Beyond Fear

In 1985 I wrote this story in the present tense. Now it must be told in the past tense, because for many years Margaret has led a happy life. She now has her own home and a loving partner, and she travels extensively worldwide. I have told the story of how she took charge of her life and changed in my book Breaking the Bonds.⁹

Many of us define ourselves in terms of our sense of guilt. A feeling of impending punishment can hang over us, like a Damoclean sword, ready to smite us for deeds done or which we have failed to do. While shame relates to our identity, the person that we are, and guilt to what we do, we can come to believe that everything we do is wrong and that we can never do anything properly, so that a sense of guilt, a pervasive sense of fear, can absorb our being to the extent that it becomes one of the structures by which we define ourselves. If we did not feel guilty we would not know what to do. As Constance once said to me, ‘I was born guilty’.

Some children acquire this sense of guilt when they come to feel that it was their fault that their mother died or their parents split up, even though these events occurred when the children were far too young to understand them. Most of us acquired our sense of guilt when, as small children, we found ourselves locked in combat with a parent over where and when we should defecate, or whether and what we would eat, or because our parent was punishing us and we did not understand why. We defended ourselves with anger and protest against a parent whom we saw as interfering and unjust. However, we could not win the battle and bring it to an end. We went on battling, and, as we did, we recognized that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. We felt very keenly that our parent was wicked to do this, but if that were so it meant that the person on whom we depended was wicked. This was terrible. We had to find some way of making ourselves safe.

Our solution was to accept our parent’s definition of the situation. Power is always about who does the defining and who accepts the definitions. So we acquiesced. We decided that we were wrong to see the situation as ‘I am being unfairly punished by my wicked parent’. The correct way to define the situation was ‘I am bad and am being justly punished by my good parent’, which was how our parent saw it.

This acceptance of our parent’s definition may have extricated us from that dangerous situation, but the price we paid was a lifelong sense of guilt. The sins of commission and omission became an integral part of our relationships with others and, knowing our badness, we have to strive to be good. Or else what will happen to us if we are not good? We shall be punished and abandoned.

This, as small children, is what we feared most of all, that our parents would abandon us and leave us alone, weak and defenceless in an alien world. We had learned what this was like when we were abandoned in our cot through a long, dark night and no one came to comfort us, or our mother left us with strangers and did not return for a long time. We heard the threat of abandonment when our parents told us of bad children being sent to children’s homes or of parents being driven to leave or even to die by their children’s wickedness. The most loving of parents can say in a moment of exasperation, ‘I can’t stand you a moment longer,’ or ‘You’ll be the death of me.’

Threats of abandonment do not diminish as a child gets older. A friend told me how, when he was nine and causing his mother some bother, she had packed a bag with his clothes and ordered him out of the house. He spent the day sitting at the front gate, hoping to be let back in again and promising to be very good. He is a man of unsurpassed goodness.

The fear of abandonment can underlie the whole of our experience of our existence, and because it is always there, allowing no contrast with periods without it, we do not conceptualize it clearly and consciously. Thus we do not ask why we have this fear now and whence it came.

Lorna had a nasty, life-threatening disease, cystic fibrosis, but she showed that by bravely and sensibly following a strict health regime this disease need not cut short one’s life nor prevent one from leading an ordinary existence. She had had to give up her work as a nurse but she had a loving, supportive husband, a wonderful daughter, a pleasant home, and a strong Christian faith which assured her that there was no reason to fear death. She could not understand why she should wake during the night consumed with panic, nor why a black depression should immobilize her in a way that her illness never did.

Nor could she understand why her GP wanted her to talk to me. But she dutifully came along, and discovered that talking to me gave her something important that was missing from her life. At home she was addressed as wife, mother, daughter, daughter in-law. Nobody talked to her. Now she had found someone who talked to her as her.

We talked about many things - the worry of her illness, the peculiarities of the medical profession, the responsibilities she carried for her family because she had always been the ‘sensible, well-organized, reliable one’. We talked a great deal about her need to do everything perfectly. Visitors had to be entertained with hot meals and home-made cakes. The garden must be trim and neat, the house immaculate. ‘I wouldn’t dream of going out and leaving the washing up not done or a bed unmade,’ she said.

I argued that she should let visitors fend for themselves and that housework should be kept to a minimum so that she had time and energy to do things which she found interesting and pleasant. At first she was doubtful, but one morning she told me, with triumph and laughter, ‘I went to church on Sunday without making the bed first but I closed the curtains so the neighbours couldn’t see.’

Why did she set herself such high standards and always strive to meet them? True, she had a mother who always expected her daughter to be perfect and a credit to her, but why had she accepted the enormous demands that her mother made on her?

One day, when she was telling me how fiercely she resisted going into hospital whenever her illness produced some complication, and how miserable she felt when she was there, she mentioned going into hospital when she was a child. I asked her about this and she described how she had been sent to a hospital when she was about seven. It was housed in a castle and run with military efficiency. Parents were not allowed to visit and children had to do what they were told. They had to be neat and tidy, obedient and reliable, and there were punishments if they were not. When her parents left her there she dared not cry because her mother disapproved of tears. She thought that she might never see her parents again, but when, at last, after many months, she did go home, she worried that she might be sent away again, to be abandoned and alone. So she tried very hard to be good.

Until we talked about these events in her childhood and uncovered the meaning they had for her, Lorna had not seen the connection between these childhood experiences and her drive for perfection, her fear of hospitals and the terrible panics which came whenever she felt that she was completely and absolutely alone. Buried farther was her anger towards her parents, who had abandoned her in the hospital, and towards her family, who expected her to give up being herself and to be what they wanted her to be. She had not acknowledged this anger, lest it burst forth and her family, who would not tolerate anger, reject her.

In the womb we were securely held. Being born brings us the first experience of being abandoned. We are no longer confined within secure limits, and instead a limitless world stretches around us. This uncertainty is frightening but necessary. All through our lives we cannot change anything about ourselves unless we go through a period of uncertainty. If we are wise we teach ourselves to tolerate the uncertainty of change, but, even as we do this, we retain the longing for the comfort and security of being securely held.

The ways in which this need can be met range from being physically held to knowing ourselves to be an accepted and loved member of our group. Important though this need is to all of us, there is no word for it in English. The closest word is ‘dependence’, from the Latin ‘to hang from’, but in our society to be dependent is not an admirable quality. Only weak, despicable people are dependent; strong, admirable people are independent. So we have to keep hidden our longing to be held secure in loving arms.

Not so in Japan. The Japanese language contains an important word, amae, which has the root ‘sweet’.¹⁰ Sweet it is to rest secure in loving arms. Sweet it is to amaeru, to presume upon the secure and indulgent love given by another person. It is that sense of snuggling up, of coming home, not to shouts and yells and coldness and criticism, but to welcome, allowed to be yourself and knowing that the people around you accept you as you are. The toddler who climbs on to an adult’s lap, confident of a cuddle, the teenager who throws his dirty football shorts on the bathroom floor, confident that they will reappear in his drawer, clean and pressed, the wife who snuggles up to her husband in bed and confidently places her cold feet on his - all amaeru. We all long to amaeru, but so often we cannot do this. Sometimes we have no one to hold us, and sometimes the people who hold us do so too tightly and threaten to smother us.

Adults who care for babies need to find a balance between keeping the baby securely held and allowing the baby the freedom to stretch, kick and act upon the environment by exploring it. In western Europe until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and to this day in eastern Europe, babies were wrapped tightly from birth in swaddling sheets to form a rigid bundle and left tightly held, but not in human arms, for the first six to eight months of their life. The theory behind swaddling was, according to the historian Lloyd de Mause, ‘If it [the baby] were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified at the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl on all fours like an animal.’¹¹

Nowadays good mothering practice includes both tucking the baby securely in a cot or carrying him in a sling held firmly against the adult’s body and freeing the baby from all physical restraints in a warm, safe environment. These two kinds of condition are necessary for the baby, not just to encourage physical growth and health but to help him develop as a person who can tolerate the closeness of being in a secure group and the uncertainty of being an individual acting upon the world.

Unfortunately, some parents believe that they must teach the baby that they and not the baby are in charge, and so they do not respond to cries of hunger or distress. Some parents are too tired, or too busy, or too depressed to play with or talk to the baby. To learn, to develop our intelligence, we need to be able to act upon the world. Doing this, we develop the idea that ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’.

The idea ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’ is one of the possibilities that can be contained in an individual’s sense of being a person. If I asked you, ‘Who are you?’, you could list your gender, your age, nationality, religion, race, occupation and family connections. If I asked you, ‘What kind of a person are you?’, you could list your virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, alliances and enmities, your interests, wishes, needs, passions and beliefs, and all the things you know about yourself but find hard to put into mere words, but everything that you could tell me about yourself is made up of ideas. The sum total of these ideas is you, what you call I, me, myself. There is no little you sitting inside you, adding to and maintaining this sum total of ideas. You are your sum total of ideas, or what I call your meaning structure, because this sum total of ideas has a structure where every part is connected to every other part.

Your meaning structure is not a static structure but a feedback process in constant movement. Nowadays we are all familiar with feedback processes in objects like refrigerators and heating systems. Many refrigerators freeze and defrost themselves, and many heating systems change themselves with changes in outside temperature. There is no little engineer sitting in your refrigerator or heating system pressing the right buttons as needed. The process processes itself. It is the same with you. Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, calls the self ‘an integrative process’.¹² If you happen to speak Japanese or Korean you will have no difficulty in understanding this because, as Denis Noble said, ‘What these languages do is to emphasise the “doing-ness” of things, the processes that occur, that is, the verb rather than the subject who is the possessor of the being-ness or doing-ness.’ If Descartes had been Japanese or Korean he would not have said ‘cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘thinking, therefore being’.¹³

Thinking of yourself as an active process can be somewhat disturbing, but think about it a bit more. Isn’t that how you experience yourself, with thoughts that come and go, memories bobbing to the surface, along with ideas, images, wishes and needs? The feedback in your process operates all the time as you see the results of what you have done, and you modify what you do next time. The process which is you reflects upon itself and so it can change. If you had been born with a bit of your brain marked ME, a bit that just sits there unchanging, you would have been stuck with you for the rest of your life.

Feedback processes like those in our refrigerator and heating system and in us, our meaning structure which gives us a sense of being a person, do not operate in a vacuum. These three kinds of processes operate in relation to their environment. Deprive us of our environment, and our sense of being a person begins to disintegrate. Sensory-deprivation experiments, where an individual is deprived of sight, sound, movement, smell and touch, have shown that, under these conditions, people begin to lose the ability to distinguish what is around them from what is inside them, their thoughts and feelings. These become increasingly bizarre. There is no lack of evidence of what happens to babies and children who are deprived of loving care, while all gaolers know that the quickest way to break the toughest man is to put him in solitary confinement for an indefinite period.

Our meaning structure starts to take shape while we are still in the womb, where babies hear sounds and experience pleasure and pain. A newborn baby looks around at the world with intense interest, and so his meaning structure grows and changes. Our meaning structure grows out of the functioning of our brain, and so, like all living things, its first purpose is to stay alive.

‘Staying alive’ for a meaning structure means staying as one coherent whole. The aim of all the functions of the meaning structure is to keep the structure whole and not let it fall apart. If the meaning structure starts to fall apart the sense of being a person will start to dissipate. We experience this whenever we discover that we are mistaken in our judgement. Mislaying our house keys makes us anxious; discovering that the world is not what we thought it was can threaten to annihilate us as a person. Whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement - say, that the person we loved has abandoned or betrayed us, or that being a good person does not protect us from disaster - we feel ourselves to be shattering, crumbling, even disappearing, and with this comes the greatest terror, the fear that we shall be annihilated as a person.

Our sense of being a person is our meaning structure, and this meaning structure grows out of the functioning of the brain. While we are far from understanding just how brain and mind are linked, our increasing knowledge of how the brain functions shows that there can be no scientific doubt that the brain and mind are one.

Chapter Two Understanding the Nature of Fear
Brains and Minds

The brain is the most complex object known to us. Perhaps there are more complex objects in other parts of the universe but we have yet to encounter them. Over the last fifteen years, how scientists talk about the brain has changed dramatically. Two words have entered their language - neuroscience and neuroscientist. Anyone called a neuroscientist could be a neurologist, a physiologist, a biologist, a chemist, a psychologist, an electrical engineer or even a quantum physicist. People skilled in all these different bodies of knowledge are needed in the attempt to understand this most complex object.

There has been a subtle but important shift in how neuroscientists talk about the brain. They used to talk in terms of how the brain functions, in vision, hearing and the other senses - that is, in terms of perceiving the world. Now they talk, not in terms of the brain looking at reality, but in terms of how the brain creates a picture of reality. Our brain does not show us reality. It creates a picture of reality, and the kind of picture it creates depends on the kind of experiences we have each had. No two brains ever create exactly the same picture.

The importance of experience in what individual brains do has led neuroscientists to look more closely at what individuals do. Neuroscientists used to be concerned with simple actions, such as how we distinguish different shades of colour or two different pitches of sound. Now scientists are interested in complex behaviour. They have even ventured to discuss the problem of consciousness, something which up till recently had been banned from scientific discourse because it was ‘subjective’, and scientists should always be ‘objective’. This was why psychologists and psychiatrists studied what people did, not what people thought about what they did and why they did it.

The study of complex behaviour immediately raises the question of how humans and animals learn. Psychologists have always favoured very mechanical explanations. They described learning in terms of reward and punishment, and assumed that what they saw as a reward or a punishment would pertain for all their subjects, whether human or animal. They thought that for all rats a sweet substance would be a reward, sour a punishment. For all children a gold star would be a reward, being deprived of sweets a punishment. Rewards and punishments were seen as levers which propelled humans and animals in certain ways. It did not occur to these psychologists that a reward was a reward and a punishment a punishment only if the person or animal receiving them thought that this was so. Some children think that gold stars are rubbish, and some children do not like sweets. From his studies of how rats learn, Dr Anthony Dickenson, of Cambridge University, concluded that rats, though they are probably not self-aware, do operate with schemas - that is, ideas about what they want. These desires, said Dr Dickenson, have to be learnt. They are not innate mechanisms in the brain.¹

One of the excuses which some people use when they do not want to take responsibility for their actions is that they cannot help doing something because they have been ‘conditioned’ to act in this way. Such an excuse has no scientific basis. Whatever we do follows from a wish, a desire, a need, perhaps to possess or to avoid something. We may not be consciously aware of these wishes, needs and desires, but they are ideas which we have learnt from our experience.

Whenever we learn something, the structure of our brain changes - that is, the connections between some of the neurones in our brain change. Jack Challoner, in his fascinating book The Brain, explained:

The neurone is the fundamental unit of the brain. Neurones produce or conduct electrical impulses that are the basis of sensation, memory, thought and motor signals that make muscles work to produce movement. There are other types of cell present but they only give support and nourishment to these cellular workhorses. Neurones are like other cells in many ways: they have a nucleus and a membrane, for example. However, they differ in the way they function. A neurone has long fibres, called axons, coming from its cell body. Emanating from the axons or from the cell body itself are other, smaller fibres called dendrites. Neurones communicate with each other: electrical signals pass along the axon and dendrites, and the brain is constantly buzzing with these signals.²

These signals are actually both electrical and chemical, but just how they operate is not yet understood. This is why the statement, ‘Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain’ is a nonsense, or, as David Healy, Reader in Psychiatry, University of Wales, called it, ‘a myth’. He added in an endnote, ‘There are variations in serotonin levels and serotonergic receptors from person to person, and these may make us more or less sensitive to the effects of SSRIs [drugs] and even to stress. SSRIs do act on serotonin, but there is no evidence of a serotonergic abnormality in depression.’³ David Wallis, Professor of Physiology at Cardiff University, explained:

Classical theory has it that the brain uses chemicals - neurotransmitters - to convey ‘information’ between nerve cells. These chemical messages have either a positive or negative effect on the nerve cell receiving them, dictating whether or not it will become momentarily excited.

But over the past twenty years or so, we’ve discovered [that] chemical interactions between nerve cells are far more varied and subtle than we thought. A whole second level of communication exists, in which chemicals change the properties of nerve cells or synapses in ways other than simple fast excitation. For instance they might alter the protein in a nerve cell. These types of interaction, known as neuromodulation, are much harder to pin down than classical neurotransmission.⁴

We are born with almost as many neurones as we are ever going to have but all these neurones have a vast array of possible connections with each other. What changes and develops over time is the connections between the axons and dendrites of the neurones. Just what connections are made, and whether a connection remains and strengthens or disappears, depends on our experience - that is, on what we learn. As Susan Greenfield wrote in her book The Private Life of the Brain, ‘The degree of meaning that we covertly apportion to each person, object, event as we blunder around in the outside world will, in turn, be matched by a corresponding degree of neurone connections.’⁵

No two people ever have the same experience. Thus no two brains have identical patterns of connections between neurones. ‘It is the personalization of the brain,’ wrote Susan Greenfield, ‘crafted over the long years of childhood and continuing to evolve throughout life, that a unique pattern of connections between brain cells creates what might be called a “mind”.’ She went on, ‘My particular definition of mind will be that it is the seething morass of cell circuitry that has been configured by personal experiences and is constantly being updated as we live out each moment.’⁶

This seething morass of cell circuitry is the physiological basis of what we experience as our thoughts and feelings, our memories, our desires, needs and fears, our beliefs, attitudes, prejudices and opinions. All of these are ideas, some of which we can put into words, some of which we know only as visual, auditory or bodily images. Some of these ideas are conscious, some are not. All of these ideas form a picture of ourselves, our world and our life in its past, present and future, and give us our sense of being a person.

Very few of these ideas we can rightly hold with absolute certainty. We can be absolutely certain of the feelings we are experiencing in the here and now - provided we do not lie to ourselves. We can be sure that right now we are angry or right now we are sad, but if we feel that these emotions are unacceptable we can tell ourselves that we feel frightened when actually we are angry, or we can deny our sadness and pretend to ourselves and others that we are happy.

Doing this, we lose the only absolute certainty we can ever have. All the other ideas we have about what happened in our past and what will happen in our future, what the world is like, what other people think and feel, and what they do when we cannot see them, are guesses, theories about what is going on.

To live safely in the world we have to try to construct theories which represent a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually going on. Every time you drive a car or cross a busy street you have to form a reasonably accurate theory about the traffic on the road, or else you are likely to come to grief. When we daydream we can form the most fantastical theories, but if we want to turn our daydreams into reality we have to take account of what actually goes on in our world.

When our meaning structure is a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually happening, we feel secure. As soon as we discover that a part of our meaning structure is not reflecting sufficiently accurately what is going on, we feel anxious. Sometimes we can delineate precisely which bit of what is going on we could be wrong about. We can be anxious that we have not predicted accurately enough what questions will be on our forthcoming exam paper, or whether the people we are about to meet will like us. Sometimes we cannot name a reason for our anxiety because we suspect that some disaster is about to befall us but we do not know what it will be. Amplified, this kind of anxiety becomes angst or dread. When a great disaster does befall us and everything in our life becomes uncertain, we feel terror.

Whether anxiety, angst, dread or terror, all these states of fear are states of uncertainty, and uncertainty is what we cannot bear. Uncertain, we feel helpless, a prey to forces we cannot control. We want to be secure and in control.

Yet in fact there is very little over which we do have control. We can work hard and take sensible care of the money we earn, but we have no control over the worldwide financial forces which, amongst other things, determine exchange and interest rates and levels of employment.⁷ We can eat sensible food and exercise regularly, but our body can still betray us. We can try in all kinds of different ways to get other people to behave as we want them to behave, but they will still fail to meet our expectations. We can try to see ourselves and our world as clearly and accurately as possible, and yet we will still get it wrong. Things are rarely as they appear to be.

The only way to cope with all this uncertainty is to accept that it is so. This is the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu and Buddha. Lao Tzu advised:

True mastery can be gained

By letting things go their own way.

It can’t be gained by interfering.⁸

Suffering, Buddha taught, was our attempt to make something permanent in a world where nothing remains the same. Such wisdom can be hard to acquire when we are intent on surviving as a person - that is, on keeping our meaning structure whole.

If we understand that our sense of being a person is a meaning structure made up of ideas, then when events surprise us we know that we have to go through what can be a painful, unsettling period until our meaning structure can reorganise itself in a way more in keeping with what is actually going on. If we do not understand that we are our meaning structure, then when the unexpected happens we feel ourselves falling apart and are terrified lest we be annihilated as a person. Not understanding, we build up all kinds of defences to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves in danger of falling apart.

The tool we use in building these defences is a very cunning one and represents one of the functions of the meaning structure. It is the tool of pride. How pride functions has interested me for quite a long time.

By the late seventies, through listening carefully to what depressed people were telling me, I realised that the essence of depression was the sense of being alone in some kind of prison where the walls were as impenetrable as they were invisible. I could see that the depressed person had certain attitudes or beliefs which served to cut him or her off from other people and from everything that makes life worth living. These attitudes and beliefs preceded the person’s depression, and they provided the person with all the building blocks necessary to build the prison of depression. I wrote about this in my first book, which is now called Choosing Not Losing.⁹ I came to realize that the many and various beliefs which depressed people held could be summarised as six attitudes which, if held as absolute, unquestionable truths, would create the prison of depression. These beliefs were:

1 No matter how good and nice I appear to be, I am really bad, evil, valueless, unacceptable to myself and other people.

2 Other people are such that I must fear, hate and envy them.

3 Life is terrible and death is worse.

4 Only bad things have happened to me in the past and only bad things will happen to me in the future.

5 It is wrong to get angry.

6 I must never forgive anyone, least of all myself.¹⁰

These are not bizarre, idiosyncratic beliefs but are held at least in part by many members of every society, and are often taught by parents to children. They are pessimistic beliefs, but not unreasonable because life is far from easy. However, it seemed to me at first that it could be possible to help a depressed person moderate these beliefs, to be less harsh on themselves and to find it easier to take other people on trust. However, this proved not to be the case. Depressed people, I found, even though they were suffering dreadfully, resisted any suggestion that they might change their beliefs because such a change meant going from certainty to uncertainty. Indeed, they took pride in these beliefs, even though they caused them to suffer. I wrote: