About Fear

Some time ago I read an article about a biologist named Savolina. He looked at a study done in the 1950s by Balyav with foxes. People in the fur industry were concerned about the amount of aggressive behavior among their foxes. On their behalf Baylav looked at a feature of the foxes that he identified as “flight distance,” that is, how tame or frightened the animal was. Flight distance was measured in relation to the proximity of humans. If food was put out by someone who remained close by, individual foxes observing this, would differ in how far they would stay from the person and the food. If the person was to advance toward them, all of the foxes would run away but they would run different distances, depending upon how reactive they were to the fear of humans -- basically the fear of being captured or killed. One fox might run a half a mile, another 500 feet, and another 100 feet. When the human left, whoever was closest to the food would get there first and would eat it. This proved to be adaptive. Savolina related this behavior to the evolution of dogs from wolves in their interactions with humans. Those less frightened, would gradually be able to connect with and become a part of the human “pack” and be rewarded with food.

I considered Savolina's ideas in relation to human’s relationships to danger or perceived dangers. All sentient beings have a “hard-drive” response to danger. In mammals this is regulated by the autonomic nervous system fight-flight reactions. These reactions take over in cases of perceived danger. This is not taught behavior. Rather the reactions are “encoded” in the brain and nervous system. All mammals have these same automatic reactions. The world that we must navigate now is not the world humans lived in 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, or 100,000 years ago. In today’s world we very rarely fear being eaten by large animals or attacked by wild beasts. In some contexts we can fear being attacked by wild human beasts during war, for example, or in places where the rule of law is non-existence or perhaps in areas of our own country or city where we don’t feel safe. In those contexts we learn how to navigate: we learn a flight distance. Most of us simply stay away from places of war or areas of our cities where we feel unsafe. We have a sense of things of which to be wary by paying attention to signals that are real, not only from our bodies, but also which have been transmitted by media or by our community.

But there are many people who are over-reactive to signals of danger. They suffer anxiety or fears that are not even conscious. Discomfort is felt in various contexts – for example, social situations or ones in which a performance of some nature might be expected. Fears of this kind can take many faces and have a huge impact on a person’s daily life even though she may not have a particular consciousness of being afraid. She may have learned to distance herself from people, places or situations where she feels discomfort and does not necessarily examine or understand the sources of the discomfort. She may only be aware of a stomach upset or a shortness of breath and not recognize these feelings as bodily signals of fear. She may simply have a sense of not feeling well, a reaction which would further validate her withdrawal physically or emotionally from the context in which she feels her discomfort. More subtly, someone may adapt by living in a way that allows her to experience fewer signals of fear – either overt panic or anxiety or the unrecognized signals in the body. For example, she may not move from home or from her community. Perhaps she won’t travel abroad or even on the subway. If she does go away, she may feel a discomfort that is identified as homesickness. She goes home in order to feel better but does not understand that the real difficulty lies in her fear of unfamiliar settings and dangers that she fears may lie within them.

“Programmed” fear responses occur in situations which are not in themselves threatening. It is not, for example, particularly dangerous to travel on the bus or subway if one takes normal safety precautions. Nor is it an inherently scary thing to go out socially or communally; ordinarily people whom we meet are not going to punish or criticize or humiliate us. But fear, even an unconscious fear, that something of that kind could occur, will greatly curtail one’s ability to get around in the world. In my practice I am constantly struck with how often people present with difficulties in their lives which at bottom have their root in fear. There are tremendous elaborations resulting in physical problems, mood disorders, relationship problems, troubles with intimacy, with work, creativity, or with parenting. As I pursue different pieces that people bring, the greatest common denominators seem to be various levels of anxiety. In some, bodily reactions to threats have overwhelmed the person on a physiological level and become a kind of habit of the body – the way that Wilhelm Reich talked about the body carrying tensions to hold in threatening emotions.
With this awareness I work to discover the parameters of fear as they operate within the difficulties a person presents when she comes for therapy. Often I am aware of nervousness in her, manifested in agitated movements, a discomfort with silence, difficulty maintaining eye-contact, and the kinds of tensions that the person is obviously holding in her body.

When we come to doing relaxation, these anxieties become even more visible. In relaxation one listens deeply to the voice of another telling her muscles and nervous system and whole body to relax. In order to yield fully to these instructions, she will necessarily go closer to places of discomfort and fear that chronically lie within her body. Experiences which one has had when young, perhaps of which she has no memory, can have made her suspicious of being fully relaxed in the presence of another person. Her eyes are closed and she is in a semi-recumbent position with her legs and arms uncrossed. She is deliberately trying to let go of muscles that are ordinarily kept tight. She has discovered a long time ago that when she holds herself tightly, she feels more alert, more ready for the scary thing that has happened and could happen again. So when someone tells her to relax and let go, she will move toward those things that she doesn’t want to feel and there will be a reaction. This may take the form of tensions in her legs: those legs want to be ready for running – to get out away. Or she may be aware of the tensions in her neck and shoulders. She keeps herself tight in her upper body with energy concentrated in her head – keeping alert and ready. Her eyes may twitch as she struggles to comply with the therapist’s directive to keep them closed. Her body’s reaction is to keep “the other” in view.

Letting go deeply enough to gradually connect with the feelings of terror that underlie her body’s tensions is a slow process that requires patience and a great deal of trust. It is the gradual evolution of this trust that over time can operate on many levels within the therapeutic relationship to allow an easing of the fear that she has carried and the development of strategies that allow new forays into a world once boundaried by threat.