UNDERSTANDING FEAR IN OURSELVES and OTHERS

Bonaro W. Overstreet

Fear is a necessary tool for survival, a warning of danger. However, in humans, fear also inhibits our powers or distorts expressions of those powers and means living self-defeated, not able to utilize our potential to live our lives to the fullest in ourselves and with others.

Fear comes in many disguises:

· As courage - doing things so as not to appear afraid (a teenager driving fast and recklessly at the urging of his peers)

· As humility or self-sacrifice - fear of expressing one's own feelings and thoughts in the face of another's strength

· As strength - power over others

· As goodness - hostility, concealed by meekness and unselfishness

from Robert Frost's poem The Pauper Witch of Grafton

“....when all's said

Right's right, and the temptation to do right

When I can hurt someone by doing it

Has always been too much for me, it has.”

· As love - can only affirm another person as a reflection of oneself, not as a person in their own right

· As prejudice, hostility or physical illness

A common reaction to social fear is to become a "hider", assuming others are not affected by fear and therefore are free to make the first move (or maybe the first of many moves) until the hider has opened up, and thus break a stalemate. Hiders rationalize their retreat from human interaction with expectations of failure, by becoming hostile, self-pitying, less sensitive to others, thereby making it less likely others will take the time and effort to seek him out (giving the hider even more reason to reinforce the above behaviours).

Fear is a roadblock between individuals and reality. The fearful person doesn't want to look at complexities but wants simple answers immediately to ensure his emotional safety. Should he flee, dominate to increase his power, or manipulate others so they will protect his position?

When the satisfaction and security of another becomes as significant to one as is one's own satisfaction and security then the state of love exists. If people are on good terms with themselves, love themselves, trust themselves in action, they can withdraw their attention from themselves and lend it to others. When they can acknowledge their limitations and their mutual dependence without feeling that these brand them as weak or put them under threat, their love of self and life will express itself as love of others. As Erich Fromm said: "Whatever you do to others, you also do to yourself. We find that the destructive person is unhappy even if he has succeeded in attaining the aims of his destructiveness because he is contradicting the very principle by which his life and all life is sustained."

We need to improve our awareness of fear and its disguises. Freedom from fear shows by the power to turn our attention spontaneously and productively away from its negative effects; to love reality and build habits and attitudes suitable to dealing with it; to affirm another's rights and valuable uniqueness.

There are areas in marriage which give greater opportunity for the venting of hatred and fear than in any other relationship. Thus married partners need enough freedom from fears, guilts and hostilities to allow for shared attention to be focused on shared concerns. Realism, flexibility, independence and generosity are the marks of emotional soundness, qualities we want to encourage whenever we can, both in ourselves and others.

We can like people into liking themselves - the self is "made up of reflected appraisals". Showing interest and approval, helping others take a realistic attitude towards their limitations and errors, giving more attention to what they do well and less to what they do badly. Criticism is usually prompt, frequent and sharp, while appreciation is niggardly or almost wholly lacking. If people are to grow beyond their errors, they must be allowed to assimilate those errors without too much self-distaste.

We cannot command love and good will. If we want people to feel a certain emotion, the only rational thing we can do is provide the sort of experience from which that emotion will grow of its own accord, in its own time. To decrease fear means to increase love, but to increase love must also mean to increase self-liking, self-acceptance.

It is well known that repressing anger and other "bad" emotions leads to aberrations in our personalities, but self-liking and pride of accomplishment also need expression. We have been brought up with a long history of "acute Calvinism" where it is a mark of bad taste to show pride and satisfaction in our accomplishments. Our ability to express these without fear of disapproval helps us toward honest self-approval and self-trust based on competence. Also, we are curiously embarrassed to show or accept the emotions we say we want to encourage - affection and good will. We rebuff them, stiffen with embarrassment and transmit our embarrassment to the other person - checking one another's spontaneity at the source. We tend to use the "jovial", crude "razzing", a few drinks to break the ice and quickly wear ourselves out trying not to look foolish, being thought sentimental or of being an "apple-polisher".

Knowledge is independence. It gives us clues as to how to interpret and deal with people and situations; it becomes a positive factor in our emotional readiness for independence. Without it, the more we feel we are blind in our relationships and the more tempted we are to borrow someone else's sight and call it insight. Ignorance contributes to fear and an example is the "War of the Worlds" broadcast. The more knowledge we have (and put to use) the more independence we will have.

Eight ways to strengthen love within the family are:

· eating together

· giving and receiving gifts and help

· talking

· listening

· working together

· playing together

· learning together

· affirming together

Fear casts out love, intelligence, goodness, thoughts of truth and beauty and the power to know what should be feared and how it should be feared. The need for courage, rationality and ingenuity is essential if we are to overcome our own fears and those of the people we love.

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