simont | ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’

Suppose you have a general tendency to be irrationally terrified of a particular class of thing. Suppose a new specific example of such a thing appears on the horizon.

Is it healthy, I wonder, to avoid even looking at it for fear that you'll be terrified out of your wits? It doesn't sound healthy on the face of it; but it occurs to me that it has one rather encouraging implication, which is that at least at a conscious level you think being reduced to a gibbering jelly for a week at a time by your unreasoning terror is actually more worrying than the thing itself. Which is sort of good news in terms of how bad your unreasoning terror actually is – if it can't override your perfectly reasonable dread of things you've actually had happen to you before, it can't be all that bad.

Of course, on the minus side it might be that the thing turns out to not be nearly as scary as you'd thought, and that you might spend some time failing to find this out in the course of avoiding hearing anything about it. Then you feel silly…

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Er.. wah. Confused now. You'll have to explain this to me with diagrams if you want my commentary..

Don't tempt me. I'm bored enough as it is this afternoon; if you give me the slightest excuse to draw pictures of clouds with arrows between them in the Gimp, I'll never get any work done :-)

PNG! PNG! *malicious giggle*

When reading this, I was trying to instantiate it for myself using spiders as the class of things. I sort of see what you mean, but perhaps I picked a poor instantiation. I was hard put to imagine a new instance of this class that I might encounter, until I remembered a picture I once saw in the Radio Times of a deep-sea horror they'd dredged up from the Marianas Trench or somewhere - a ten-legged thing about two feet across that looked more like a spider than a spider does, IYSWIM - it certainly evoked my arachnophobia to a remarkable extent, so that I was afraid of the Radio Times itself for some time :-) I suppose in light of that, I might well avoid encounters with potentially-spiderish things in future, for fear of being frightened of them! Is that what you meant?

That sort of thing, I suppose. Perhaps a better spider-related analogy might be: suppose you're terrified of poisonous spiders, and you see a newspaper article talking about a species of spider previously unknown to the UK which has been coming in from abroad in (say) fruit shipments. Now if you're really concerned about poisonous spiders, you'd want to read about this thing so you know how to recognise and avoid one if you see it; but if you avoid the news reports so as not to be scared by them, it sort of implies that you're more concerned with not being scared than you are with (as you might naively expect) not being lethally bitten.

Then, of course, after a month or so someone manages to get through to you that this new species of spider isn't poisonous at all, and you feel silly because you could perfectly well have found that out for yourself...

Meta-fear, you mean? That has the possibility for a nasty feedback loop. Fear the meta-fear!

I often find that things aren't as bad as I thought they might be. I also find that I can generally manage my fears through frequently facing them - for instance, I spend time in the dark alone now and again and that keeps that fear at bay, and recently I spent some Hours of Terror gingerly hiking some miles along mountain passes as old ladies jogged by in apparent ignorance of the precipice that would claim them if they put a foot wrong.

Is there any way you experience less scary things to build up to facing the Big Scary Thing? It's by this sort of thing - for instance, being near little, slow spiders to help learn to be able to face big, fast spiders - that has enabled me to be relatively sure of not reacting too badly.

But, then again, I am not particularly worried by things like dying: I figure it's an occupational hazard of being alive that I have limited control over. For instance, if I saw ghosts or aliens or something, I'd be scared, and open to the possibility that I may not survive unscathed, but I would still figure that I probably can't escape anyway so what the hell so I may as well hunt for the silver lining. Maybe I'm just unusually lucky in that respect.

Good luck, anyway.

In this case its more nausea (and perhaps the odd nightmare or daymare) but I've decided to avoid looking at unpleasant things such as one might find at rotten.com. That and certain other websites are on my personal aversion list.

I don't think it's advisable to become avoidant. I have an old entry on the subject, that I can't find, concerning a traumatic episode on a motorbike. ISTR, though, that you came to the same conclusion yourself in an entry shortly after that.

My friend uses this sort of technique with her son and it works wonders. You can probably do something similar as an adult to rationalise fears and work through them productively.

Sean: Mummy I'm scared to go to bed - a spider might be in it and bite me.
Mum: Have you ever had a spider in your bed?
Sean: No.
Mum: Have you ever had a spider in your room?
Sean: Yes.
Mum: How would you feel about having a spider in your room?
Sean: I'd be scared it might chase me.
Mum: A spider is a tiny little thing and you are a lot bigger. Do you think the spider would
be more likely to chase you or run away and hide from you because it was scared of you?
Sean: How do spiders make webs? (fear is now completely forgotten and he's moved on to
interest intead).

There are some really good books out there too - it's worth having a look.

‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’

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