, it can return, and there is no good parent there to pick us up and cuddle us and assure us that the world is a safe place and there is no reason to be afraid. We are grown up now, and, try as we might to deny it, we know the loneliness of being. We long for good parents who will rescue and love us, but we know that there are no good parents and, while we might believe in God the Father, in these times of terror He is far away.

For some people the waves of terror and the sense of annihilation last for many minutes. Some people move very quickly to turn the terror into all kinds of manageable worries - manageable not because the worries are about problems which can be solved but because they turn a nameless terror into a named anxiety. Thoughts like ‘Who will look after me when I get old?’, ‘I can’t manage the tasks I have to do at work today’, ‘The lump on my groin is certain to be cancer’, ‘If my daughter goes to that school she’ll get mixed up in drugs’, ‘I won’t be able to meet this month’s bills’, ‘I should have done more for my parents before they died’ are indeed terrible, but they give a sense of structure and have a common, everyday meaning. With these common, everyday meanings we can pretend that the terror we felt did not happen, and that we belong to the everyday world.

However, not everyone can do this. For some people, lying there in the dark, the terror goes on and on. When Edith described to me how this happened to her she said, ‘It gets so bad I think I shall run outside the house in my nightie and stand in the middle of the road so I’ll get run over and that’ll stop it.’

‘Not in your street at 2 a.m. you won’t,’ I said, knowing how empty her town was at night. I went on to tell her that the terror she felt is called ‘existential angst’. She laughed at this ridiculously pretentious name. ‘I’ll remember that next time,’ she said, ‘I’ll lie there and think, “I’m experiencing existential angst.’“

I do hope she does, and finds her laughter in the midst of her terror. It would be so monstrously unfair if Edith followed the path of a woman whose inquest was reported in the paper recently. She was an elderly patient, not long discharged from a psychiatric hospital. A nurse told the coroner that she had looked in the patient’s room at midnight and seen her sound asleep. When she returned at 6 a.m. she found her floating in the bath. The coroner returned an open verdict. There was no mention of the terror which the poor woman could bring to an end only by filling the bath with water and, all alone, immersing herself in it. When fear is terrible, all we can do is run away.

Fight or Flight

Fear has a vital life-saving function. It is the means by which our body mobilizes itself to move swiftly and efficiently to protective action. When we interpret the situation we are in as dangerous, adrenaline, which is produced by the adrenal glands just above the kidneys, as well as at the ends of the neurones in the brain, is pumped into our system, thus causing our heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar level to increase, and so preparing the body to fight or flee. If we act physically, by striking out at the source of the danger or by taking to our heels and running away, then we make use of our body’s preparations. But if we neither fight back nor run away we are left with the effects of these preparations and they can be most unpleasant.

Our heart beats fast and we feel shaky, sweaty and tingly. Some people experience severe headaches, some feel nauseous, some feel dizzy and close to fainting. Some people do faint. When these reactions occur in company, where we need to be calm and collected, we can feel very ashamed of ourselves. When they occur and we do not know why, we can feel frightened and so start on the sickening cycle of fearing fear itself.

Faced with an external danger, such as a man carrying a gun, or an oncoming monstrous tsunami, we can stand and fight or flee. However, sometimes the people around us will not let us do either. Children who are frightened of their parents or teachers may be prevented from either fighting to protect themselves or running away. Lacking the means to support themselves or their children, women may be unable to flee from husbands who frighten them. Needing to support their families, men may be unable to fight or flee from employers who frighten and mistreat them.

Thus it is very easy to find ourselves in a situation where we wish to fight or to flee but feel that we can do neither. Such a conflict leaves our mind in a turmoil and our body reacting appropriately to our reading of the situation (danger) and inappropriately to our reaction to our reading of the situation (neither fighting nor fleeing).

If we can make such a conflict explicit, by thinking about it very clearly and honestly and by discussing it with understanding friends and counsellors, then we can often find a way to solve the conflict or to live with it more easily. But if we dare not make the conflict explicit to others or even to ourselves, then we cannot resolve it and our misery goes on.

Shirley came to see me because she was nervous. She had given up driving because she was frightened she would have an accident and hurt someone.

‘I’m not worried about hurting myself. It’s other people that I worry about.’

She felt nervous when she had to go into a room where there were other people.

‘I worry that they’ll all look at me. Yet I like going out and having a social life. It’s just I sort of feel ashamed. I don’t know why. I do go out, like we go out for a drink, and I find my hands shaking.’

She said that what she wanted was to feel more confident.

‘I’ve never felt confident.’

Her brothers, all older than her, used to tell her that, as she was a girl, she could not play with them. At school her teachers told her that she was not bright.

‘I mightn’t be brainy but I’m intelligent. That’s what I’m always telling my husband. He treats me like I’m stupid and don’t know anything. But you can’t tell him. He’s one of those men who always have to be right. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a wonderful husband and thinks the world of me, but he does put me down.’

She spoke of how important it was to her to be herself, to have a small job so she had some money of her own, and how annoyed she got with herself when she became too nervous to do the things that she wanted to do. Yet, when she spoke of being confident, there was some sense of reservation. She would not want to be totally confident.

Why was that? Well, a great deal is expected of totally confident people. People expect them to be able to cope with everything. Shirley’s problem was that if she became totally confident she would be asked to do things which she could not or would not do, and she did not want to say no to people.

‘I don’t like to upset people. I want to be liked.’

If Shirley’s problem had been simply that she lacked self-confidence, then she could have solved that problem by taking steps to increase her self-confidence, but if she also believed that if she was self-confident she would upset people and they would dislike her, she could not afford to become self-confident.

Unavoidable Conflicts

Shirley’s conflict is one which many people experience. We want to be ourselves, but we fear that if we do express our own wishes, needs and attitudes, then people will not like us. For some people being liked is not their top priority, but for many people it is a matter of life and death. More of this later. Here I want to point out that all of us, whatever we feel about being liked, are always involved in finding a balance somewhere between

If we live completely as an individual pursuing our own interests and taking no account of other people’s needs and wishes, we soon become extremely lonely. If we live completely on our own, lacking the checks and balances that other people place on our interpretation of what goes on in the world, we become an extremely idiosyncratic person whom other people regard as odd, even mad. On the other hand, if we merge ourselves completely with a group we cease to be the person we are. We become a nothing. Rather than face either of these fates we have to find a balance, day by day, between being an individual and maintaining relationships with other people.

In finding a practicable balance between being an individual and being a member of a group, you have to arrive at a balance between regarding yourself as

The more we regard ourselves as valueless and imperfect, the more we fear, hate and envy other people, the more we feel frightened of doing anything, and the more we fear the future. Regarding ourselves as bad brings a lot of troubles. Yet if we regard ourselves as perfect we delude ourselves and make it difficult for other people to get along with us. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes, get things wrong, irritate other people, and fail to make the most of our talents.

So we have to arrive at a realistic assessment of ourselves, with no false modesty, seeing ourselves as ordinary people, like all other people, yet at the same time as individuals who are valuable to ourselves and to other people, even though other people may not value us in the way that we want them to value us.

It can take us many years to arrive at an assessment of ourselves which provides a realistic and hopeful balance between imperfection and perfection. We can be plagued by doubt, confused by the conflicting demands that people make on us, and hurt by criticism. To find out who we are and how we should assess ourselves we need to explore, to meet new people, to try out new situations and to see how we feel and react to and deal with the strange and the new. But to do this, we need freedom, and to have freedom we have to give up security.

From the moment of our birth, we have to find a balance between

The more freedom we have, the less security. The more security, the less freedom. Total freedom means total uncertainty and great danger. Total security means total certainty and total hopelessness, for hope can only exist where there is uncertainty.

We all try to hold on to a measure of security. Most of us do this by having possessions (what is that line from a song - ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’?), just as most of us find security by keeping close to a group of people (why else would we put up with awful relatives?). Some people seek security not just in possessions and people but in a set of beliefs which makes everything that happens part of a pattern. The pattern may be in terms of heaven and hell, or Allah’s will, or karma, or fate, or a constellation of stars, or the eventual victory of the proletariat, but whatever the pattern is, it gives us a sense of fixity in what would otherwise seem to be a meaningless chaos.

However, while having a belief in some kind of grand design can give a sense of security, it can make the person who holds the belief feel hopeless. If the pattern of your life is already determined by God or by your stars, or by your genes, or by your parents, or by a series of rewards and punishments called conditioning, then there is nothing you can do to change it. You are helpless and hopeless.

On the other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1- Fear and the Fear of Fear
• Part 2 - The Alternatives
• Notes
• Books and Websites
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Publisher