Free Yourself from Fears (6 page)

Imagine you were put into an unknown environment. You had no idea what was dangerous and what was not, but if you saw the inhab-itants (who you are sure know this environment) react with fear to something, you would too. Why take the chance? This is exactly the situation young children face. Children learn by copying, by watching those large adults who seem to know so much about this complex world. We learned to be afraid: sometimes with good reason, 36

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

sometimes with no reason except that others had learned to be afraid and they passed on the learning to us.

How we learn unreal fears

We learn our fears in many different ways: J
By example
. Our parents or significant adults show they are afraid of something and a child learns that too.

J
By trauma
. A child has a bad experience and generalizes it. For example, a child goes to hospital and is treated badly. Perhaps she suffers a lot of pain. She may conclude that all hospitals and all doctors are to be feared and she may keep a fear of doctors and hospitals into adulthood. She may even forget the initial experience, but the fear remains. This is often how phobias are built, in an intense, one-time, painful experience.

J
By repetition
. We may have a series of bad experiences. For example, a person may have a number of upsetting experiences with authority figures, starting with his teachers. As time passes, he learns to be afraid of authority figures because he consistently has bad experiences when dealing with them. None of the experiences is traumatic, but the weight of them builds the fear.

J
By information
. We hear about danger and come to believe it. News stories are often the cause of this. We hear about other people’s bad experiences and this makes us afraid. We avoid similar situations because we do not want to suffer in the same way. The information may be mistaken, or the circumstances may be unusual, and it does not mean that we will have the same experience, but often we do not want to find out. For example, there may be a rash of stories about the dangers of travel to Africa. People are attacked or fall ill. We may decide not to travel to Africa as a result. While the stories may be true, that does not mean these things will happen to us. There are plenty of news stories about disasters and dangers, but very few saying the dangers are over, so our learning is never brought up to date.

37

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Children’s fears

We learn our fears mostly when we are children. That is when the world can be most threatening, because we have very little control over what happens. We have to learn what is dangerous and what is not. Unfortunately, we often make mistakes and then forget we have made them. Consequently, we may have many fears that are long past their sell-by date. They might have been reasonable at the time, because we did not know better, but they have never been updated in the light of adult experience. What can children’s fears tell us about learning and unlearning fear? How do unreal fears develop?

Fears at different ages

Specific fears tend to develop and be dominant at different ages. From the age of five months to ten months, infants are afraid of strangers as they begin to distinguish between those people they know and those they do not know or do not remember. Strangers are dangerous. Many adults still have this attitude—they assume that a stranger is hostile unless proved otherwise.

Toddlers suffer from separation anxiety from the age of about twelve months to eighteen months. During this time, the child may worry about being separated from a parent. This is more common if the child has recently experienced a loss or death of a relative, friend, or pet, or is undergoing a major change, such as the parents separating or the family moving house.

From the age of two to four years, the child is making sense of the world and telling the difference between fantasy and reality. They may be afraid of the dark. Parents may have to constantly reassure them that there are no monsters under the bed and check the wardrobe for monsters several times a night. When the lines between imagination and reality are blurred, logical argument does not work.

The child needs to trust the parents, or have some remedy like a

“magic” ray gun, to combat the monsters.

From four to six years, children are afraid of separation from parents, so they are often frightened of going to school. They may still be 38

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

frightened of the dark and of getting lost. From six to eleven years, the commonest childhood fears are about being physically hurt: fears of dentists, doctors, thunder and lightning, and burglars.

After the age of twelve, the most common fears are about social situations, taking tests, giving public presentations, being rejected by others, being embarrassed, and being ridiculed or fooled by the opposite sex.

Helping children overcome fears

Children’s fears are just as intense as adult fears. They fear many things that adults fear, and they have special fears of their own. Their fears can be dealt with in very similar ways to adult fears. People sometimes think that because children fear things that are strange or unreasonable (at least to our adult reason), their fears are less intense and less important. But fear is based on perception, not reality. It is worse for children if adults ridicule their fears. They have to cope with the fear
and
the ridicule. Sometimes they will keep fears and worries to themselves because they are ashamed of them, or do not want to trouble other people with them.

When you need to help a child with a fear, start by accepting it exactly as they describe it. You may think it is unrealistic, or mistaken, but just listen. By taking the fear seriously, you reassure the child that you take them seriously.

Secondly, give them any real information they need that is appropriate to their age, to help them evaluate the fear. Make it accurate.

Do not try to persuade them out of their fear, or gloss over it. This information may not help them overcome the fear immediately. The person who gives the information is often more important than the information itself. They need to trust you. The more they trust you, the more they trust the information.

I remember when my five-year-old daughter came to me very upset and asked, “Daddy, will I have to break a bone to grow up? I don’t want to. It’ll hurt.”

I reassured her that of course she wouldn’t. I asked her where she got that idea. She told me that many adults she knew kept saying how 39

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

they had broken bones in the course of growing up. She had come to the conclusion that it must be compulsory in order to become an adult. I told her that although many people had broken bones when they were young (I had broken an arm), these were accidents and there were plenty of adults who had not. The next day, I found some friends who had never broken any bones and this reassured her. She was frightened by the conclusion she had drawn from the only information she had. And of course, if she had said nothing and accepted the fear, then I am sure she would have found a way to break a bone before her teens.

Thirdly, you need to help a child take control of their fear in their own way. We know that control reduces fear. To deal with a child’s fear, especially if it is about something that is real to them but not logical, offer them a solution that works for them and gives them a means of control that comes from the way that they think about the fear.

Skill for freedom

Helping children with fears

1 Help the child take control of their fear in their own way.

2 Give them the information they need, appropriate to their age.

3 Accept that the child is afraid. Do not make them feel bad about it.

4 Find a solution that works in their reality and makes sense in their world.

The dream catcher

Here’s another example of helping a child with their fear. When my daughter was seven years old, she was having nightmares about monsters chasing her down endless corridors. She would wake up in the 40

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

middle of the night, very frightened, and have trouble getting back to sleep. She had these dreams at least twice a week and after a while she became frightened of going to sleep at all, because she was afraid of the dream.

There were all sorts of possible explanations and reassurances that I might have given. “It’s just a phase” would not have been helpful (although it would have reassured me). Even if it was a phase, it was an uncomfortable one, and she needed help. Children are not normally impressed by explanations and promises about a better future as a reason to tolerate a bad present. They live more in the present moment than adults. Equally, a Freudian psychodynamic explanation would probably have scared her more than the dreams. And

“pull yourself together!” doesn’t work for most children (and very few adults either).

That summer I had been in the USA and traveled a little in Arizona. While I was there, thinking of my daughter, I had bought her a Native American dream catcher. This is built like an oval spider’s web of brightly colored strands of fabric with colored feathers attached, and ribbons of braided leather streaming down from the main oval. You hang it beside your bed before you go to sleep. The dreams that want to visit you float beside your head in the night, and they are attracted to the brightly colored dream catcher. They have to pass through it to reach the sleeper. Good dreams are like gossamer, they pass easily through the delicate web of the dream catcher. The worse the dream, the heavier, darker, and bigger it is. These bad dreams are trapped in the web of the dream catcher and so cannot reach the mind of the sleeper. In the morning, you take the dream catcher and shake out the dreams that were caught, and they dissolve in the sunlight.

My daughter was delighted with her present, but skeptical at the same time. “Does it work?” was her main question. I said that I had tried it myself and did not have any bad dreams (this was true), and that it worked for many people. I said that we don’t really understand what dreams are or how they come, so why not try it. It would probably work for her. My daughter was a pragmatic seven year old, so she 41

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

tried it. She trusted that I wanted to help her. The dream catcher worked. We shook out the dust every morning in the sunlight; it was a good, comforting ritual.

Occasionally she would have a bad dream, so we repositioned the dream catcher over her bed, or made the web finer. After a month or so, she had no more nightmares. The dream catcher gathered dust and dreams unattended for six months before disappearing into a drawer. I would certainly not claim that the dream catcher works lit-erally, but it made sense to my daughter: it gave her control, so it worked in practice.

Reassuring rituals work for children. A child’s world is an exciting, wonderful, and sometimes frightening place, because they have less knowledge and less control than adults. With older children, many of the patterns in this book will work well.

Fears can persist after childhood

Some fears persist into adulthood when in fact they are out of date.

A large survey of Chicago schoolchildren a few years ago showed that they were most afraid of lions, tigers, and snakes. Surveys in the UK

come up with similar results. Polls for adults show that they are afraid of dentists, snakes, spiders, public speaking, and air travel.

The most common fears are of thunder and lightning, blood, heights, darkness, narrow confines, and social scrutiny. Thunder is a sudden loud noise and like any sudden noise makes us react invol-untarily. We tense our shoulders in a characteristic way. Thunder is the archetypal sudden loud noise that makes a baby cry, so it is not surprising that the fear of thunder stays with many of us. Lightning always goes with thunder, but is more spectacular than dangerous, unless you are out unprotected in a thunderstorm.

Many people are afraid of blood and faint at the sight of it, especially women. Fainting is a useful reaction only if the blood is your own because it lowers your blood pressure and puts you flat out on the ground; both reactions cause you to lose less blood. Women often have lower blood pressure than men and so a drop in blood pressure is more likely to make them lose consciousness.

42

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

Many people are afraid of being alone and are more afraid of being alone in the dark than of being in the dark with others. The dark is not so frightening when you have a companion. This probably harks back to the infant’s fear of abandonment.

Fear of heights is probably related one of our primary fears from infancy, fear of falling.

Fear of social scrutiny also links with the infant’s fear of abandonment. We want to be accepted and we need human companionship.

When other people are looking at you and judging you, this is usually a prelude to you being rejected.

Adults conquer these fears for two main reasons. First, more years and experience make things familiar and we have more confidence in our ability to handle things. The more familiar something is, the less we are frightened of it. Secondly, we have more control as adults; we do not feel at the mercy of unknown forces as children do.

Logically, we should now be afraid of cars, knives, electrical appli-ances near baths and showers, power drills, and chain saws, rather than the venemous snakes and spiders of which our ancestors were afraid. Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people worldwide—driv-ers, passengers, and pedestrians. They are mundane and familiar, but that does not make them any the less dangerous. We are careful about them, but they do not inspire fear in the way that a snake does. Snakes and spiders kill very few people. Why be afraid of them now?

I am not suggesting that we add a host of new, modern fears to the ones we already have. But it is clear that many fears are no longer as useful as they were, yet we retain them.

The modern dangers have not had a long evolutionary timespan to insinuate themselves into our psyche. Thousands of people are hurt every year in accidents in the home, falling off small stepladders, hitting fingernails instead of metal nails, or stabbing themselves with screwdrivers. People die every day because of smoking cigarettes.