LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One The Nature of Fear

      Fear comes to us in many guises. It can come as a shiver in the delight of anticipation; or as the drenching, overwhelming, annihilating terror known by the inadequate names of existential anxiety or dread. It can come suddenly, life-savingly, in situations of danger, when it is known purely as fear; or it can gnaw away endlessly with little apparent cause, and we call it anxiety; or it can come with a sense of having the eyes of the world upon us when we are naked and alone, and we call it shame; or it can loom darkly, threatening punishment, and we call it guilt.

      Fear, like death, is the great unmentionable. We maintain a conspiracy of silence so as to pretend we are not afraid. In the aftermath of great physical danger or terrible disaster everyone claims that everyone was brave and no one panicked. In 1985, when I was living in Sheffield and writing this book, at nearby Manchester airport a British Airways plane loaded with holidaymakers caught fire as it was about to take off. Those passengers who survived spoke of terror and panic and the rush for the exits as smoke filled the rear of the plane, but they soon ceased to be reported in the newspapers as other people, important people who were not aboard the plane, made their statements commending the passengers for their bravery. These important people would have had us believe that everyone aboard that plane acted with courage and decorum. Yet would not anyone, trapped in the narrow space of a crowded plane, watching the flames and breathing the acrid smoke, feel afraid and try desperately to escape?

      Sixteen years on and another, even more immense, tragedy occurred in New York on 11 September 2001. Across the world millions of people watched the television pictures of these events that day and over the next few days. We saw how again fear became the great unmentionable. When the two planes flew into the World Trade Center and the buildings collapsed, television crews filmed and interviewed some of the people who had escaped death. These people showed their fear and spoke about it, and such interviews were repeated in news bulletins later that day and evening, but by the next day such interviews had disappeared from our television screens. They were replaced by stories about the bravery of the firefighters and other rescue workers. The courage of the Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, was praised, as was the courage of Americans generally. By then Americans had turned to patriotism and religion. The symbol of the USA, the Stars and Stripes, became a badge of courage and determination, while churches, synagogues and mosques were overflowing with worshippers. Americans were still afraid, very afraid, but this fear could not be mentioned.

      The memory of such fear can stay with us for the rest of our lives, leaving us unable to enter any place which will remind us of our fear, or returning in dreams of terror when we find ourselves re-enacting, helplessly, the scenes where we once successfully escaped destruction. Some people, to give themselves freedom to go and do what they wish, put themselves through the painful process of therapy, in the hope that relearning a skill or talking about the events will remove the fear, and with that the shame of being afraid. Most people, however, adapt their lives to avoid certain situations and activities, by never entering an enclosed space or flying again, or they fog their sleeping brains with drugs to blot out dreams, or become what is known as ‘a light sleeper’, someone who is often awake while others sleep. They invent all sorts of excuses for not doing certain things - proneness to illness, or allergies, logical reasons for following one course of action rather than another - all to hide the fact that they are afraid. They must do this because they know, correctly, that to be afraid is to be scorned.

      The fear we feel when faced with an external danger - fire or flood or a terrorist bomb - is bad enough, but what is far, far worse is the fear we feel when the danger is inside us. When the danger is outside us we know that at least some people will understand how we feel, but when the danger is inside us, when we live our lives in a sweat of anxiety, shame and guilt, we find ourselves in the greater peril that if we tell other people about our fear they will think that we are weak, or, worse, mad. So we take drugs to drown our fear and maintain the conspiracy of silence.

      Edith was a very good woman who had devoted her life to others. She often acted as chauffeur for one of my clients, and while this client was talking to me Edith would visit some of the elderly patients in the hospital. One day she phoned me and asked whether, when she came the next day, she could have a quick word with me. I agreed, and so the next day she came into my room, apologizing for taking up my time and sitting nervously on the edge of her chair. What she wanted to know was whether she was going mad. The evidence that she might be was that she would often wake at 2 a.m. and lie worrying. The fear that pervaded her being manifested itself as the fear that no one would look after her when she was old. What if she became senile and incontinent, like the old women she visited on the psychiatric ward? She had done enough nursing to know that I could not truthfully say that her old age would not bring indignities and inadequacies, but there is one truth I could tell her.

      Waking in the early hours of the morning in a sweat of terror is an extremely common experience. All across the country people are experiencing that terrible loneliness of being. They have woken suddenly to the greatest uncertainty a human being can know. There is no shape or structure to hold them. They are falling, dissolving; totally, paralysingly helpless without hope of recovery or of rescue. Sickening, powerful forces clutch at their hearts and stomachs. They gasp for breath as wave after wave of terror sweeps over them.

      We all knew such terror when, as small children, we found ourselves in a situation which filled us with pain and helpless rage. We screamed in fear and in the hope that our good parents would rescue and comfort us. Now grown up, we know the extent of our loneliness and helplessness. Some of us wake, like Edith, completely alone. Some of us have another form sharing our bed, but it is effectively insensate, a log refusing to acknowledge our misery. Others of us, more fortunate, share our bed with a kindly person who switches on the light, makes us a cup of tea, and holds us close. Such love can make our terror recede like the tide, but, like the tide, it can return, and there is no good parent there to pick us up and cuddle us and assure us that the world is a safe place and there is no reason to be afraid. We are grown up now, and, try as we might to deny it, we know the loneliness of being. We long for good parents who will rescue and love us, but we know that there are no good parents and, while we might believe in God the Father, in these times of terror He is far away.

      For some people the waves of terror and the sense of annihilation last for many minutes. Some people move very quickly to turn the terror into all kinds of manageable worries - manageable not because the worries are about problems which can be solved but because they turn a nameless terror into a named anxiety. Thoughts like ‘Who will look after me when I get old?’, ‘I can’t manage the tasks I have to do at work today’, ‘The lump on my groin is certain to be cancer’, ‘If my daughter goes to that school she’ll get mixed up in drugs’, ‘I won’t be able to meet this month’s bills’, ‘I should have done more for my parents before they died’ are indeed terrible, but they give a sense of structure and have a common, everyday meaning. With these common, everyday meanings we can pretend that the terror we felt did not happen, and that we belong to the everyday world.

      However, not everyone can do this. For some people, lying there in the dark, the terror goes on and on. When Edith described to me how this happened to her she said, ‘It gets so bad I think I shall run outside the house in my nightie and stand in the middle of the road so I’ll get run over and that’ll stop it.’

      ‘Not

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