I’ve written recently on A Lust for Life about defence mechanisms that help us cope with stressful situations that sometimes effect or even seem to “control” our behaviour. I’d like now to explore that a little further and dig a little deeper into fear and why it can sometimes affect our ego-state to the extent that we cease to behave like adults at all.
This is a phenomenon that affects everyone and, if you look around you, you will see it everywhere. You don’t have to look outside; open your phone, go to almost any website that allows comments and you will see it there too. I’m writing this on the day of Trump’s election to the Whitehouse and it seems like the culture is thick with howls of rage, fear, triumph and confusion.
It comes as no surprise; any of us who has followed the news recently has been witness to a kind of circus of infantile behaviour where name-calling, lying and facile bragging have been common currency. We have seen macho posturing so puerile we cringe. The polarisation has been palpable with a Good vs. Evil narrative emerging on both sides. Social media is a hot bed of the same – an “Us vs. Them” mentality often pervades in an environment where it sometimes feels like who can shout the loudest is the winner. So what’s going on here? Can we start to understand this by looking inward rather than out?
I mentioned infantile behaviour above and I mean it literally – consider the classic toddler in a supermarket tantrum scenario. The child overwhelmed by tiredness, frustration, anger or whatever just collapses – they literally fall to the floor and their tolerance of emotion falls away too. Screaming, kicking and crying ensue. Now consider the less enlightened parts of the internet where opposing opinions are met with a similar collapse; entrenched positions are taken, names are called, rage is expressed. Listening stops entirely. The similarities are not coincidental. What is happening in both cases is that tolerance is being overwhelmed and a system of fear is taking over (this happens in infancy when our sense of self is being threatened).
When our fear system kicks in certain things can start to happen that are intended to self-defend and return us to our regular more secure state of mind, some of these I discussed in my last article. However, in infancy, our self-defences are easily overwhelmed and we simply slip into the kind of dominant/submissive behaviour that is associated with fear. We also begin to split the bad from the good – it is easier to deal with black and white when we are afraid. It’s what leads us to disconnect from very frightening emotions and parcel them away inside of ourselves and call them “demons” or similar. It’s my belief that this plays into the polarisation of political debate recently – look at the “Us v Them”, “Good v Bad” vitriol on both sides of Brexit and the recent American election. It starts to feel like everyone is shouting and nobody is hearing. Our fear is reducing us to the children we no longer are.
We can see it also in the urge to “no-platform” those who hold views that are not palatable to us; only when we are feeling great fear can we react as peevishly as this. If a view is wrong-headed, abhorrent or threatening then we as adults can trust each other to demonstrate that, to discuss it and bring it out into the light. We as children simply collapse.
What is to learn from any of this from a personal point of view? The good news is that we all do this; it’s actually a massively unifying phenomenon. Think about your own life recently and it’s likely that you can think of a few examples when you basically had a tantrum. I know that I can and I’m probably missing a few. Perhaps you were in the car feeling the shocking injustice of being behind someone going slowly or you had just been asked to do something you really, really didn’t want to do and you sort of freaked out before you knew what was happening (ugh, I think I just remembered some more). This was your fear system taking over and you were regressed by it; you lost the tolerance you normally have and you acted out of fear. Sure, things righted themselves pretty quickly and you maybe even had a bit of a laugh about it later but you had a glimpse right back into your past – DO NOT STAY THERE!
The truth is that a state of fear in tandem with a regressed ego state is a very powerless place to be. It feels powerless and it is powerless. Take back that power and return to your adult self – step back. Learn to “mentalise” the situation with some questions to yourself:
- What is really going on here?
- How am I behaving, is it reasonable?
- Do I really think what I am about to say/ what I just said?
- Do I really want to do what I am about to do/ what I just did?
This gives a space in which to come back to yourself and behave the way you really want to. It’s hard, it takes lots of practise and you will fail, often. You’ll have to relearn it again and again. When you think about it though, you are giving yourself much more power over your own environment – a power to make your world a better, gentler, more compassionate place for you and the people around you. The power to listen and to be heard. If recent events tell us anything, they tell us the importance of that.
More information about David’s work via davidfoottherapy.com and find him on Twitter @DavidFoot5
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