Putting Fear into Perspective

Don Brandes

How many of you have seen a tarantula spider before?  This my friend Terry the Tarantula.  I brought him along today because of the irrational level of fear which many people experience when they see spiders - aracnophobia. 

Now I don’t want Terry to get loose and start running around here while I talking, so I going ask Dave to hold him for me during my presentation.  Actually, I think I’ll just put the lttle guy back in his box for safety, his safety that is.  (Put Terry in a box.)

Certain types of creatures can generate much more fear than others.  In that way, spiders are in a select group along with such beloved rascals as snakes and rats. 

Or, darkness.  There is one of our biggest bugaboos, darkness.  You can be in a very familiar place and know you are totally safe there, your own home even, but when the lights go out, it can suddenly become threatening, especially if you are alone.

I once had occasion to trace out some electrical wiring in this building.  The wire went from the closet back here where the breaker box is, down through the floor and under the stage.  So, I went to the very back of the building where there is a fairly high crawl space, about four feet or so. 

There is a bunch of junk piled in there, old lumber, paint cans, you name it.  You don’t know what might crawl out from under that stuff or drop down your neck from the ceiling.  I shined my flash light through there and saw a hole in a cement block wall about 15 feet away, boarded up plywood. 

I had to crawl over the debris, through darkness with my flash light to get in there.  When I got there, I couldn’t get the plywood off to crawl through hole, somewhat to my relief, but I was able to push one corner of it out enough to shine my light through and find the wire under the stage back here. 

When you cast a light around in the dark, of course, the shadows move and dart around and you can’t tell if it is just shadows or there is something really out there moving.

And what are those two little red spots that reflect back at you when you shine the light in a certain place?  Rat’s eyes?  Imagine being down in that crawl space under this stage with rats scampering around you in the dark, maybe crawling up your pants leg.

So, what are YOU afraid of?  Spiders?  Rats?  Dark places?  High places?  Failure?  Success? Getting up in front of a group of people?  Dealing with people in general?  Y2K? 

Fear, at various levels, motivates us to do many things or to refrain from doing them.  Sometimes our fears are well grounded in the recognition of real danger.  Often, though, our fears are irrational and we over-react to something that can cause us little or no harm.

A moderate amount of fear can motivate us to take actions to prevent something bad from happening.  Or it can enhance the excitement of a recreational activity.  As I pointed out in a talk here last winter, a low level of fear keys you up and raises your awareness and contributes to pleasant excitement at times.

Higher levels of fear though may cause someone to panic and run or immobilize them so they can’t react to the perceived danger at all.  Or more often, in our day-to-day lives, it may simply prevents us from doing things that we would like to do or causes us pass up valuable opportunities when there may actually be no valid reason to do so.

So, let’s take a look at our fears.  Think of something that scares or worries you.  Now think about how you usually deal with things that scare or worry you.  What do you do?  What can you do?  What are your options.

You can run.   Sometimes that’s the only thing to do.  There’s flash flood coming!  Head for high ground.  More often though, we are retreating from personal challenges or interpersonal situations.  We may let valuable opportunities pass by because we are afraid to take advantage of them.  We may be scared of failure.  We may simply be scared of trying something new and unknown.

So what other alternatives do we have?  You can face the perceived danger.   Facing fear often is pictured at toughing it out in spite your feelings.  Yes, you are scared of something but you do the action or face the object of your fear anyway.

We often think of these two choices, running away or toughing out a confrontation, as the only alternatives, but that is not true.

Facing fear does not necessarily mean making yourself directly confront a horrifying situation.  In some instances it can mean recognizing a danger that you cannot overcome and retreating in a careful, rationale manner rather than just running in panic. Or, it can mean learning how to deal with situations that you can potentially handle.  Or, it can mean learning how to overcome fear itself.

One way to deal with fear is by progressive desensitization.  Psychologists use this technique to treat patients with phobias.  But it is not restricted to those circumstances.  In fact, it is pervasive in our lives and we experience it naturally.  We all have “gotten used to” things that initially caused us apprehension.  The way we do this is to start with small challenges and work our way to apparently more difficult or threatening situations.  If we work up to them slowly, by the time we get to those more threatening situations we find that they aren’t really more threatening when we have desensitized ourselves to them.

This happens naturally with aging and the accumulation of experience.  The more challenges you have met in the past, the bigger something new has to be to intimidate you later.

I had Dave mention in my introduction that I had done things like spelunking and mountain climbing so I could incorporate them into an example and relate it to your own experience.  From time to time many of you probably have seen documentaries of climbing expeditions on TV.  You probably saw someone hanging by his fingernails from the side of a rock face and thought, “you won’t catch me doing that.”  You don’t think of yourself as a coward for thinking that.  You probably consider yourself to be sensible and rationale and the other guy to be a fool.  You perceive an unacceptable danger and make a rational judgment that you would not expose yourself to it.

However, if you objectively examine things that you do, many of you will find that you routinely do something much more dangerous than hanging off the side of a mountain.  Has anybody here ever drive on an urban expressway? 

You put your life in the hands of any other driver that gets near you every time you get on the road.  When you drive through Jacksonville on I-95 or 295 you are surrounded by people driving 70 mph or so who don’t realize what poor drivers they are and how little control they have of their cars. 

But you are used to driving on the expressway.  It is a routine part of urban life.  It can be scary for a new driver but after a while it becomes normal.  You get so used to it that you just go out there and don’t even think about the dangers after a while.

I think that our experience with driving cars in traffic shows that we can desensitize to some rather serious dangers.  However, it also shows that desensitization does not necessarily reduce the danger.  To some extent it does reduce danger because you are likely to remain calm and not panic when faced with a hazardous situation.  On the other hand, it can increase the danger by making you less attentive to caution, as witness the many stupid things people do on the road.

When I compare mountain climbing to driving on an urban expressway, climbing looks pretty safe.  When I used to climb, I always knew that the other two guys on the rope were competent people who knew what they were doing and were very safety conscious.  If I fell into a crevasse, I knew how to claw my way back up the ice.  If I were injured or in a position where I could not do that, I knew that my companions knew how to get me out of there and had all the equipment they would need to do it.  I knew that the rope that tied us together was a top quality climbing line that was protected like a baby and thoroughly inspected for damage or any possible weak point before the climb. 

When I get out on the highway, I don’t know if the brakes on the car behind me will work even it the idiot who is tailgating me reacts in time.

My mountain climbing example actually has two parts to it.  Not only does one work up gradually to greater and greater challenges by desensitizing but also by taking measures to minimize the danger, be it a physical hazard or simply the embarrassment of failing at something.  Preparation is important.  You not only make sure of your equipment but you practice and develop your skills and accumulate knowledge. 

This principle can apply to our personal challenges as well.  If fear keeps us from facing or trying something, we can reduce our fear level and the possibility of negative consequences by preparing ourselves to meet the challenge.  Preparation goes beyond desensitization because it reduces both the perceived and actual danger of failure or whatever.

This is all assuming there is even a real danger at all.  In many instances our fears of personal challenges and interpersonal situations are not well grounded and there isn’t any real danger.   You are only scared of failure or someone else’s negative reaction to you.

Under those circumstances, maybe we should take a more direct approach and address fear itself, rather than the objects of our fears. We actually can learn to ignore or transcend fear.  To some extent, this happens with age and the accumulation of experience anyway.  The more crap you have been through, the less there is left to intimidate you.

But with some mental discipline and practice we also can learn to understand fear and the subsequent reactions it causes within us.  We can learn to observe when we are acting irrationally and practice changing our reactions so we don’t retreat when there is no point to it.

Think again about the things that scare you. Think about something you shy away from because of uneasiness, apprehension, or even an outright palpitating fear. Something legal too.  I don’t want to help you overcome your fear of holding up convenience stores.

When you are scared of something, first try to objectively determine whether your fear is justified.  Ask yourself two questions:

1.  What is most likely to happen if you confront the object or your fear and fail?

2.  What is the worst thing that can happen if you fail? 

In most instances, the answers to both questions are of very little consequence.  Very often there is no real repercussion for failing at the things that we routinely avoid.  We may be embarrassed or have our feelings hurt.  But that goes away and the experience we gained prepares us to approach the same type of situation again in the future with greater likelihood of success.