Anxiety or Fear?
“I define anxiety as the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self.” ~ Rollo May (Psychology & The Human Dilemma, 1996, p. 72)
I explained to my father that a giant tarantula had scurried across my floor. He looked at me, and managed to hold it together for a good thirty seconds before his expression of concern cracked and became laughter. He explained that it was “probably” just a mouse and he would buy some traps the next day. Fine by me. Mouse traps would probably work on giant tarantula’s, right? Of course!
So, here’s the question: What was 5 year old me feeling? To whit; is there a difference between anxiety and fear? In The Courage to Be, a book often referenced by May, Paul Tillich draws clear, and perhaps arbitrary, distinctions between multiple forms of anxiety. However, one thing they both agree on is this: Anxiety is the fear of “no thing”. Kierkegaard calls it, “the dizziness of freedom” (i.e., potential). For me, that is distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear has a clear and distinct source: A lion about to pounce, a car swerving into my lane, emotional distance of a spouse. To quote Tillich, “Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. They are immanent within each other: The sting of fear is anxiety, and anxiety strives toward fear.”
The concept that “anxiety strives towards fear” is crucial. As a 5 year old lay in his bed, imagining monsters waiting to destroy him, a mouse running across the floor was the object upon which I projected my anxiety. Today, I’m trying to learn how to sit with my anxiety, but I doubt I’ll ever master that ability. People aren’t designed to exist in a nearly constant state of anxiety. If you don’t believe me, get some history on your neurotic friends; you’re going to find a great deal of anxiety. I always want to know why I’m feeling anxious, not simply that I’m feeling anxious. However, I have gotten better at realizing when my anger is misplaced fear/anxiety and it helps me realign my priorities and consider my actions in a new context.
In other words, there have been times where my wife, my friends, my coworkers were just mice going along their way when I projected the fear of under-the-bed-monsters onto them. Then, trying to make sense of my irrational fears made real, I tried to think of a logical way to explain my anger with them: they must be tarantulas (things that I know exist and/or have seen/experienced in the past). However, understanding what I have projected onto others, my own transference and countertransference is a crucial step in being able to begin to know if how I perceive other people is more or less accurate. In other words, are my feelings for the other person based more on our interactions or on my presuppositions and projections? If the former is the case, then I can begin developing a genuine and authentic relationship. If it is the latter, then I am in a relationship with myself more than the other and most attempts to work on difficulties in the relationship will be for naught because the difficulties may lie more in myself than the other.
What do you think? Are the terms “anxiety” and “fear” merely synonyms or are there real, meaningful differences?
(C) Nathan D. Croy, 2013 |
Subjectivity & Truth, & the Moon.
“Subjectivity is truth.” ~Soren Kierkegaard
Probably one of the least understood quotes of Kierkegaard. The most common interpretation is that all truth is relative. However, this goes directly against what Kierkegaard was trying to say. What it means is that people can only know what they know. Seems redundant, but it’s true. Brian Regan actually makes a joke about this that may illuminate the point I’m hoping to make.
There have been times when I was discussing my frustrations, hurt, or experience with someone. That someone then takes it upon themselves to trivialize my experience as “less than” because their experience was so much worse, greater, or better than mine. I believe Regan references how often this happens when people are talking about getting their wisdom teeth removed. See the video below after the jump. Somehow, everyone feels some compulsion to one-up the previous story. These often start with phrases like: “You think that’s bad?” and “Well, you haven’t experienced…”. While I’m all for good natured fish stories, there are some areas that are sacred.
My daughter, at three years old, was nearly certain that the world would implode because she wasn’t going to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner last night. Initially, I thought about how silly and petty her frustration was. Then, I remembered; in her subjective world, tomorrow is not a real thing! Time doesn’t work for a three year old the same as it does for adults. I still remember being about five and my mom telling me dinner would be ready in three hours and me thinking, “three hours? That’s it! I’m a goner and she doesn’t even care! She’s not even sweating and she’s talking to a dead man. A dead man that’s dead because she wouldn’t feed him!” This left me in a bit of a bind because my daughter needs to understand that when the family eats, she eats. We don’t make her special food. Life doesn’t work like that. On the other hand, should I risk minimizing her experience of stress by saying there are starving children in Africa?
Just because someone else had it worse, doesn’t mean whatever your current experience isn’t the worst for you. This is where Brian Regan points out how difficult it could be to have a friendship with someone who’s walked on the moon. I mean, what story could you possibly have that would top, “I walked on the moon!”? None. There isn’t one!
We must allow others to experience their pain as they are experiencing it and attempt to see it from their view. Entering into their experience, their subjectivity, may require us to set aside out own judgments about the severity of their story and identify with this: This may be the worst they have ever experienced. It doesn’t matter if we’ve walked on the emotional equivalent of the moon and see their struggle as a triffle. What matters is that it matters to them. And that’s all it should take to matter to us.
(c) Nathan D. Croy. 2013 |
“Never the twain shall meet.”
I heard an article on NPR about the change in courting behaviors in youth. The piece ended with with a quote that gave me pause. The author said, “For me one of the most moving comments I heard over and over and over from 18 to 25 year olds was ‘We’re the most connected generation in history, and yet we are the worst at real love’.” The people of my generation are desperately longing for something real, yet they are constantly inundated with the means to distract themselves from their own longing. It’s as if they are separated from themselves and their own desires. Now, it would seem, the children of my generation are being isolated from themselves and others via electronic communication that lacks authenticity. More than that, it lacks risk.
In Works of Love, Kierkegaard defined Love as an infinite debt to another willingly taken on (2009, p. 172). An infinite debt like that also requires infinite risk. The “other” will always have the option and the ability to leave me. If I attempt to take that freedom away, either through abuse or manipulation, in order to assuage my own fear of abandonment, then I am clearly acting out of selfishness instead of Love. Please, click on this link and listen to the report. How do you think we can bridge the gap between the seemingly unavoidable inauthenticity that arises when technological interactions usurp genuine face-to-face interactions? Is this any different than writing love letters? Is it the technology/means in and of itself, or is it the way it is being employed?
(c) Nathan D. Croy |
Less is More, or Less.
For my sixteenth birthday my parents got me a car. Well, I should use the term “car” pretty loosely. It was a yellow GEO metro LSI, convertible, three cylinder, mobile coffin. Still, free car! It was “fondly” referred to by other high schoolers as a roller skate. It was small. For my wife’s sixteenth birthday she, actually, I don’t know when she got her car. I do know that she had a job at 15 in order to save up for a car. She eventually bought a 1985 Camry and affectionately named it Owen. About a month into her proud ownership, the engine exploded and she put in a new one. She still had her car after we were married. I was on my third or fourth car, none of which had been named. My wife took good care of her car. I did not take good care of mine. I appreciated them, but they were just cars, nothing more. My wife’s car, on the other hand, symbolized independence, freedom, genuine ownership, blood, sweat, and tears! It was more than a car, it was a symbol.
There was less meaning for me in my cars than for my wife. While I appreciated them as gifts and they were a symbol of my parents love for me and a celebration of my birth, I never had the same attachment to my first car as my wife had to hers. Perhaps that could be better explained in the differences between male and female. In truth, I wasn’t all that attached to my next car for which I did work. Regardless, there is something to be said for the association between sacrifice and appreciation. The word we often use for that association between sacrifice and appreciation is “work”. In Psychology and the Human Dilemma, May (1996, p. 93) makes an incredible point that as therapists, people in relationship, and humans in general, often miss, and it’s this: Not everyone wants to be well.
Please, let that sink in for a moment and really think about it. Not everyone who is suffering wants to be at ease. Not everyone who is hurting wants to heal. Not everyone who is angry wants to be at peace. This seems, to me, to be unhealthy. It is, inherently, damaging to self and others. It goes against the very nature of my calling. To be clear, this does not refer to people who are suffering and lack the skills, mental capacity, and/or tools to become well. I am referring to people who are in dispose of the necessary and sufficient elements to become well, and then, at some level, make the decision to remain as they are while knowing there are other options.
May (ibid, p. 95), writes that, “sickness is precisely the method that the individual uses to preserve [their] being”. The neurosis, mental illness, or whichever myriad way the sickness manifests, it is there for a reason and has become a part of the person and they will cling to it like an addict. Yalom urges therapists to avoid the “crooked cure” (Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapist and their Patients, 2001, p. 102 ). In the entire chapter, he never explicitly defines what a crooked cure is, merely how to avoid it. However, what I think it may mean is that “giving” someone the answer to their problems instead of helping them “work” to get their own answer, can merely become substituting one neurosis for another. No genuine or authentic change has happened. Spoon feeding solutions often provides no real solutions at all. My car transported me just as well as my wife’s car transported her, but her car came with a heaping helping of earnest work and pride in accomplishment. Mine should have come with a helmet.
Now, there is nothing wrong with giving gifts, I am still grateful for their generosity, and we should all be able to accept acts of love from others with appreciation and humility. If you want to buy your child’s first car, go for it! However, make sure, like my parents did, that they have plenty of opportunities to struggle and work for something. Otherwise, they may miss out entirely on understanding what appreciation is, what they are capable of, and what it means to earn something. And in that process of work we often discover that circumstances, our general being, and our world, can be made into something intentional and genuine. If we’re lucky, we may even learn there is nothing wrong with failing.
(c) Nathan D. Croy |