CHAPTER ONE
FEAR
‘The world feels dangerous’
My mother wanted an abortion when she found out she was pregnant with me, but she was talked out of it by a friend. For most of my life she’s never stopped saying how much she hated having me and how much I’ve wrecked her life. I’ve always felt I had to look after her and do things for her, to make up for just being here … this makes me feel hurt and scared … when I get scared my anxiety can just take over and I get terrified to drive or catch trams or go into supermarkets … sometimes I can get really afraid of people for no obvious reason.
My father was more or less absent — he was a workaholic — and my mother seemed angry all the time. She was the sort of person who was driven by her emotions. It scared me; I’ve never felt safe in the world. Being so scared, I think I learned to disconnect. I retreated into reading and playing music, but I never felt part of things … I felt very on my own. I still do. Nowadays I spend lots of time scared and anxious, worrying about everything. What will others think, have I made the right decision, what’s wrong with me that I don’t have many friends … on and on it goes.
When I was young my father pushed me around all the time, forced me to do things when I was terrified … He didn’t seem to understand how timid I was. My parents didn’t know how to bring up my brother and me. They kept splitting up and then getting back together … my brother and I would have our hopes raised by them getting back together, and then they would be shattered again, over and over … in the end we just stopped feeling anything except rage … my brother and I are both really angry, and we’ve both been in trouble for it. I bashed so many kids at school and I still get into fights all the time … but usually I just drive my car really fast and scare people, you know, when I’m really pissed off … and I drink a lot … but lately I’ve been getting really anxious, It sounds stupid, but I think I’m scared of my own thoughts.
When I was a young child I was convinced that my mother would kill me. I felt it was just a question of when. I used to think that my father was all that stood between me and death. Her manner felt so cold and vicious and I couldn’t understand what I had done to cause it … I knew I had to be on guard at all times … It was me or her. Even now, the world feels dangerous … especially when I go and visit her … Even though I think it couldn’t really happen, I still have a sense that she might kill me even now, despite the fact that she is more frail these days.
Both my parents were migrants and very religious, fundamentalists actually. They were incredibly strict with me, what you would call ‘restrictive’. They didn’t want me to go out, they wanted to choose my friends, and so on. They told me the world was full of dangerous people and I had to be careful. I remember, my father would belt me if he thought I was straying away from the home fold. My mother was too weak to stand up to him. At that time all I could think about was escaping … but I started to get frightened of things—silly things, like whether my hands were clean enough, or whether my clothes were exactly right or whether my bed was made neatly enough, and that’s when I started cutting myself, I think, to relieve the fear. When I got terribly anxious a couple of times, my parents called on church members, and exorcisms were carried out. These were horrible experiences that sometimes went on over a couple of days. I don’t think I ever got over them.
THE WORDS ABOVE come from adults who formed the assumption that the ‘world is dangerous’ when they were young children. It is not surprising they formed this view; in fact, any other response would have been irrational. To be a young child, small in size compared with a larger adult, and to have that adult behave in a hostile manner towards you, is dangerous. It leads children to form certain basic assumptions about the world that then serve as starting points for later experiences to be ‘hung upon’. Children can form these assumptions quite early, based on the extent to which they feel safe in their environment. Through their experiences, children will determine whether or not the world is a benevolent place and whether or not it is safe to venture into it freely and with confidence.
The negative experiences do not necessarily arise from a hostile parent. Some parents are overly protective and fearful of the world themselves. Often these parents will constantly tell their children to ‘be careful’ or to ‘stay close’, actively discouraging independent exploration of the world. These parents often encourage their children to sleep with them well beyond infancy, and keep them home from school with the slightest ailment.
Often these overprotective parents were harshly treated during their own childhoods, which led them to feel insecure and unsafe, and they are often motivated to provide for their own children the protection they themselves did not have. These parents make unrealistic demands for certainty, often overwarning their children and overcontrolling any potential dangers in the world of the child. But no person can guarantee an absolutely risk-free environment. Sadly, over-restriction has the same result the parents were trying to avoid in the first place. Overprotection creates a profound fear of the world, causing children to develop strong feelings of insecurity and lack of safety. Against their best intentions, such parents will have inadvertently transferred the same underlying assumption that the world is dangerous to their own children, thereby passing on the legacy.
DIFFERENT RESPONSES TO NEGATIVE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
While what follows is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of personality profiles that can arise from all negative childhood experiences, here are some of the more common profiles that I have come across in my work. It is important to realise that a person can switch between the profiles depending upon what is required in different contexts. However, a person will usually have a well-practised and highly accessible set of strategies that give rise to a dominant profile in most contexts.
Shyness and lack of confidence
This profile can arise from different contexts. One of the more typical is the over-restrictive parent. A child with an overprotective parent gets insufficient practice at exploring the world. This child will often lack social skills such as independence, assertion, and self-confidence. There is usually also a lack of performance skills. For example, activities that develop physical skills are often deemed by a parent to be too dangerous or too reckless. This child is often inappropriately rescued, and thereby prevented from finding solutions to life problems.
The tendency not to venture out independently becomes compounded. While peers are gaining more and more life skills, the overprotected child starts to fall behind. As time progresses the gap becomes more evident, making the child ever more afraid to attempt solutions when peers are clearly more advanced. The child rapidly loses confidence in his or her ability to negotiate the world, and self-doubt becomes paramount. Pina typifies this type of response. She became inappropriately sensitive, highly self-critical, and overly cautious, striving relentlessly for perfection, afraid that she would make an error, afraid that her hands were not quite clean enough or that her bed was not quite straight enough. When Pina first consulted me, she was full of self-doubt, asking me to verify whether a sound was really loud or whether she was just imagining it.
The shy, unconfident profile does not just arise from overprotective parents. Many children respond to an overhostile parent by developing similar low-risk, overcautious strategies. Overhostile parents can make children acutely aware that their existence depends upon treading lightly, upon being careful not to irritate the hostile parent. These children become highly sensitive to every nuance and, sadly, they learn to focus on the needs of other people (mainly the hostile parent) instead of their own. Indeed, these children often lack any awareness of their own needs. Without that understanding, it is difficult for them later to learn how to become assertive and instrumental in determining their own destiny—an important life skill. Since these children are so overfocused on what other people are thinking or feeling, they often lack an awareness of what their own preferred result would be in any given situation. Without knowing what they want they can never hope to get it. These children will lack assertion skills to such an extent that their strategy is often just to wait for the ‘scraps or the leftovers’, believing that is the best they can do in their lives. This often makes the strategy self-fulfilling. The more these children hang about waiting for scraps the less likely they are to get more substantial meals.
Anger and defiance
The overhostile parent can produce an angry and defiant child. Such children will often decide that they have been hurt so much they have nothing left to lose, so they might as well fight.
Take Marco, for example. He had been bullied by two overly hostile parents. Even though Marco came to see me about a problem of anxiety and fear of his own thoughts, he had been ‘bashing’ people for years for minor incidents. Marco definitely gave off a loud and clear ‘Don’t mess with me’ message. He was strongly built, and he had physically hurt some people badly over the years. Even though Marco was a highly intelligent person, his options in developing strategies for dealing reasonably with life had been limited by his hostile environment. He had everything to lose, yet he believed he had nothing to lose. He drove his car at high speeds, intimidating pedestrians and other drivers, not caring if he lived or died.
Similarly with Patsy. While Patsy was deeply afraid of her overly hostile mother and had learned as a child to tread lightly around her, she had nonetheless developed many of her mother’s more aggressive behaviours. These strategies became more evident around adolescence as Patsy became bigger and stronger. Patsy could bully others quite effectively, and she had no hesitation in demanding what she wanted. Patsy learned that standing over people or coercing them sometimes achieved a result she wanted. Indeed, Patsy even started becoming defiant and angry towards her mother once she was big enough to do so. The more afraid she felt, the more angrily she behaved.
Alex also had a predominantly angry and defiant profile. When I met her, Alex had reached a crisis in her life and had become frightened by her own anxiety, but this had not always been the case. Alex had spent much of her life acting tough and defiant, allowing herself to quickly switch into aggressive mode whenever the ‘need’ arose. Underneath, Alex had always wanted her mother’s love and approval. As a result, she would often yield to her mother’s demands to take care of her, yet Alex was more than capable of demanding what she wanted.
The angry and defiant profile appears to have agency— that is, such children seem instrumental and effective in achieving their own goals. In reality, though, angry and defiant children too often coerce and bully others to get what they want. The problem is that this strategy ultimately fails because, when people feel they are being over-ridden without due consideration for their position, they block. When they block, the result is passive resistance, sabotaging the result the defiant children pushed for. In this way, the strategy is profoundly self-defeating.
Elusiveness
Another response to parental hostility was the one adopted by Thea. In response to her mother’s bullying, Thea had withdrawn and disconnected herself. I have seen this response often where there is a manipulative side to parental bullying. It may be that the bullying has been ambivalent, such as when children may have been told it was for their ‘own good’. The bullying is often not a series of clear or obvious attacks, but may be masked behind the appearance of concern for the children. The children nonetheless feel coerced and intimidated. To defend themselves, they withdraw by disconnecting from their own emotions, often appearing to cajole and appease the bullies in order to keep them at a distance. Often these children move interstate or migrate when they become adults, putting physical distance between themselves and the threatening parent.
When this situation becomes very extreme, the price children pay for adopting the elusive strategy increases. In some cases, where the strategy becomes too well-practised and reinforced as children grow older, more and more emotional disconnection can develop. This can continue until they become so alienated both from other people’s emotional demands and from their own emotions that they can be almost impossible to engage with. Elusive people can often become so alienated from their own inner world that they have no idea what is emotionally important to them.
In an extreme form, elusive people will agree with all views, but take none in and act upon none. They are locked off from interaction with others, frozen in time and distance from others, and extremely disconnected from their own emotions. It often takes a while to identify such people because they usually appear friendly and easygoing on the surface. It is only when you try to get them to change that you come up against a forceful and stubborn resistance. Often, when working with these people, it is difficult to find a way into their hearts in order to increase their motivation to change. It is very hard to engage them, to get them to feel enough passion to care about a result—even their own.
When I work with very elusive people, I find that the therapeutic tasks we agree on for homework are rarely carried out. In reality, their agreement is used merely as a strategy to get me off their backs. In other words, there is never any real agreement by them, despite the assurances they offer. They have learned to be plausible, while maintaining a passive resistance to any outside influence. The tragedy with adopting this strategy is that, without outside influences, it is extremely hard to change. Also, even though they are often not aware of it, being cut off from other people creates unresolved feelings of loneliness and desolation for them that are often expressed as free-floating anxiety or misdirected searching behaviour to try and find meaning in their lives. This behaviour often takes the form of an overattachment to gadgets, pets, or activities—attachments to things that are other than human.
Fearing catastrophes
Although different personality profiles emerge in response to early negative experiences, all these people have one thing in common. Later, when they undergo stressful life events, such as job loss, separation, illness, failure, or divorce, they will tend to interpret such problems as catastrophes because of their existing assumption that the world is dangerous. As well, the strategies they employ will generally be different from those of a person who has not experienced a negative childhood.
The reason for this is simple—their lives have been less secure than other people’s. They have been more fraught with danger and insecurity, creating a more hypersensitised brain that responds more readily to a perceived threat. This makes the interpretation of relatively ordinary events disproportionately catastrophic or ominous. When early experiences have too often signalled danger and threat, the developing mind learns to both anticipate and remain alert towards potential catastrophe.
ABOUT THE BRAIN
Recent brain research helps to shed some light on the effects of danger. Physiologists have found that brain cells become sensitised to stimuli; that is, over time brain cells can become more and more sensitive to fear cues, making them ‘fire’ more with less stimulation. In other words, the brain cells themselves learn to become more reactive to cues of danger.
Researchers have also found that anxious people from negative backgrounds, whose lives have been less secure and predictable, have increased activity in some parts of their brains, mainly the limbic system. The limbic system, which is the part of the brain that registers and responds to strong emotions, particularly fear, is thought to send impulses into the frontal cortex, where they are probably consciously experienced as emotions. It makes sense that the more hyperaroused the limbic system is, the more conscious experience there would be of strong emotion. Many people I see in my work show signs of this type of hyperarousal. It is common for them to jump at small sounds and to display excessive physical indicators of fear, such as faster breathing, sweating, or shaking following very minor incidents. These people frequently experience intense emotions such as fear, and are often excessive in their perception of threat.
The CRF response
We also know that stressful life events can enhance fear responses in the brain. Where these are perceived as continuing, with no obvious resolution, higher levels of corticotrophin releasing factor (CRF) are released into the brain as part of a secondary stress response. Excessive CRF release probably does not occur in every crisis, since most crises are solved within a reasonable time frame. The CRF release may not occur until several weeks or months after the crisis, often making a causal connection between it and the crisis less obvious.
When CRF is released into the brain, it is thought to make us agitated, fearful, and more anxious than usual. Things that are not usually scary become so at times of serious crisis because of the CRF. We might suddenly feel scared of people, or of particular situations, or we might suddenly become frightened by our own thoughts. This CRF release is a normal response to continuing stress, and it probably occurs to help prompt and stimulate us to focus more intensely on the unresolved problem that faces us in order to seek out some better solutions to it.
In most cases, the CRF output reduces over time, and the fear resolves without incident as we find some way to compensate for the loss of meaning or the threat that occurred during the stressful life event. There can be times, though, when the result is more problematic, and some people enter into a fear cycle. This is most likely to occur when people going through a crisis have also experienced a negative childhood, and their dominant strategies involve avoidance or withdrawal.
Fear cycles
A fear cycle occurs when severe anxiety is experienced as unrelenting over a long stretch of time, often gradually becoming worse. Such a cycle usually starts following a stressful life event, when the CRF response is elicited. Although the CRF response is a normal reaction to a continuing, unresolved crisis, and is experienced by all people in such a predicament, in my experience it seems to be only people who have had a negative childhood who enter into unrelenting fear cycles that fail to resolve. I have asked myself many times why this might be the case.
I think that part of the answer lies with the fact that people who have experienced negative childhoods perceive the world as more dangerous than people who have had positive childhoods. The more dangerous the world is assumed to be, the more a person will experience high levels of fear, and the more there is a perceived need to be hypervigilant in noticing potential threats. With more fear inputs coming in, the brain becomes oversensitised, culminating in an increased awareness of fear. This intensifies hypervigilance and catastrophic thinking patterns, which then over time keeps increasing brain sensitivity. This in itself is a vicious cycle of escalating brain sensitivity to fear cues.
Add to this a CRF response following an unresolved stressful life event, and you would expect a very high level of fear indeed. When fear is less extreme, we are ordinarily able to deal with it by confronting it through approach strategies. We think about the fear, it worries us somewhat, but we decide to move ahead through it anyway. It is when fear is experienced as particularly intense, life threatening, or overwhelming that we are afraid to confront it, and instead adopt strategies that allow us to escape or avoid it. Unfortunately, as we have seen, people who have had a negative childhood will be far more likely to experience overwhelming and life-threatening fear following a serious stressful life event, and so they are far more likely to use avoidance strategies for dealing with it.
Even though avoidance seems the most rational strategy when a high level of danger is perceived, the intensity of the fear in such situations is the result of an overinterpretation of events or circumstances. The overinterpretation comes about after years of brain hypersensitivity in people who have experienced a negative childhood. In fact, the choice of an avoidance strategy is inappropriate, and usually too extreme for what is warranted. The tendency of people from a negative and more fearful background to opt to use an avoidance strategy for dealing with the fear created by the CRF release becomes a problem in itself: research has consistently shown that unrelenting fear cycles depend upon avoidance in order for them to keep going. That is, a cycle can be both started and maintained by adopting avoidance strategies. Because of this, when such people try to avoid their fears, they fail; instead, their fears are not resolved, they remain intense, and they even get more intense over time. This seems to be why it is only people from negative childhoods who enter into unrelenting fear cycles.
I have chosen the following case study of Eleni to demonstrate how intensively fear can be experienced in a person who has come from a negative childhood. The study also shows how Eleni adopted behavioural strategies to try to avoid her overwhelming fear. As a result, her fear became more and more intense, spreading beyond the original source and becoming attached to related objects.
ELENI
Eleni was 35 years old when she first came to see me. She came from a Spanish family of nine children. When Eleni was young, her mother had very little time to spend with the children beyond making sure their physical needs were attended to. Her father was fairly remote, working long hours at several menial jobs to gain enough money to support the family. Eleni spent large amounts of time with an aunt, whom she grew to love.
Then her parents decided, in their forties, to migrate with the children to Australia, bringing the aunt with them. Eleni’s mother never got over the migration experience. She felt isolated, lonely, and bitter. Being always at home, she found the English language difficult to practise, and she never learned to speak more than a few words. Eleni’s parents bickered much of the time about leaving Spain, and the mother harboured a great deal of resentment about feeling ‘forced’ to migrate by her husband. Eleni thought that her parents had a ‘poor’ relationship, ‘always fighting’ and ‘always trying to control each other’. Indeed, she could not remember hearing them have a civil or sustained conversation with each other.
Eleni’s mother took much of her resentment out on Eleni. Perhaps it was because Eleni looked like her father, or because she was less compliant than some of her other children. Eleni had adopted an angry and defiant attitude towards her mother, obviously believing she had nothing left to lose. This added fuel to the fire. Eleni’s mother was constantly ‘critical’ of her and ‘never showed any love’. If she listened to Eleni it was because she felt she had to, not because she ever wanted to.
She puts me down all the time in really cruel ways, telling me things like I’ll never amount to anything or that I’m useless … she laughed at me when I got married and we bought a house, saying ‘I wouldn’t have a hope of making it work’ … she can get really cruel.
It appeared that Eleni’s mother preferred the more ‘compliant’ children:
My mother had favourites amongst the children but, as you can tell, I wasn’t one of them … she seemed to like my oldest sister who toed the line … I think she loathed me, it was like I got in her way … she didn’t like me standing up to her … she was always busy and nasty … I can’t remember ever spending any time with her or thinking that she liked me … that has really hurt me.
The relationship between Eleni and her mother was quite cold, rated on a cold–warm scale by Eleni as consistently two out of ten over time.
Eleni was also frightened of her father, who was overly strict and rigid in his viewpoints, although they had a warmer relationship (rated as seven out of ten by Eleni). She says that
He was very strict … I was still asking him whether I could go out to see girlfriends when I was in my early twenties … I had been with John (now her ex-husband) for two years before I was game to bring him home.
The only safe, secure relationship that Eleni had was with her aunt. She alone was affectionate and relatively uncritical.
During secondary school, things were difficult for Eleni. She had language problems, and also sometimes felt ‘left out’ by the other students. Gradually this improved; she stayed at school until the end of Year 11 and then completed a secretarial course. Her life went on without incident for a number of years. By then Eleni spoke English well. She worked in a couple of reasonably well-paid jobs, had a group of friends, and eventually married John. She was a perfectionist and was inclined to hold fairly rigid views, but she was getting along okay. There was no obvious anxiety, although she was a ‘worrier’.
Even when her aunt became ill, Eleni appeared to cope, although she was worried and ‘fairly anxious’ during that period. Her aunt died several months later. Her aunt had obviously been a central figure in Eleni’s life, providing a foundation of self-worth that was more solid than her parents had been able to provide.
A couple of months after the funeral, a relative gave Eleni some of her aunt’s clothes to remember her by. Later that night Eleni took the clothes out of the bag to look at them. Without warning, Eleni suddenly became terrified of the clothes. They ‘felt contaminated with her death’, and ‘represented my aunt dying’. The clothes became sinister and she could not bear to be near them. Eleni immediately threw the clothes into the rubbish bin in the kitchen. She felt better temporarily.
The next day a thought occurred to Eleni. It went something like this: if the clothes were contaminated with death, now the rubbish bin was contaminated with death, and other things that she had touched when she was holding the clothes were now contaminated with death. Enormous fear overwhelmed her. She thought she was in grave danger: she was contaminated with death. Immediately, Eleni experienced a full-blown panic attack with feelings that something horrific was about to happen to her. She felt that her life was under threat.
At the time she had these thoughts, Eleni had just been given a new pet bird. The bird was now ‘contaminated’ because Eleni had picked it up just after handling her aunt’s clothes. The bird had to be given away because Eleni could not bear to touch it. To touch the bird would threaten her life. This was a tragedy for Eleni because she had ‘loved the bird very much’. Not only this, but the laundry where the birdcage had been was also now contaminated, and she found it hard to go in there. In the laundry were also the black clothes she had worn to the funeral two months before—she had been avoiding washing her funeral clothes.
Eventually, donning rubber gloves, Eleni forced herself to go into the laundry and wash her black funeral clothes. By this time, though, Eleni was preoccupied by the thought of becoming contaminated with death, so she washed the funeral clothes separately by hand in order not to contaminate the washing machine. What she found was that then she was terrified that the trough was contaminated, so she scrubbed that several times. The fear was so overwhelming that Eleni washed her hands hundreds of times in the course of these tasks, despite wearing gloves. She desperately wanted to wash out the rubbish bin where she had thrown her aunt’s clothes, but she was ‘absolutely petrified’ of going anywhere near the bin or even looking at it. Even going in the general vicinity of the bin led to thundering heart palpitations, profuse sweating, nausea, dizziness, and shaking. Eleni stayed away from the bin, and did not even let herself look in its general direction. Eventually, a relative had to remove the rubbish bin for her.
Then, over the next several days, Eleni noticed she became terrified of anything related to death. She became terrified of black clothes (such as funeral clothes). She soon became terrified of any bird (not just hers), and this eventually became ‘all animals’. She became terrified of flowers (like funeral flowers), and then of anything that ‘grows’ like flowers do. Before too long, Eleni became afraid to even go near a growing tree or flower. Of course, Eleni could never go near or even look at rubbish bins of any description, so she became unable to cook at home. But going out to eat became a problem also. She might see a person wearing a black article of clothing, there might be flowers in the restaurant, she might see a rubbish bin on the way to buy food. If any of these things happened she would have to retreat home.
Over the next several months, Eleni, who had had a normal body weight before her aunt’s death, lost more than 25 kilogrammes and looked as though she was dying. She was also exhausted from only sleeping for about one hour a night because of her anxiety level. Eleni started to eat at her sisters’ and brothers’ homes alternately. But this, too, was inconsistent. In order to eat there, she had to insist on specific food preparation techniques from her siblings, such as excessive hand-washing, placement of the rubbish bin outside, and no touching of anything in any way connected to the outside garden or rubbish bin. Eleni could not enter a house where the family had a pet.
Several of her siblings became frustrated and refused to co-operate, making them also ‘contaminated with death’ in Eleni’s mind. So any contact with the contaminated siblings, either directly or indirectly through objects, had to cease. Eleni’s options narrowed. In the end, there was only one sibling who would adhere to her rigid rules and feed her, and she couldn’t go there too often in case she overdid her welcome and was banned from there as well.
As time went on, Eleni became more and more afraid to go home, since that was where the original ‘contamination’ had occurred. By this time, she could hardly ever bring herself to wash her clothes, in case they were contaminated. When she bought new clothes or other items she often had to throw them away immediately, especially if she saw someone wearing black or saw an animal close to the time when she bought things. As her confidence slipped away, she stopped trusting her own judgement and became full of doubts. She ruminated incessantly on things like whether she had accidentally brushed past a rubbish bin (which she thought had been on the other side of the street), or whether she might have touched something black or something growing without realising it. She wondered how she would know for sure if she had done these things. The more her confidence receded, the more her doubts increased.
Eleni first came to see me in the middle of winter. It was four years since her problems had started. She was skin and bone. She wore a summer skirt and singlet top, and had bare legs. She looked freezing. When I asked her why she was so underdressed for the weather conditions, she told me she could hardly ever manage to wash any clothes. She told me she couldn’t eat very often either because of her fears. I realised that Eleni’s fear had become greatly exacerbated over time, and that she was excessively vigilant and reactive to everyday situations. To make things more difficult, I had plants in my consulting room, I had a pet cat outside, and I sometimes wore dark-coloured clothing. Eleni would ask me whether I was deliberately taunting her, making it hard for her. I assured her these things were not aimed at her. Nonetheless, many sessions were cancelled, as Eleni was simply unable to find the inner resources to attend them.
It took a long time but, eventually, Eleni started to improve. She had to learn how to relax her brain and stop the hypersensitivity reaction that had been happening. Meanwhile, Eleni had to slowly start to do the things she had been avoiding. She gradually learned to be able to eat, cook, and wash her own clothes. The next step was getting some part-time work, and then slowly forming a close relationship. Without a doubt, Eleni was one of my most difficult cases of sheer, unrelenting, and lateralised fear.
What happened
Eleni was experiencing a serious, stressful life-event. When her parents had been unable to provide the love she needed, her aunt had loved her. She was somehow pivotal to Eleni’s wellbeing, and she had died. Interestingly, Eleni did not see her fear of death as being directly related to her aunt’s death. This was because Eleni did not develop her fears immediately upon her death. It took about two months before Eleni went into her secondary stress response and CRF flooded her brain. The commencement of CRF release was almost certainly first felt by Eleni when she experienced the sudden, out-of-the-blue terrifying thought that her aunt’s clothes would somehow place her life in jeopardy.
Eleni’s fear cycle started at the point where she threw her aunt’s clothes into the rubbish bin. It could have stopped there: Eleni could have decided that the fear she was feeling was too exaggerated, and she could have retrieved the clothes. Instead, she tried to avoid her strong fear that her life was in danger, and left the clothes in the bin. She chose a short-term relief strategy of getting rid of the clothes, rather than choosing to let herself experience high levels of distress. Often the easiest strategy is not the best strategy.
The next day, when Eleni had a series of thoughts about cross-contamination, she could instead have decided to throw all her clothes in the washing machine, without gloves, and not scrub anything, including her hands. She could have lived with her distress, not tried to escape it. Had she done this, the fear cycle would have stopped. But again, Eleni chose to avoid her intense feelings of fear. When she scrubbed she felt instant relief, even though it was only short-lived. I guess Eleni hoped that if she scrubbed long enough the whole threat would go away and her life would return to normal. The problem was that the more she avoided her fears, the less her feelings were able to be resolved and the more the fear cycle flourished. Eleni kept choosing a strategy of avoidance because her earlier life of negativity had not helped her develop alternatives.
In the case of Eleni, it is easy to see how the fear spread to all sorts of objects that were conceptually related. There seems no end to the powers of human imagination, and the capacity to think laterally and capture more and more objects of fear. In the end, Eleni could not do a single thing without tracing it back to her fears. Her life was highly restricted by her fear cycle: no animals, no black, no flowers, no bins, and so on. When it first arises, this type of difficulty seems interminable; every task or activity evokes some sort of fear cue. To even start to recover, Eleni needed to relax her brain and get rid of the hyperactivity of her limbic system.
Fear and the body’s response
Through evolution, our bodies were set up to maximise our chances of escaping by running away when we experienced danger or fear. We needed to breathe fast in order to supply our muscles with enough oxygen so we could move quickly and prolong our lives. Nowadays, our fears are very rarely those that require the swift muscle-response of escape. Indeed, most of our fears these days are internal or mind fears; yet our bodies are stuck back in our evolutionary roots.
When we experience fear, we still immediately speed up our breathing, usually without even being aware that we are doing so. The problem is that, when we do not run away from what has frightened us and, therefore, fail to use the excess oxygen that has been produced by our rapid breathing, we initiate physiological changes in our bodies. Just to mention a couple: the width of blood vessels narrows, allowing less blood and therefore less oxygen through the vessels; and the haemoglobin (the part of the red blood cell that carries oxygen) becomes sticky, making it more difficult for any oxygen that does reach its destination cell to disengage and enter that cell
These physiological processes that occur in response to overbreathing without running away make the brain believe it is short of oxygen. Less oxygen is getting through the blood vessels, and when it does get through it remains stuck on the haemoglobin. Not surprisingly, the brain behaves as though our oxygen level is low because we may be losing blood, so it tries to compensate by putting us into symptoms of shock to try to conserve vital bodily functions. Therefore our heart rate increases suddenly; we break out in a sweat and become clammy; and we start shaking, become nauseous, feel short of breath, get dizzy, and so on.
HOW TO CHANGE
The physiological processes described will help you realise that there is no need to be afraid of anxiety symptoms. Many people are afraid of the symptoms caused by overbreathing, believing that something absolutely dreadful is about to happen. These feelings are known as thoughts of ‘impending doom’. Not surprisingly, when the brain believes that we are losing blood we are bound to interpret those symptoms catastrophically. Often people believe that they are about to have a heart attack, or that they are going mad, or that something terrible is about to happen. In reality, all these symptoms (and the subsequent catastrophic interpretations) are simply caused by overbreathing and the ensuing acidity changes. There is, in fact, no need to be afraid of panic or anxiety symptoms. Such panic attacks are simply a misreading by the brain, and they will resolve soon after you slow down and relax your breathing.
To stop a hyperactive brain, you have to work through your body. Think of your brain, as it is, sitting there in a vat. Your brain is an organ that does not ‘feel’ for itself. It has no pain receptors. This is not to say your brain is not important, but your brain is in a sense removed from direct contact with the world. The only way your brain can obtain information about the world, and therefore about how it ought to behave within that world, is through the information that you give it. This information is given to your brain primarily through your body responses and your senses and, in particular, your eyes.
The ‘body flop’ exercise
There is a simple exercise I have developed that helps many people who suffer from excessive feelings of panic and fear. I call it ‘the body flop’. To overcome such feelings I recommend that you learn and then practise this exercise. The body flop enables your mind to gradually slow down and relax. It significantly reduces the oversensitivity of a brain that has been trained on too much danger and threat.
Follow these steps:
• Look out towards the world with a ‘soft’ gaze. Look gently and without any defensiveness or guardedness, with softness, towards a world that might appear frightening. When people are scared, they often develop a ‘steeled’ look in their eyes, as though they are defensive and ready for combat. Their gaze is often ‘flinching’, as though pain could strike at any moment. You must trick your brain. Look out bravely and softly as if you believe the world to be a totally benevolent place. It doesn’t matter if you do not believe the world is benevolent: pretend with your gaze that it is. Your brain will experience different messages, and it will gradually start to correct its hyperactive response.
• You also need to trick your brain through your body. Even if you feel terrified inside your brain, make your body completely soft and relaxed and undefended. Do the things that scare you, but do them in a state of physical relaxation, no matter how scared you feel. To do this, take a couple of slow, deep, relaxed breaths. Breathing slowly and in a relaxed way at the start of the body flop is important. Remember, most anxiety symptoms are caused by breathing too fast.
• Lift both your shoulders up high (around the ears), hold that position for a couple of seconds, then drop your shoulders all the way down while ‘sighing’ out any tension through the exhalation of your breath. At the point where you have dropped your shoulders, continue the flop throughout the rest of the lower body, ensuring that all tense muscles (including your jaw and face muscles) flop and relax as the wave moves downwards through the body. Your whole body should feel floppy, soft, and relaxed to a point of about one out of 10 (ten out of 10 would be the maximum fear level you have ever experienced). Whenever you speak after doing a body flop, make sure your voice is soft and calm, ensuring that any demanding or fearful tone is eradicated.
• Do these body flops every time you reach a fear level of three out of 10. Don’t worry if your mind is screaming with fear; you have 100 per cent control over relaxing your body despite what is going on in your brain. With time, your brain starts to register the different messages it is getting from your body, and it ceases its hyperactive behaviour.