Super Brain (17 page)

This simple pattern recurs in all kinds of situations, such as going home for Christmas, seeing a politician on TV from the opposing party, or getting caught in a traffic jam. Know that even if you have no control over event A and memory B, reaction C will open up the chance to intervene. While having your reaction, you can work on it, examining your response, moving the negative feelings that are evoked, and not running away until you feel that you have had the response you want to have. In the chain reaction, A, B, and C can hit all at once, but even so, you can intervene consciously to break the chain, and when you do, memory won’t be quite so sticky anymore.

4. Fear leads to silence. From shame or guilt you don’t speak your fear, so it festers

There’s an old-fashioned nobility about keeping your fears to yourself. Males in particular are reluctant to admit that they’re afraid, for fear of not being masculine enough in the eyes of other men. Women are more likely, thanks to social acceptance among other women, to speak about their emotions. But sharing, too, has its pitfalls, since people are pressured to keep their confessions or complaints within socially accepted boundaries. The most difficult things, colored by guilt and shame, rarely get expressed.

We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that more often than not, abused children keep quiet and suffer in silence. Child abuse relies upon this reluctance to speak out. The victim feels that she must have done something wrong simply by the fact of being victimized. Switch to anxiety as the problem rather than abuse, and you see that the mind plays a double role: it accuses a child of doing something wrong and at the same time it tells her that she is being violated,
which puts the blame on the abuser. This is a double bind. Let’s look closer at how such a trap works to paralyze the child. Suppose a mother is angry at her child and wants to spank it, and she says, “Come to Mommy,” with a coaxing smile. The child hears the words but at the same time sees that Mommy is angry and is going to mete out punishment. Two contradictory messages clash, which is a double bind.

Speaking out your fear untangles the bind. A young child who doesn’t want to be spanked may simply balk and refuse to move. He isn’t old enough to say, “You’re making me feel afraid even though you’re pretending to be nice.” If you feel anxious, it’s up to you to untangle your feelings yourself, but by definition speaking out your fear requires another person. You need more than a listener. You need a confidante, someone who has been through the same kind of fear. Such a person must be at least a few steps ahead of you. They need to empathize and show you that fear can come to an end. In other words, they have walked the walk when it comes to anxiety. Well-meaning friends are not necessarily good at this. They may respond by judging against you, taking the side of guilt and shame. (“You wished your baby was never born? Oh my God, how could you?”)

Emotional maturity begins with knowing that thoughts aren’t actions. Having a bad thought isn’t the same as carrying it out. Guilt doesn’t recognize the difference. Therefore, to come out of silence, you have to learn, by watching another person’s reaction, that it’s all right to have any thought you want. The point is to get out of the anxiety that the thought induces. To get to the point where you can find such a mature confidante, you need to cultivate thoughts like the following:

I don’t want to live with my guilt.

Silence is making it worse.

No matter how long I wait, my anxiety isn’t going away on its own.

There is someone who has been where I am.

Not everyone will feel as bad about me as I do. There even might be someone who wants to sympathize.

The truth has the power to set me free.

One of the more peculiar findings in psychiatry is that people who are on the waiting list to go into therapy often improve before they have the first session, and the improvement can be as much as they can expect to receive from a psychiatrist. Before working up the courage to go into therapy, these troubled people overcame the pressure from inside to keep silent. That step, in and of itself, has the power to heal.

5. Fear feels bad, and you shove the pain out of sight. But repressed feelings endure. What you resist, persists

Avoiding pain is effective. Humans aren’t lemmings. If your friends dare you to jump into an empty marble quarry, you don’t have to just because they do. But the simple tactic of pain avoidance backfires in the brain. You’ve probably heard the old challenge, “Try not to think of an elephant.” The mere mention of “elephant” triggers associations in the brain. This is essential for human existence—it’s how we learn, by steps of association. At this moment you associate the words on this page with all the words you’ve ever read, and thus you can decide to absorb and accept what you’re reading or not.

Fear associates pain with pain, however. Its associations feel bad, and when somebody mentions it, you will try very hard to push pain out of the way. Freud, among many other students of the mind, believed that pushing feelings, memories, and experiences out of sight, which is called repression, doesn’t work. Lurking somewhere out of sight are the associations you don’t want to face. Carl Jung, following Freud’s lead, believed that part of us creates a fog of illusion in order to keep life from being too painful. He called “the shadow” all the
hidden fear, rage, jealousy, and violence that gets shoved into secret compartments in the psyche.

On the face of it, Freud seems to be wrong; most people are quite good at denial. They don’t face painful truths. They block out all kinds of experiences they wish they’d never had. But the shadow taps out messages in the dark. Repressed feelings rise up like ghosts. Sometimes you feel anxious because your fear is trying to rise up. But repression is tricky. You can feel anxious because you are worried about keeping secrets; or because you know that one day you will be exposed; or because the pain of avoiding pain is too great.

The antidotes to repression are two: openness and honesty. If you are open to all your feelings and not just the nice ones, you don’t have to repress anything. You have no dirty little secrets to squirrel away. If you are honest, you can name your feelings, no matter how unwelcome they are. But nobody is perfect at this. Freud announced to a shocked world that all infants are hiding a sexual attraction for their mother or father. If that is a universal secret (it very well may not be), then repression is epidemic. We don’t have to settle that deep psychological issue here. The important thing is to heal. In order to find the courage to bring up your secrets, you need detachment. A one-year-old who wets the bed is detached because no guilt is attached to wetting the bed at that age. A four-year-old who does the same thing and gets scolded for it will try to hide the next incident. A forty-year-old who wets the bed can enter into very convoluted states of embarrassment.

To speak the feelings that you have suppressed for years, your biggest risk is that the person in whom you confide will react judgmentally, at which point you may wish you had kept your secret hidden. But then, guilt has a nasty way of making us turn to the wrong people when we want to bare our souls. That’s because we still play the double role of abused and abuser. We don’t seek someone who then turns out to judge us: we seek them out
because
we know they
will judge us. So you must prepare the ground first, with thoughts like the following:

I know I’m hiding something, and it hurts.

It’s scary to come clean, but that’s how I will heal.

I want to be unburdened.

Being haunted makes me too anxious.

When you are keeping secrets, especially secret emotions that you judge against, it’s hard to realize that forgiveness is possible. The state of forgiveness is too far away; it feels imaginary compared to the anxiety you feel here and now. Just remember that forgiveness is the last step, not the first. You approach it step by step. Your responsibility to yourself is only to want to forgive yourself and then to figure out the next step, however small, to get toward healing. The first step could be reading a book, keeping a journal, or joining a support group online. Whatever it is, the point of taking a first step is always the same. You stop heeding fear and learn to accept your feelings for what they are: natural events that belong in your life.

6. Fear is crippling. You feel too weak to do anything about it

When someone is frightened, they can become paralyzed with fear. Two soldiers charging up the hill at Gettysburg or two firefighters facing a burning house may feel the same fear, as measured physically by changes in their brain. But if one is a veteran soldier or firefighter, their fear doesn’t immobilize them. They relate to it in a different way from the soldier who has never faced gunfire or the rookie firefighter who has never run into a blaze. Being frozen with fear, in other words, depends on more than the body’s fear response.

Fear’s ability to freeze you in your tracks is mysterious and changeable. An experienced rock climber can be enjoying a normal
day’s climb, with nothing especially risky ahead of him, when suddenly he can’t move another inch. He freezes on the rock face, because suddenly his mind, instead of taking for granted the danger of falling, thinks,
Oh my God, look at where I am
. The raw fear of falling takes hold, and it doesn’t matter how often the climber has been on the same rock face. He has computed the experience in a new way.

How you choose to reinterpret any bit of raw input can work to your advantage. That’s how you decided to stand up to a bully on the playground or got back on the horse after it threw you. Since your brain isn’t you, neither is its reactions. FDR was making a universal statement when he declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The way out of any fear is to get past its power to frighten you. (Because economists don’t factor fear into their equations, many were baffled at the sudden and total collapse of the American economy after the housing bubble burst in late 2008 and banks started to topple. According to the data at hand, the economy was strong enough not to lose as many millions of jobs as it did. But this was a case where data didn’t matter. People allowed themselves to be frightened by fear. Manageable anxiety was transformed into panicky behavior.)

Mind, brain, and body are seamlessly connected. Being afraid of fear leads to all kinds of symptoms, such as muscle weakness, fatigue, loss of enthusiasm and drive, forgetfulness that you were once unafraid, poor appetite and sleep—the list goes on. Imagine that you find yourself hanging from a cliff by your fingertips, and it’s midnight. In the pitch darkness, you are terrified of falling hundreds of feet to your death. Then someone leans over and says, “Don’t worry, the drop is only two feet.” Suddenly you relate to your fear response in a new way. It’s easy to feel the panic and helplessness of hanging from a cliff, but when fear lifts, the whole body changes. Even if your fear lingers, knowing that you are safe signals the brain to restore you to your normal state.

Anxiety tells you that you are in great danger, and the body
doesn’t operate with a rheostat to turn the fear response up and down—it only knows on and off. Even fear of the number thirteen, technically known as triskaidekaphobia, can feel as if you are going to die. A blunt but effective treatment for phobias uses saturation to short-circuit the exaggerated fear.

A patient was deathly afraid of rat poison and electrical cords. The sight of either threw him into a panic; during these attacks his fear made him mindless. His therapist put him in a chair and sedated him. When he nodded off, he was draped with empty boxes of rat poison around his neck and wrapped in electrical cords. As soon as he woke up and saw what had happened, the patient screamed bloody murder. As far as his phobic reaction was concerned, he was about to die. Phobics will do anything to avoid this feeling, but here he couldn’t escape it. He went into a frenzy of fear. But as the minutes passed and he didn’t die, he found an opening. The phobia was no longer in total control because he wasn’t in total terror of it.

We are not recommending saturation; that’s not our message. But it is necessary to defuse the fear that fear provokes.

In order to get over your fear of being anxious, you need to cultivate thoughts like the following:

I am not going to die, no matter how scary this is.

I need to face my exaggerated sense of danger.

Since I know I can survive, I can risk not running away from my fear.

I can face fear and still do things that scare me.

The more I face fear, the more control I gain over it.

When I am really in control once more, my fear will vanish.

This is the final step in dismantling the stickiness of anxiety. You can approach the problem, however, by starting with any of the steps we’ve covered. The aim is always the same: to get to a more detached place. Phobias prove that reality isn’t strong enough to conquer fear.
You can put a few harmless spiders on someone who is deathly afraid of them, and their panic may induce a heart attack. What’s stronger than reality? Knowing that you are the reality maker. That is the pivotal point. Once you regain the clarity that comes from knowing how reality is made, you’re free. You’ve invaded the workshop of the brain and declared that you are in control. The creator has returned.

THE
EMOTIONAL BRAIN

F
ear and desire are bred in your instinctive brain, mediated by your emotional brain, and negotiated by your intellectual brain. These structures meet the mind’s demand to process lust, infatuation, anger, greed, jealousy, hatred, and disgust. All such feelings are tied to survival in the course of evolution. The fight-or-flight response in reptiles implies a brain with fixed circuits for that response. Humans didn’t evolve to be rid of the same circuits, or even to nullify them (the way, for example, the tails of early mammals shrank to a vestigial bone at the end of our spine).