Verified by 
“I can’t move my arm.”
Amanda was a first-time mom at 24, and a first-time patient in a locked psychiatric ward. Her baby girl was 6 months old, safe at home in the warm and capable arms of her grandmother, Amanda’s mother.
“I can’t move it at all.”
Amanda had a paralyzed left arm.
There was no pain. No muscle disease. No bone disease. No neurologic disease.
She just could not move her arm.
It hung limp from her shoulder, a pendulum whose only motion was the lazy reaction to a movement far away, swaying invisibly to everyone but Amanda. On occasion, she would cradle it against her body, held in place by her right hand grasping her left wrist. If she took away her hand it would fall limp to hang again at her side.
Everything had been fine just a week before. Her baby was a lovely little girl, who had quickly found a rhythm with her new mom. When she cried, Amanda responded. When she slept, Amanda slept. When she woke crying, Amanda would come to comfort her. Again and again, the pattern repeated until Amanda and her infant were as one, dancing with each other effortlessly as the two explored their new worlds together.
One day while trying to hold her baby, heat a saucer of water, and put in a bottle of formula Amanda’s mother startled when the little girl seemed too squiggly to be held safely. “You’ll drop her!” Amanda’s mother blurted out. Amanda startled, her baby began to cry, the water boiled, the bottle burst open, and the rhythm was broken. Crying and crying, the little girl seemed to find no comfort in Amanda’s arms. Amanda took her to her crib and laid her down, stroking the little girl’s back as she tried to soothe the infant to sleep.
The next morning Amanda awoke and could not move her arm. She went to get out of bed to get her crying daughter, her left arm instinctively mobilized to move the sheets out of the way. But her arm did not move. The baby kept crying. Amanda rolled herself out of bed and went to get her child. But she could not pick her up. Her left arm flopped at her side, even as she tried to lift her baby up with just her right. Amanda called desperately for her own Mom who emerged from the guest bedroom to find two generations of her offspring crying, crying, crying.
Over the next several days, Amanda and I explored her fear that she was not a good Mom, that her own Mom was a better Mom than she would ever be. How was she meant to protect her daughter, how was she meant to provide, to feed, to clothe, to change diapers when she only had one good arm? And if she did ever hold her child again, how could she be sure she would not drop her, just as her mother had warned? Amanda was frozen by fear, converted through her brain into a belief that her arm, which had no neurological reason to be paralyzed, was as useless to her as she was to her daughter.
Amanda began to explore her fear. This alone took enormous courage, but the prize was compelling: a return to a life of exploration and pleasure, a return to the music and rhythm of her relationship with her infant child. As her epiphany approached, she used the memory of that lost love to rekindle her own value as a mother, crystallized when her own mother brought her daughter to visit her in the hospital. As her little daughter’s face blazed with an enormous smile of recognition, her little legs beginning to wiggle, her arms stretching out to her remembered source of comfort, the little girl's grandmother began to lose her grip on the baby that was desperately trying to extricate herself and get to the safe haven of Amanda.
And Amanda’s arms moved, fluid, intuitive, without restriction towards the little girl who needed her. She was not a bad mom, was not going to drop her baby, and need not fear. Amanda’s arms stretched out, touched her daughter, and the two were wrapped in each other’s embrace.
As a psychiatrist, I have been impressed with the resilience of our human nature, but also its fragility and susceptibility to our ancient emotions. Fear has been part of our evolution, an emotion that can happen in an instant but last a lifetime. Without fear, we would never have survived the potential threats of predators or marauding bands of territorial competitors. Without fear, we would never have evolved morals and ethics, the substrate of religion, and the foundation of law.
Fear has had a pivotal role in our development as a species, but it has also become a source of incapacitating terror, threatening to rob us of our ability to explore the world, experience joy, and reach out to each other for companionship, protection, and cooperation, just as if our arm was as paralyzed as Amanda’s.
