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The Fear Paradox. Frank Faranda
Читать онлайн.Название The Fear Paradox
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781642500585
Автор произведения Frank Faranda
Издательство Ingram
Without much difficulty, we can see something of April’s struggle in these infants: when the world is too threatening, retreat is the only answer. And if retreat is physically impossible, then isn’t it amazing that our nervous systems found a way to retreat while remaining physically present? Of course, these infants did not fare as well as April. Extreme forms of deprivation, such as these infants experienced, are hard to come back from. But what is similar is that, beginning in the first moments of life, our well-being is in the hands of others. And if those others do not handle us with love and care, we suffer deeply. Ours is a dependence from which there is no safe retreat.
One of the marvels of childhood development is the way in which children are able to remain aligned with their caregivers, no matter what happens to them. Not only are we biologically programmed to maintain physical proximity to our caregivers, an aspect of what we call “attachment,” but human attachment also psychologically programs us to “love and trust” our parents. When “bad” things happen to us as children at the hands of a parent, it is not the parent who gets the blame. Children have a simple logic: “If I am good, I get the candy, and if I don’t get it, I must be bad.” Ronald Fairbairn, an early psychoanalyst following Spitz, called this the moral defense.10 The parent is viewed by the child as morally superior. If actions of the parent cause pain to the child, or if the child fails to receive what they need, the child places blame for this, not on the parent, but on themselves. “It must be what I deserve.” In this way, the child is able to maintain a better connection to the caregiver. If they take the badness into themselves, then the parent is preserved as good, and this allows the child to stay more easily connected. It’s hard to love a bad parent. It is easier to be bad and love a good one.
What I want to highlight here is that we have evolved ways to stay connected even when a parent is highly dysfunctional. This is both amazing, from an evolutionary engineering standpoint, and extremely sad, from a human point of view. Too often, those who should be protecting us become those who threaten us most; a childhood that is designed to be full of play becomes a perfect petri dish for the cultivation of fear.
Playing Matters
Play, fear, and vitality are meaningfully interwoven within the animal world. Research on species as diverse as tortoises and rats indicates that, when play is absent from the life of an animal, well-being becomes compromised.11 For human beings, there are further indications that absent or constricted play is associated with higher levels of psychological dysfunction.12 And in considering the causes of constricted play, fear emerges as the primary culprit.
In one series of studies,13 researchers looked at the backgrounds of men who were incarcerated for homicide. Two findings stand out. In the homicidal group, there was significantly more physical abuse than in the control group—and with abuse comes fear. What is even more surprising, however, is that the homicidal group also had a startling absence of play reported in their childhoods.
The lead researcher on this study, Stuart Brown, later became aware of the work of Jane Goodall and contacted her to share his work. He had become intrigued by the 1976 report on Passion and Pom, the mother and daughter chimpanzee duo who systematically and cooperatively murdered and cannibalized infant chimpanzees in their community. Jane Goodall related to him that Passion and Pom had both experienced ineffectual mothering and exhibited profound distortions in their play as juveniles.14
In thinking about these curious findings, we need to be as parsimonious as possible. The simple existence of a correlation between the absence of play and murderous tendencies does not in any way prove that they are causally linked. But, for our purposes here, it is meaningful to consider the importance of play in mammalian life, and further, to wonder about the ways in which play is part of a much larger symphony in which we negotiate our relationship to fear.
Play and Risk
For most juvenile animals, play takes shape primarily in the form of rough-and-tumble. For human beings, rough-and-tumble is just one part of a wider spectrum of play that includes object play, symbolic/fantasy play, rough-and-tumble, and games with rules.15 Risky play, related to rough-and-tumble, is generally identified as any play that brings the participant within a meaningful distance of danger. This is the type of experience I described in the introduction, riding waves with my son. It is often divided up into play with heights, play in proximity to dangerous objects, and play with speed.16 We climb a tree to the thinnest branch that can hold us, walk along the edge of a narrow ledge, play with fire, or ride our bikes as fast as we can down a hill and then take our hands off the handlebars.
Research on this form of play has been important in understanding how to keep children safe and define policy. Recent trends have moved our families and communities toward a dramatic reduction in what we view as potential risk for children. Much of this has to do with increased supervision, and as we all know from our own childhoods, increased supervision means decreased fun. But the increased safety is also a function of a reinvention of outdoor play equipment, replacing the hard impact of metal and concrete from the past with the padding of a softer landing.
Recent research by Scott Cook of the University of Missouri looked not just at what children do in risky play, but also at what they feel.17 In this research, risky play is not just the result of inadequate risk assessment, attention-seeking, or an impulse for self-harm. It is a developmental experience of exhilaration that has emotional and biological validity for the developing child. Supporting this is the neurodevelopmental research on adolescence that has found very particular areas of brain development that are promoted by risk-seeking behavior.18
One element that stands out in research on risky play is that there is an edge between safety and danger that best promotes exhilaration. As we might imagine with my son, when he turned and saw a wave forming that was far bigger than the six we had ridden previously, he froze. The balance between safety and danger had been crossed. Fear held him, and he braced himself. Unfortunately, he was no match for the strength of the wave. The only way to survive that wave was to playfully surrender to it.
Fear has a constrictive effect on play, and yet dangerous play, play on the edge of fear, brings with it an evolutionary derivative of joy.19 Has this strange evolutionary cocktail been mixed to help us learn how to more easily approach fear? Is it an effort to calm our inherited terror by giving us a sense of mastery over fear? Or is it possibly a joy that comes when freedom from fear becomes possible?
A clue to this connection lies with our animal relatives and their use of rough-and-tumble play. Rough-and-tumble is the rolling, wrestling, and pinning that we see in animals from mice to puppies to human beings. Early understandings of play such as this stressed its value as an educative tool. This is the model of play fighting as preparation for real fighting. Today, understandings of play fighting center on notions of relational learning.20 What stands out in these theories is the idea that, through rough-and-tumble play, animals learn to adapt to unpredictable social circumstances with flexibility—an education in assuming varying social roles. And in these changing roles, stress and fear are managed within non-threatening situations. Additionally, these social roles pivot on the axis of social dominance. In rough-and-tumble play, juveniles learn to assume both submissive and dominant positions.21
It is this last element that I believe is most important for us in understanding the connection between risky play and fear. There appears to be something quite meaningful in our relationship to submission—so important, perhaps, that these behaviors of play in the realm of dominance and submission have become hardwired into the DNA of mammals, including us. And, as we will come to learn, our fear of being dominated by another of our species is so terrifying to us that we will do anything to avoid it.
As many of you might be aware, animals held in captivity are prone to develop behaviors called stereotypies. These are repetitive movements without apparent function or purpose. Examples range from the pacing of a large cat in a relatively small enclosure to the chewing behaviors of a horse on the wood of his stall. Zoo personnel have come to use these behaviors as markers to identify situations in which animals might