With Halloween just around the corner fear is in the air. There are spooky movies intentionally released at this time of year to build on the fear. The catalogs at my house are filled with costumes, masks, music, and other creepy decorations to make our home frightening to small children.  We read the suspenseful terrifying books of Stephen King at night with the all the lights in the house on.  We even pay to be afraid.  There is the thrill of the roller coaster or the spook house that gets our hearts pumping. We seem to have an appetite to be frightened. Even babies love to be startled to a point.  Preston, my one year old, will giggle if we startle him with “boo.” But he will cry if he takes a scary fall.  All fear creates a rush of adrenaline that brings a type of high. Bungee jumping or scaling rock walls are controlled fear that brings the rush with less then the life threatening danger of being attacked by a crocodile.

Another fear producing event just around the corner is our national election.  Some of us are afraid of who might get elected and others prey upon that fear with scary statistics and threatening statements.  “If he gets elected,” the rhetoric goes, “our national economy will collapse, your children will waste away in poor schools and our elderly will have no medical attention.”  How much actually changes when a president gets elected is debatable but the fears increase with each exchange.  In the book The Culture of Fear Barry Glassner suggests that, “it is from crosscurrents of scares and counter scares that the culture of fear swells.”[1]  He suggests that in large part we fear the wrong things because we are infinitely susceptible to suggestions of what to fear.  That susceptibility and the physical reactions we experience are deeply seated in our basic wiring as living beings.

Why are we afraid?  In the book, Fear Itself Rush, Dozier suggests, that “from an evolutionary perspective the answer is straightforward: we are afraid so we can survive, preferably injury free, for as long as possible or at least long enough to reproduce and rear our children.”[2]  Most of our fears are learned but there are a few that seem to be hard wired - at least we are more susceptible to them.  Fear of snakes, high places, spiders and the dark seem to be among the most common ones.  These fears, that Dozier calls prepared fears, are the ones our brains seem predisposed to develop. It is believed that these fears have an evolutionary base taking us back to a time when the earliest Homo sapiens lived in caves.  We share many of these fears with our primate ancestors. Perhaps most interesting is what fear doesn’t appear in the human – the innate fear of fire.[3]  All other animals on earth fear fire.  In addition we have a fear of things to come or things that might happen which doesn’t exist in our animal relatives.  What seems to have happened is that with the dramatic shifts in our brain structure, through evolution, we began to have the capacity to plan and imagine.  “With the expansion of the frontal lobes we see the beginnings of a vastly extended and elaborated sense of time.”[4]  We fear because we are animals, we fear certain things because of what we have learned and what we are prepared to fear and unique to humans we fear the future because we have such well-developed brains.

The Gift of Fear, a book by Gavin de Becker suggests, just as the title says, that fear is a gift that protects us.  A fear of death keeps us from doing stupid things. It preserves the species. But what we fear and how we respond to those fears is central to how we feel about life and our place in it.

If we are fearful of life we are less likely to experience it fully.  There are serious disorders that affect people’s lives with a constant sense of fear. For instance there are specific fears that grow over time such as a fear of open or closed spaces.  And there are people who grew up with caring adults who were in a constant state of fear either real or imagined causing them to become constantly vigilant and overly cautious.

Fear can hold us in its grip keeping people from holding jobs, entering into relationships and functioning in the world.  For most people whose lives are limited by fear a combination of therapies help.  For some people more information about the feared object or event helps to alleviate the fear.  For instance it helps some people who are afraid of flying to learn that it is statistically safer to fly then to drive a car. For some a chance to understand the source of the fear – over vigilant parents or trauma as a child – gives us some power over the fear. For others new behaviors are learned to help reduce the fear.  For instance if one is fearful of snakes one can, over repeated exposure, learn to respond with fascination or interest rather than fear. However, some fear disorders are based in brain chemistry. Parts of the brain that are either over stimulated or under responsive.  These respond best to medication. Thankfully our modern imaging allows a clearer picture of the connections and functioning of the different parts of the brain so more people are able to live full lives then ever before.

One of the fears our culture has particularly latched onto is the fear of strangers. We have become hyper vigilant of our children being abducted by strangers.  We finger print them, warn them to not talk to strangers, register them and basically scare them so they can protect themselves from strangers.  Yet all statistics indicate that less than .001 of a percent of America’s 64 million children are abducted by nonfamily members. “What the public doesn’t hear often or clearly enough is that the majority of missing children are runaways … or kids abducted by estranged parents.”[5]  We have invested millions of dollars in protecting our children from strangers, many people have gotten rich in the process, and yet we might protect more children if as a culture put that money into ridding our country of poverty and hunger much more prevalent concerns. Glassner and de Becker suggest that the reason we persist in our fear of strangers is because of the companies that make money protecting our kids.  I would encourage everyone to read De Becker’s latest book Protecting the Gift. In it he offers real life ways to protect your children from real and overrated dangers but most important to teach them protect themselves.

But money and media savvy aren’t the only things that cause fears to persist. I know because I harbor a personal and, as I now understand it, irrational fear of vaccines and my children.  During the 80’s and 90’s there were various reports that different vaccines cause all sorts of problems.  Parents of children who suffered from serious brain injury and even death from vaccines have promoted a campaign encouraging all of us to be cautious when getting our children vaccinated.  I have to say I have fallen for the propaganda.   NPR’s reports that the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine has possibly been linked to a rise in autism in children frighten me.  No amount of physician assurance and “facts” about the poor science in the studies will assuage my fear that if I have my son vaccinated he might become autistic.   Glassner goes on and on about the diseases vaccines prevent and the numbers of children they have saved and still I hold desperately to the notion that my child might become autistic if I have him vaccinated.  Glassner suggests there are two reasons for that: the fear taps into current cultural anxieties and it has a media-savvy advocate behind it. The vaccine scare has both.  Accepting the vaccine means that I accept the government’s sense of what is important for my children and me. As a culture we tend to be distrustful of those in power. Also there are many media savvy people who know that the fear for our children sells papers and gets people to listen and watch programs.[6]   It is not front page news when one of these “scares” is debunked – in fact it rarely makes the papers, but it is when we “discover” a new reason to fear.

In addition, as Dozier suggests our brains remember much better that which has an emotional component to it.  “The stronger our feelings, the more vivid and long lasting our memories. … We have evolved to remember those things our emotions tell us are important.”[7]  For me that adds to the vaccine scare.  Like everyone else, I am less likely to take in and remember those facts that have no emotional component.  I have an immediate and emotional fear response to the notion of my son becoming autistic.  I tie that to the data and the two become inseparable.

Children’s fears give us a view into the nature of the emotion. I remember when Ariana, my now 11-year-old daughter, was three and four. She was having a terrible time with nightmares and scary things in her room. No amount of logic and rational thought was having any effect on the creatures that visited her in the night.  No amount of reassuring her the creatures were not real and mom was in the next room would help her go to sleep.  Susan Greenfield in her book The Private Life of the Brain suggests that at about this age young people have developed enough to appreciate the dangers of the world but they have insufficient associations, memories and experiences to place those fears into a rational setting.  Their rational fear system has not developed at the rate their primitive one has.  What worked for Ariana was to access that primitive brain through magic.  She and I bought a dream catcher and hung it over her bed.  It would catch the bad dreams and only let the good ones drip down into her sleep.  It worked.  She found it easier to fall asleep each night and the bad dreams soon disappeared.  Thillich, the famous theologian, called this “utter dependence”. It is an emotional connection to the divine that takes away our need for constant vigilance.  Ariana did not need to worry about the dreams because the dream catcher was on guard so she could go to sleep.  Her primitive brain was eased it seems by a sense that someone or something else was in control.

Our greatest fear is fear of death. For me it is a fear of the unknown.  It is a fear of nonexistence.  I like being alive and I can’t imagine liking not being alive.  I am pretty sure that death will be an end to all consciousness and feelings and even the bad ones I like better than not feeling at all.  Fear of death is that haunting nagging feeling that lives just below the surface of our every move.  We share it with all humanity, it is part of what makes us human and what makes us vulnerable.  Our brain with its primitive and rational system tries to see into the future to prepare and since it is impossible in most cases to predict the future we all carry a low level fear about our unknown future. The greatest unknown is death itself.  I can lessen my fear of death, but thinking spiritual thoughts and connecting to the “grand scheme” of life, but it never goes away. I can deny my fear of death but that doesn’t somehow seem healthy. Humans “have developed an elaborate spiritual life that seeks to give us a greater sense of mastery over our own destiny”[8]  In all of its many manifestations religion gives us a sense of control over the fear of death and the unknown.  But not only does religion alleviate fear it also gives us more to fear. Burning in hell, for instance, jumps immediately to mind.  Fear motivates us to avoid different events, people and objects and many religious concepts play on our primary fears of death and pain. Science and reason help our rational fear system to deal with death but do very little to alleviate primary fears.  Religion, story, and spirituality can give our primitive brains a sense of security and explanations for our fears. For instance many mystic traditions teach that we return to the greater cosmos when we die and science teaches no energy is ever destroyed, each compliment the other bring us some comfort and freedom from fear.

As Marilyn Ferguson said in The Aquarian Conspiracy  “our fears are a treasure house of self knowledge if we explore them.”[9]  Fear that we can control gives us a kind of pleasure.  Fear that is beyond our control can save our lives.  We cannot stop ourselves from being fearful but we can learn to respect the emotion, use it to teach us and protect us.  We can learn to calm our fears and to proceed with our lives with gusto despite the pounding in our chests.  Fear is a tool that can bring us destruction and immobility and creativity and security.  Fear has brought us science and understanding.  We are grateful to those who feared the thunder. Fear has helped us understand our mind and its emotions.  We are grateful to those who fear the stranger’s smile.  Fear has made us mend our ways.  We are grateful to those who fear the police, the public eye and the private one too. Fear has brought us dreams come true.  We are grateful to those who fear the voice of desire through a dream.  Fear has brought us peace. We are grateful to those who fear bombs, war and death.  Fear has brought us story and religion, pageantry and tradition.  We are grateful to those who fear the unknown.[10]   We are grateful to all who fear and go on through the pounding heart.  Thanks be for those who are afraid.
 

Footnotes:
1) The Culture of Fear Barry Glassner p. xxvii
2) Fear Itself Rush W. Dozier p.80
3) Ibid p.84-5
4) Ibid p. 92
5) The Culture of Fear p. 61
6) Ibid p.177
7) Fear Itself p. 43
8) Fear Itself p. 129
9) The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women p. 249
10) adapted from “God Bless Those Who are Afraid”, by Louie Crew  from Prayers to Protest edited by Jennifer Bosveld
 

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