The nature of fear
Often, worrying is the least helpful thing a person can do. Just chewing on the anxiety and letting it wrap those icy, crippling fingers round your heart on a regular basis, will make you sick. But when life is full of things that scare you, when you’re waiting for the next unpayable bill, the next round of bad news from the medics, the next court date, the next phone call from the police, or your stalker, or whatever it is, letting go of worry is hard. It’s there as soon as you wake up in the morning. It’s there when you sleep, too, shaping up into nightmares, and it’s there when you can’t sleep. Being exhausted doesn’t help, of course.
Sometimes, anxiety can become so intense that everything starts to feel impossible. The fear of punishment makes it hard to act. And, for someone who does not live in fear, this can be hard to imagine. If you’ve been knocked down enough times it is easy to imagine the next blow. The experience of cruelty, unfairness, perhaps even abuse that is inherent in a system, teaches you to be afraid. The fear of not being taken seriously, as well, being laughed at, or told off for being hypersensitive, over reacting. And so the fear begets fear, until you’re mired in it and do not know how to move. At least, it can.
Once upon a time, hedgehogs (a cute, prickly mammal, for those of you outside the UK) used to respond to predators by rolling up into balls. They handled cars the same way. They died as a consequence. These days, hedgehogs know to run away from cars. Sometimes rolling into a tight little ball and putting the prickles on the outside is not the answer to fear and danger.
Nature gives us all kinds of models for responding to danger – both real, and imagined. It is discernibly natural to jump at unfamiliar noises, to associate one bad thing with something that maybe wasn’t connected but happened to be there at the time, and to be nervous of the unfamiliar. Animals do this all the time. My cat is very good at reminding me that there’s nothing weak, or unnatural about how I experience fear. Every rescue dog I meet has the same story to tell. The one who had become afraid of hats. The one who mistrusted all men. We learn to fear through association. And like the rescue dogs, given time, love, support, we can also unlearn, build trust, regain hope. One of the worst things about anxiety is its capacity to make you feel like a freak.
Humans are not, generally speaking, all that good at recognising what is natural in humans. We tend to stigmatise it. Bleeding, sweating, crying, shitting, lusting, raging, hurting, fearing, these are all socially stigmatised. Which makes it that bit harder to vent, to express, to seek support. To get help for the fear, you have to admit that the fear exists, and in doing so you have to deal with the layer of fear that is all about how people will react to your confession.
Fear begets fear, and taking those first steps to tackle it is really hard. But, the sooner you catch it, the sooner you can get it under control and the less badly it affects you. Fear is like any other disease that can spread in your body. The longer it runs unchallenged, the more it eats into you. Think of it as you would a virus, or a cancer.
If you do not live with fear, then this can be peculiar stuff to try and make sense of. For those who are not riddled with it as a sickness, fear seems like a fleeting thing. Nerves. Edginess. Somewhere close to excitement. Perhaps bad enough to make you throw up before you go on stage, but fundamentally transient in nature. It’s hard to imagine that which falls beyond our own experience. But, understanding intellectually is really useful. Because about the least helpful thing you can say to a fearful person is that they are silly and should pull themselves together and get over it. Such words force silence on the ill one. And they add to the fear. Those layers of fearing ridicule are paralysing too. Warm words, words of encouragement and support, are gifts. Having the compassion to say ‘I’ll do this with you’. ‘You can do this.’ You don’t have to do this’. ‘Maybe just try a bit of it,’ open the prison doors and give anxious people a chance.
And, if you haven’t been there, just pray that you don’t. But a significant percentage of us will suffer from anxiety illnesses and/or depression during our lives. This is probably part of the natural, human condition too. Nothing will really prepare you for it, but the person who knows something about the mechanics and possibilities will be less shocked when it happens to them, more able to get help, and perhaps less likely to fall so far and so fast, or to hit the bottom of a dark hole with quite the same crippling force.
