Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 11

Beautiful though our world is, it has many dangers about which it is appropriate to be anxious. The earth quakes, hurricanes blow, blizzards freeze. Necessary as other people may be to us, there are many dangerous people about whom it is appropriate to be anxious. Banks crash, wars start, cars collide, guns fire, fists smash, sex becomes hate instead of love. So we maintain an appropriately anxious guard and we teach our children to feel an appropriate amount of fear.

A certain amount of fear is necessary for our survival. We need to be alert to possible dangers and to respond to them with a spurt of fear which both focuses our attention and prepares our body, by increasing heart rate and adrenalin flow, to take the necessary action for fight or flight.

Some time ago a New York editor rejected my book Beyond Fear on the grounds that I did not instruct my readers how to give up feeling fear. I was amazed that he had never considered how essential for survival an alerting fear response is, especially in New York. What I was trying to do in Beyond Fear was to show how our fear response can go past the necessary alerting and mobilizing response and actually prevent us from dealing effectively with the danger. However, it is possible for us to become aware of such overlarge fear responses, to understand why we feel such fear, and, through such understanding, reduce the fear to appropriate levels.

In doing this we can come to realize that what we are afraid of is not something in the world around us but something inside us, and that what is inside us is nothing to be frightened of at all.

Until we do this, we all, to some degree, experience a fear which seems to have no object.

Sometimes we experience this fear without an object as anxiety, a persistent alerting to unspecified dangers and a kind of physical shakiness; or as worry, a persistent round of thoughts which project bad outcomes for all events, large or small; or, as Pat and Tom felt it, as an overwhelming dread and terror, our greatest fear. This fear can come upon us at any time, but it most often comes as we wake out of sleep where all the defences we have created to keep the fear at bay have dissolved.

Our most popular form of fear without an object is worry, where we create objects for our fear. The world is full of expert worriers. There is no situation, no matter how blissful and secure, about which expert worriers cannot worry. The sun shines, and they worry about drought; the rain falls and they worry about flood; spring comes and they worry about winter; dawn breaks and they worry about night. They hoard worries like a squirrel hoards nuts, and, like Charlie Brown, they see an absence of worries not as happiness but as evidence that something dangerous has been overlooked.¹⁴

Lisa laughed when I described her as an expert worrier. She had never thought of worrying requiring any expertise. It came to her as naturally as breathing. She described herself as ‘an anxious person’, with ‘anxious’ being an attribute like her blue eyes and blonde hair. She saw herself as inheriting her anxiety from her mother, in the way that she had inherited her blue eyes and blonde hair. She was at first astounded when I suggested to her that feeling anxious about many small things was a way of dealing with a much greater sense of fear, but she went on to reminisce about times when she was especially fearful – when her husband was away, when her mother was dangerously ill, and, remembering her childhood, when she would be punished for being naughty by being sent to bed and she would sit with her ear to the door, straining to hear the sounds which assured her that her parents were still in the house. Later, in another conversation, Lisa mentioned that whenever her parents had quarrelled her mother would always scream at her father, ‘You take me for granted. One day you’ll come home and I won’t be here’, unaware that the person she terrified with this threat was not her husband but her child.

Lisa and I looked for the common element in her husband being away, her mother being ill, her mother’s constant references to leaving home, and the little girl with her ear pressed to the door, and we found her greatest fear was her fear of being abandoned. (She feared death, but for her the terror of death was that all the people she needed might die before her, or that she might die first and so find herself alone.)

Lisa said, ‘I always have this fear that everyone I depend on will go away and leave me. I couldn’t cope with that. It would finish me.’

‘What do you mean, “finish you”?’, I asked.

‘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.