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“I should have gone over and said hello.” But he didn’t. Bill was an undergraduate in college who sat across from me, closed his eyes, tilted his head back and sighed. He had wanted to say hello to that girl for so long, but blew his chance. As a psychiatrist I hear similar stories all too often. Lost opportunities. Ruminations and what-ifs? If only I had said hello. If only I had gone over. If only I hadn’t been so scared.
This fear thing is out of control, but no need to be afraid!
Fear is an emotion that has been around for hundreds of millions of years, if not longer. It’s just that now we have some words for it, and can describe its function: Fear is a warning. We become afraid when we believe that something is threatening us. Fear is normal and nothing to be afraid of.
Our brain is fine-tuned to perceive danger. It does so reflexively. In an instant we determine if we are strong enough to stand our ground or approach the danger and drive it off. If we think we are strong enough we activate anger, fight, approaching the offending agent with the intent to defend ourselves. We may take some time to calculate our method of attack, becoming more strategic.
If in that reflexive assessment of danger, however, we do not think we are strong enough to win, we activate fear, flight, designed to get us to run away. Fear has to happen instantaneously or it is no good to us. Any longer and we may already be eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. Later we can reflect if there was danger at all. It did you better if you ran and weren’t right about the danger, than stayed and were wrong. If you got it wrong you were lunch! This fear reflex remains in our tool-box of survival strategies, enabling us to run away from saber-tooth tigers and live another day.
The problem is our fear reflex can turn on when we just think about saber-tooth tigers. Bill, without realizing it, was afraid to go over to the girl-of-interest because he had activated his fear reflex. “Wait a minute,” he said to me. You mean I thought she was going to eat me? Have me for lunch?”
“What were you afraid she would do?” I asked in my most shrinky kind of voice.
Without hesitation Bill responded, “Based on Freudian psychoanalytic approach my oedipal conflict created fear in my ego from my superego’s moral outrage that she would accept my advances, create a relationship, and I would enact my worst nightmare of indeed possessing my mother.”
Not really.
What Bill actually said was “Well, duh, Dr. Shrand. I was afraid she was going to reject me.”
I believe this is what we really fear. In our heart of hearts I believe one human being simply wants to feel valued by another human being. That’s what we want. And when there is ever any chance that we will be devalued we activate fear and run like hell.
Why are we so invested in being valued? It goes back to our emergence as a solitary individual always at risk of being prey to a predator. Our survival potential took a dramatic evolutionary leap when we became social animals. Within the protection of our group we had different options. We could become reflexively afraid, but our strength in numbers made us a formidable foe. To remain part of that protective group you had to contribute something: you had to have value.
The new saber-toothed tiger is fearing we will be de-valued and rejected by our protective group. That’s why Bill didn’t walk across the room. On a deep and primal level his ancient fear had reflexively kicked in and he ran in the opposite direction.
I think the great antidote to fear is trust. But that trust has to start by trusting yourself.
The I-M Approach
That’s what my I-M Approach is all about, a tool to rekinde our own sense of value so we can trust our I-Mperfect self. I think we have so much fear in the world today because we have lost so much trust: in each other and ourselves.
Bill was very interested in what that girl would think about him. We all do this, have an interest in what other people think or feel about us. We fear we will be seen as doing less-than-we-can, not the best-that-we-can. I have a tool that can turn that fear around. Bill learnt it and used it and, (spoiler alert), he did get another chance and this time walked across the room and spoke to that girl.
Next week I will explore my I-M Approach, the idea that we are all doing the best we can at any moment in time: our I-M or current maximum potential. I’ll talk about how it helped Bill to be able to walk over and meet that girl. In the meantime, perhaps you want to start a thread about what things you fear. I’ll start: I’m afraid no one will write anything!
I hope you come back next week to learn more about what happened to Bill. It’s an I-M thing.
