I had a very insightful discussion with my psychotherapist, Dr. W. She wondered whether feeling afraid hadn’t become my baseline over the last few years. A very intriguing idea. I thought I’d expand on it here, and explain my strategy for coping.
When I was a child, I was a sad, scared and lonely person – one who experienced moments of happiness, yes, but was not a happy child. (Many, many of the happy moments I recall were brought about by my two maiden aunts, Aunt Georgina and Aunt Ruth, who often looked after we four kids and took us on spontaneous adventures. I’m forever grateful to them for those moments.) As an adolescent, however, things changed radically. I became outgoing, popular, successful in school. It was a new “me”. Yes, there remained hard times post-childhood. Indeed, I’ve contemplated suicide throughout my life. But I’d shifted entirely around age 17: I became a happy person who, like everyone else, occasionally experienced sad moments.
Dr. W’s thought was this. Between the usual effects of aging; the various troubling medical diagnoses in my mid-50s (I learned all at once that I suffered from high cholesterol, type II diabetes, and vasovagal syncope); and then inoperable esophageal cancer, my body has come to store masses of fear. Indeed, she suggested, I had reverted to being sad/fearful Robbie S., after many years of living as hyper-resilient Prof. Robert J. Stainton, Ph.D.
On this scenario, I had been misconstruing my frequent “fear episodes”. I had been thinking of them as mysteriously arising ex nihilo, not grounded in any reason. That’s why they weren’t “about” anything, not even anything imaginary. They seemed, instead, to be provoked willy-nilly by something wholly physiological, such as a random rush of cortisol into my brain. They were, in this respect, more like having a hot flash than anything else. Dr. W wondered, however: Maybe what’s going on instead is that I am holding all this fear constantly, and it sometimes bubbles up to the surface when I’m unable to mask it? Put otherwise, what was happening was not that Prof. Robert J. Stainton, Ph.D., was regularly experiencing, in an inexplicable way, unprovoked episodes of the-sensation-as-of-fear. No, rather little Robbie S. had reasserted himself. Granted, Robbie S. was often distracted enough that his fear wasn’t manifesting all the time. But that fearful person was always just below the surface, waiting to pop out.
In light of this possibility, I have tried revising my self-talk when the fear-symptoms show up. What I had been telling myself, as a kind of internal mantra, was: “This is just a brain malfunction which is giving you an illusory feeling of fear. The sensation-as-of-fear can’t hurt you. Just let it be there”. In light of Dr. W’s thoughts, I’ve modified that to:
There’s plenty of legitimate reasons for your body to store fear. It’s thus natural that feelings of fear should bubble to the surface sometimes. However, there isn’t any imminent danger. There’s nothing to flee right now, nothing to fight. And, as you’ve experienced many times, the sensation of fear is unpleasant, but it itself can’t hurt you, and it will go away shortly.