26th January 2014 by Paul Craft
So I was born afraid of being dropped and afraid of hunger; and I learnt to be afraid of a lot more things when I was growing up. Not to mention my Father's voice, or the sound of the front door being opened, or the creaking of floorboards outside my bedroom door. But these are all obvious examples of events that could precipitate a fearful response. And if I said that overeating is a fear response, that jealousy, envy and addiction are also fear responses, would you think that a step too far?
The truth is that fear, the antithesis of love, is the root cause for all suffering. And by suffering what I mean is, every event that causes you to act out a negative emotional response, in whatever way is, a direct result of the fight or flight (or freeze) response. Either it is the initial event, or it is a conditioned response to an initial event. For example, you are a small child, you hear 'that' raised voice and naturally you react, you flinch or pull back. There is no filter for the ears, the noise hits your brain without warning and, some innate ability triggers the adrenal response and the event is stored; deposited in a physiological repository for immediate and future use. But did you know that the brain deals with threats in a very simple way, and not in an evolutionary way. By that I mean that evolution has not appeared to change our response. In the very old part of the brain, the neocortex, a seemingly threatening new event is processed. The repository is checked and if needed, direction is provided; more adrenalin, increase the heart rate, more oxygen (breath rapidly and shallow), in other words, prepare for action!
Of course this happens automatically without any rational or conscious thought. However, the initial response does require some conscious action. When the event stretches or overloads the conscious process, the neocortex intervenes, and as this is an unconscious action there is a momentary pause in cognitive functioning, whilst the risk is assessed and a course for survival is decided upon. There is an actual time delay of about 500 milliseconds as this occurs but the brain masks this dip in time (this is the dip that hypnotists can exploit in order to access the unconscious). Any new event can incite activity in this way: an incomplete sentence or grammatical blunder, a sudden physical or emotional jolt, the strange, the extraordinary, the unusual....... The point (at last) is that as soon as we are faced with any potential threat, our instinct to survive, which has surely made us the most dominant and intelligent species on the planet, automatically responds without prompting or control and proceeds to dictate all similar behaviour from that point on.
In his extraordinarily book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin described an experiment with a snake he performed more than a hundred years ago that shows the power of FEAR.
"I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced."
This shows how rational thought cannot prevent a fearful response to an innate fear. Evolution has somehow hard-coded some responses into our DNA and this would account for many obvious fears, but not why phobias are so easily developed. But what of eating, drinking, and sexual activity all performed to excess? How are these responses related to fear? Why is a 60 stone woman more afraid of where her next meal will come from than she is afraid of dying? Why is her carer more afraid of not supporting the habit than she is afraid of contributing to the death of another human being? Why do some people drink until they drop and then seemingly bounce straight back up again only to drink until they drop some more? Why do we continually and habitually follow destructive patterns of behaviour? We seem incapable of acting in a rational manner, bound more by rules of 'civilised society' than any survivalist approach to life or reality. And therein lies the problem! This human species has so little to seriously threaten its existence that it creates fear from inactivity, fear from security, fear from plenty, fear from the idea of fulfilment and, it creates fear from the idea of happiness and contentment.
Depression, anxiety, insomnia, dysfunction, addiction, poor self-esteem, low confidence, obesity, phobia, OCD, ad infinitum. Socially constructed problems, no less real because of it, but nonetheless, a result of civilisation, and not a result of evolution. Fear is at the heart of many emotional issues, dare I say it, 'all emotional' issues. Understanding fear and its relationship to human suffering is a central theme to my practise as a Coach and Hypnotherapist. Fear presents itself in many ways, but for me the most obvious is pain, either emotional or physical, and ultimately pain relief, and to some extent understanding, can provide the best relief and a return to the much coveted 'normal' functioning.
