FEARFULNESS CONCEPTS
by F Richard Singer III edition date 11/07/07
website: www.conceptualstudy.org email: richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net
Conceptual Papers: As with any conceptual paper, this one is neutral with respect to any significant paraceptual propositions, and it does not argue for or against anything or any course of action. It merely presents and relates some concepts and indicates how I find them personally useful in thinking about what people do. Perhaps these concepts can be useful to some others persons. For more about the concept of a conceptual paper, see the conceptual papers part of the above website. This part of the website also contains a link to a paper that summarizes the core concepts used in developing the concepts in a conceptual paper. Many of these core concepts are taken from the Public Net for Descriptive Psychology. Others are all developed in My Net for Conceptual Philosophy. For the most part, an ordinary understanding of these only a few of these concepts is sufficient for understanding the concepts developed in this present paper.
This present paper is a modified version of the appendix to My Net for Doing. It is intended to be self-contained. Altho I have chosen words for these fearfulness concepts whose ordinary meaning is close to my usage, I am not trying to explicate their ordinary usage. The capitalized ‘IS’ means ‘is conceptually within the context of this paper’, and will sometimes be used to stress the conceptual nature of a statement. The letter P denotes an arbitrary person.
The Essence of My Third Collapse of Will: Just prior to dawn on 3/11/1889, the morning after the accident, I experienced a sense of personal isolation so deep that it seemed it would not only persist thruout my life, but thruout eternity. However it was not until 1999 that an understanding of this emerged as an insight linking so many events. Perhaps this is because feeling personally isolated manifested itself at first as extreme pathological anxiety and despair. It was not until early in 1993, when I was able to convert a major part of the anxiety into a fear, that I was able to lift myself from this pathology state and regain some stable power of will. I could observe that at any time my pathological state would place me in situations where I was personally helpless and that nobody could give me the help I needed when this happened. I had also been afraid that my ability to function effectively would never return. Once this fear was recognized, I was able to see that each time my will reemerged and my helplessness begin to fade. However while strength returned, a less pathological state of pain and sadness and tension remained. This state does not prevent origin activity, but it does slow it down, making life a grim struggle, sapping the joy from even the most positive experiences. What was this 1999 insight, and will I be able to build on it in my quest to become a viable radical origin? Before discussing the events that this insight linked, I will sketch some of the concepts being used.
- A distressing state for P IS one that causes P to experience a high level of discomfort or pain.
- Anguish for P IS an emotional state for P in which P is motivated to alleviate part or all of some state that is distressing for P.
- A harm for P IS a state that is destructive to P’s wellbeing in a significant manner.
- A danger for P IS a state which may result in a harm for P. A danger may be immediately present or it may be one that is at least somewhat likely to occur in the future.
- A threat for P IS a state that P feels is a danger for P. A threat may or may not actually be a danger.
- Fearfulness IS a state for P in which P feels as if there is some threat. P’s awareness of the threat or danger or harm may vary from very vague to extremely clear
A state IS destructive to P’s wellbeing if it inflicts distress that P cannot tolerate and still function effectively. An extreme threat IS one that could potentially result in a pathological state for P. A pathological state IS one in which P is no longer able to engage in at least one ordinary activity in a normal manner. A pathological state CAN BE emotional, such as extended grief. It CAN BE spiritual as in being plagued by a sense of sin. A pathological state CAN BE temporary, such as a broken leg that heals. However a state that briefly interferes with normal activity, such as being unable to tolerate normal sunlight for a few hours after having ones eyes dilated, IS not pathological.
Fearfulness IS of 2 main types, fear and anxiety. Both are related to feeling endangered but they differ in terms of how the threat is identified.
- Fear IS an emotional state in which P feels like some specific state is a threat and P could describe the threat if asked to do so, altho P may or may not be able to describe the potential harm.
- Anxiety IS a state in which P feels threatened but is unable to make the threatening state specific or bring the potential harm implicit in the threat into sharp focus. Altho P will normally motivated to reduce anxiety, anxiety does not mobilize P for any specific type of escape action. I fact one of the main features of anxiety is that escape action may not seem to be an option.
Urgent Fear vs Trepidation: I once only used the word ‘fear’ for what I now call urgent fear. Fear IS urgent if it is triggered by a threat that is immediate. Urgent fear mobilizes P for action that could help P escape from the threatening state. Trepidation IS any fear that is not urgent. This choice of terminology may not be the best, but I need a concept of fear that is not as restrictive as the concept of urgent fear. Unlike urgent fear, trepidation is more likely to inhibit than to mobilize behavior. For example, when Jo says that she is afraid to talk to Bo, I classify at least part of her emotional state as fear rather than as anxiety (altho anxiety may also be involved). My reason for considering her emotional state to be fear rather than anxiety is that the threat is apparent. She may even be able to identify the danger as being humiliated and specify some of the harm that would cause her.
Floating vs Situational Anxiety: Situational anxiety IS anxiety that arises only in certain types of situations and which fades rapidly when the situation ceases. Situational anxiety always involves one or more avoidance attitudes. During situational anxiety, P can identify the threatening situation. However to have anxiety of any type conceptually implies that the potential harm is at most vaguely understood.
Floating anxiety IS persistent personal state of feeling vaguely threatened, altho no specific threat can even be identified. It can arise in almost any situation, altho it will tend to be muted when P is actively involved in situations that P finds interesting or engaging. Unlike fear and situational anxiety, floating anxiety is not a temporary departure from what is the norm form for a person. Thus it is not an emotional state. Instead, floating anxiety is a pathological state that persists in relation to an amorphous fearfulness trait that can be extremely hard to alter.
Altho P will normally motivated to reduce anxiety, anxiety does not mobilize P for any specific type of escape action. In the case of situational anxiety, P is likely to try is get out of the situation, but usually without any sense of urgency. One of the main features of floating anxiety is that escape action will not even seem to be an option.
Since fear and anxiety relate only to feeling that there is danger, fearfulness may occur when there is a threat but there is no danger. Fear and anxiety can occur jointly, especially when the fear is mild and is accompanied by situational anxiety which P feels will pass as the situation changes. Consider a child walking thru a cemetery. The child is mobilized to escape, but there is more anxiety than fear. On the other hand, strong fear tends to mobilize a person for action in a way that at least temporarily obliterates anxiety. An owl hoots and the child runs as fast as he can. The problem with anxiety is that it is akin to fear in feeling threatened, but unlike fear, the implicit harm cannot be clearly identified. This can make anxiety much more difficult to manage, especially floating anxiety.
Example: A person P reacts fearfully when confronted with a harmless snake. P says that he is afraid of being bitten, thus identifying a threat. I say that being bitten may be unpleasant, but hardly dangerous, showing him that this snake has no teeth. A bite from a snake without teeth cannot even cause minor pain, much less an infection, and certainly you cannot be poisoned. Even if totally convinced, P may still be fearful, retaining a feeling of anxiety when trying to hold the snake but unable to identify what harm could possibly occur. This anxiety is clearly situational, and can easily be relieved. Just take the snake away and do not ask P to hold it.
Dealing With Fear: The most direct way to deal with trepidation is avoidance. Altho this will always work in the short run, this may not be the best solution. Even if seldom used, avoidance could result in lost opportunities or even worse. Jo doesn’t talk to Bo and the romance she might have had never develops. Ben is afraid to admit that he accidentally caused the fire and later he is accused of arson. Avoidance works best when used in situations that can be indefinitely avoided without significant negative consequences. Jill is afraid to go swimming in the ocean. The main problem with avoidance is that it can become a habitual response. This can easily result in a fearfulness trait that has negative utility. One way to develop a more useful habit is to deliberately practice confronting situations involving a low level of trepidation, not with dread but as a challenge.
The most direct way to deal with urgent fear is to escape from the threat. Another alternative can be to see that the threat is not really a danger because no harm is likely. When this can be done, urgent fear can be replaced by some other state such as dread or distaste or indifference or interest. A wasp flies close. I feel fear. I recall being stung and classify this as a minor pain. My fear vanishes. Having replaced fear by distaste, I still avoid the wasp but feel no need to escape. Sometimes I do not even try to avoid the wasp, especially if doing so would interfere with what I am trying to accomplish.
If the threat involves a real danger then escape is also usually the most prudential response. However there is often more than one escape option, and which option is taken may be extremely significant. Running from a threatening dog can be worse than confronting it and slowly backing away. Sometimes the best way to escape is to counterattack.
A powerful way to deal with fear is by acting with courage. P might decide to hold the snake and risk whatever unknown harm might occur. In this case, no harm is possible and the risk was only apparent. However P still acts courageously, altho once a firm belief that no harm will occur is established, holding such a snake will no longer require courage. It takes reactive courage to act confront to urgent fear. Confronting trepidation can be postponed. It takes proactive courage to confront trepidation.
When harm is possible and so recognized, risk taking will involve courage. At one extreme harm can be a major disaster, but most harm is a state that can be reversed. Minor risk taking involves accepting the possibility of incurring a harm that one believes can be reversed. One purpose of minor risk taking can be to cultivate the trait of being courageous. This can actually reduce the possibility of harm, since the ability to act with courage in the face of a threat can be the most effective way to deal with it.
The most extreme type of risk taking is by
deliberately taking an unnecessary risk when the possible harm would be major.
Doing this with great care taken to make this unlikely may be useful for some
purposes. For example jumping a motor cycle over the
Dealing With Situational Anxiety: Like trepidation, situational anxiety can often be dealt with by avoidance. Altho the advantages and limitation of this strategy are similar to those for trepidation, there is another factor involved. With situational anxiety, the situation seems threatening but the threat is not in clear focus. Before choosing avoidance, one option is to convert the anxiety into fear. Converting anxiety into fear involves bringing the feeling of being threatened into clear enough focus and then asking what dangers might be involved. If this can be done then a strategy for dealing with fear can be employed. Conversion can be extremely difficult, especially when the anxiety exists along with other negative feelings. Furthermore, since anxiety always involves a vague sense of danger, implicit doubts about having really identified the all the dangers involved are likely to remain.
Example: Bo is feeling anxiety about an exam, and can identify getting a bad grade as the threat. Regardless of how unpleasant failing an exam might be, this in itself is not harmful. However never getting a good job or losing confidence in oneself could qualify as a harm. This threat can be escaped without converting anxiety into fear, perhaps by convincing the instructor to give the class a take-home exam. However this may not be a viable option, and what Bo is most likely to do is to tolerate the anxiety and take the exam. Instead Bo asks why the threat of failing the exam is a danger and spots that the harm is that this failure will damage his self esteem.
Dealing With Floating Anxiety: Floating anxiety may be linked with situational anxiety, and to the extent that a person persistently deals proactively with situational anxiety, floating anxiety may become less severe. Another way to deal with floating anxiety is to become involved in some activity that interferes with the anxiety. This can be mere avoidance, but done persistently as a challenge, this can be part of an indirect strategy for eliminating the pathological nature of the anxiety. It may or may not eliminate the tendency for the anxiety to surface. The option of converting anxiety into fear can also be used with floating anxiety. This can be much more difficult for floating anxiety than for situational anxiety. The threat seems to come from almost anywhere. The danger and potential harm seem overwhelming but amorphous. Even when some danger seems immediate, it feels like an even greater danger will come later. This seems to be the case even when intellectually a person knows that even then the potential harm is not likely to occur. In fact, it is because this harm will not occur that something worse seems to be looming. The deepest fear may be that this pathological state will be permanent, and it will seem that amorphous terrible things are bound to happen.
Permanent Helplessness and Unending Isolation: The night of my accident I was overwhelmed by fearfulness. The two threats that I spotted were the prospects of unending personal isolation and permanent helplessness. Altho I also felt that my origin quest could never be resumed, I did not then appreciate how this linked these two threats. Perhaps this was because shortly after recognizing my fear of unending isolation, I intellectually decided that the likelihood of a state of unending isolation was nil and did not realize that it was still part of my floating anxiety. The level of this anxiety from this was pervasive but amorphous because, unlike the threat of helplessness, the threat of unending isolation was remote. Strange as it might seem, altho I felt that I couldn’t endure unending isolation, it was only the night of the accident that I explicitly spotted this as my deepest fear. What I find even stranger is that I did not bring all of this into focus during the period of anxiety that later emerged. I could not even specify what I meant by helplessness, nor could I bring the potential harm into clear focus. Even after I had converted my anxiety about helplessness into trepidation, it took four more years until I had my 1999 insight into my pathological anxiety. On reflection, I think this was because my anxiety was intertwined with a pathological state of pain and sadness, which remained even after I had converted my anxiety into fear and effectively dealt with that fear.
The key to my return to competence was an understanding that my fearfulness in relation to both unending isolation and helplessness was floating anxiety rather than fear and that both were had the same root, namely that my origin quest was over. Altho I could articulate what seemed like threats, I did not realize that these were too vague to be put into focus. Both involved literally extravagant concepts that obscured my ability to convert the anxiety into trepidation.
Extravagant Concepts: X IS an extravagant concept for a person P if X points beyond what P can imagine. This may be taken in either a figurative or a literal sense. The word used for the concept often has emphatic as well as cognitive purposes, suggesting an absence of any limitations. Words used in some contexts that may suggest extravagant include: absolute, omniscient, impossible, eternal, indestructible, immovable, indisputable, perfect, hopeless, worthless, inflexible, irrefutable, irresponsible, helpless, unending. Terminology alone is not sufficient to classify a concept as extravagant. For example, there is nothing extravagant about the absolute value concept of ordinary algebra. For more on extravagant concepts see my paper with that title.
Taken as a literal extravagant concept, being helpless would mean to be in a state in which a person was had no capacity to deliberately do anything. Clearly, I have never been literally helpless. In fact, it is conceptually impossible to continue to be a person and to be literally helpless. Even in despair, a person can choose to entertain miserable thought X rather than miserable thought Y. So what can it mean to take helplessness as a threat, and when I did, what was the harm I am trying to avoid? There is one simple reason I could not convert my helplessness anxiety into urgent fear. I never encountered a situation in which a helplessness threat presented an immediate danger. The danger always remained out of focus, receding somewhere into the future. I was afraid that I would drain all of our financial resources, have to live in the street, be hospitalized the rest of my life, that my will would never reemerge, etc. While any of these could be a significant harm, I still could not seem to put the harm into clear enough focus to convert this anxiety into trepidation. I finally realized that floating anxiety did not need to be equivalent to trepidation in order to convert it into trepidation. My conversion was a piecemeal task of identifying parts that could be converted.
Converting my financial anxiety involved a realization that the harm I feared was that I would not be able to tolerate the impact this would have on Charmayne, because my inability to function well enough to avoid this would have been one of the greatest harms I could imagine. It was not until 1992 that I was able to cope with this as a fear, primarily by discovering a realistic means to avoid financial ruin even if I was unable to function effectively. I had earlier realized that my fear for my own financial status was not very significant, altho I did have some fear of being homeless on the street. I tentatively experimented with this. I looked for places to sleep and for food in dumpsters. I went to a homeless shelter. Altho I found all of this distressing, the potential harm did not seem to be as great as I imagined.
One of the major components of my helplessness anxiety related to my feeling that my inability to function would be distressing to my family. This was one of the main reasons that I continued to escape to parks and other outdoor areas of temporary refuge where I could isolate myself. While reliving my anxiety over helplessness, this aggravated my anxiety over isolation. Hospitalization provided a way to escape that did not involve isolation. It also allowed me a constructive way to deal with feelings of helplessness, altho there was a major complicating factor. I needed to confront my fear of permanent hospitalization, but they kept releasing me too early. Nevertheless, I eventually acquired the knowledge that I could function effectively even when hospitalized. I had transformed a major component of my helplessness anxiety into a fear of lifelong hospitalization, spotted the harm I feared, knew that I could tolerate this harm. Of course, doing so removed the need to be hospitalized, so I finally spotted that this threat was not a real danger. I may now still occasionally use the extravagant concept of helplessness, but only in a figurative rather than in a literal sense.
Anxiety over unending isolation involves something so remote that it is even harder to convert into trepidation. If I used unending a figurative rather that literal sense, its cognitive content is something like ‘without any end that I feel that I can expect’. To think of something as literally unending is more emotional than intellectual, since intellectually I could always say that if only X would occur then this state would end. I may refer to my struggle with diabetes as unending, since I do not expect it to end anywhere in the foreseeable future. This is of course figurative. It does not mean that I must deny the possibility that a cure could be found at any time. With respect to my fear of unending personal isolation, the idea of unending extends for a period far beyond my ability to intuit very clearly. It relates primarily what might happen after death.
It is my attitude towards death that has played the most crucial role in relation to my basic sense of wellbeing. Before age 15, I was usually secure and happy, merely accepting that death was a transition to an even better life in heaven. Then I rejected the main theological components of my religious heritage, while retaining a belief in personal immortality. I spent considerable intellectual effort in trying to ground this in deistic beliefs that seemed more reasonable. Before I began to question my religious heritage, I do not recall having any concerns about dying. Even in situations that were threatening, any fearfulness seemed linked to dangers that might merely involve more discomfort than I felt I could tolerate. Later as I tried to cultivate a deistic faith, the phenomena of death became extremely significant to me, both in relation to fear of damnation and to my distaste for oblivion.
According to my religious heritage, my deistic beliefs and the attitudes in which they were rooted would condemn me to eternal damnation. Intellectually this only helped to convince me that the beliefs I had acquired from my religious conditioning were wrong. But regardless of how implausible these beliefs might be, and no matter how well I can reason, I am fallible. The mere existence of a heritage that accepted such an infinite threat was a threat to my emotional wellbeing. I had a far better than average ability to relate to Pascal’s wager, and could easily see why extremely unlikely infinite consequences would obviously outweigh all finite considerations. What was I to do? I never understood how it was possible to choose to believe.
While attempting to formulate my deistic ontology, I was majoring in philosophy at a secular university. I had considerable confidence in my conceptual ability to see the weakness and biases of the prevalent physicalistic ontology I was expected to accept. Still the fact that the mainstream of contemporary philosophy did not even consider deism worth arguing against also had a negative emotional impact.
On the one hand, there was a religious tradition that said my death would result in eternal torment. On the other was a philosophical tradition that said it would result in oblivion. My early struggle with these traditions was at least partially instrumental in my first collapse of will. An account of this was given earlier in Chapter 0. The eventual failure of this struggle was the primary factor in my second collapse of will. The recovery from this second collapse was directly related to what at the time was a radically new attitude, and which was presented in detail in Chapter 6. This attitude was closely linked to the sense of power and joy that permeated my life for about 15 years, altho it was being eroded even before 1989 when it was shattered by my accident.
I think it was some time in early morning after my accident that I had the most disturbing explicit thought of my life. What if I would have died biologically and found that I was totally alone, because no supernatural persons existed and no other paranatural persons who had ever survived biological death? This was the danger involved in my deepest anxiety. This was the harm that I could not endure. This would not have been the damnation that I had been conditioned me to expect. Nor would it have been the oblivion that my physicalistic tradition conditioned me to find inevitable. A belief that this could happen would not have been a live option before had I so radically questioned everything I had read or been told about what might happen after death. However I realized that my understanding of what I am is related to function rather than to substance. The uncertainty about death that this opened for me was staggering.
Both my religious and philosophical traditions were rooted in cosmic version. Both imply what happens when a human dies. My religious heritage says that God is a spiritual being, and that man is made in his image, that my essence is a soul, an indivisible immortal spiritual substance. While I can state this belief I no longer understand it, mostly because I find the underlying concept of substance far too vague. My philosophical heritage says that a human is a highly organized complex physical system. I could interpret this as one perspective for thinking about many aspects of what a human does. However the conclusion that is drawn is that when this system breaks down I will cease to exist. This conclusion seems to be linked to a very strong ontological belief, namely that everything is physical. I suspect that this involves a way of thinking that involves the somewhat sophisticated idea of physical taken from modern physics, rather than the older notion of a material substance, but still it seems that the thinking relates to what a human is rather than to what a human does.
My concept of a human is that taken from Descriptive Psychology, namely a human is a person who is a member of the Homo Sapiens species. To be a person is to have a history of deliberate action, and thus the central focus is on what a person does. Furthermore the species concept is biological rather than physical, and while biology may utilize the notion of a physical system, it also focuses on behavior. Having no preeminent cosmic version and lacking sufficient relevant paraceptual information, I have no preferred conjecture about what might happen to a person after biological death. None or some or all may continue to exist. My perspective on this is developed in Chapter 6. For now I merely reflect on the extent of my uncertainty and spot how it relates to the floating anxiety that still lingers from my third collapse of will.
The explicit insight that my most fundamental fear was of unending isolation disappeared shortly after its first explicit occurrence and did not return until 1999. Unlike my fear of eternal damnation, it was not something I had been conditioned to believe, and so even its emotional plausibility faded easily. This was especially the case due to what soon followed. My accident occurred at the beginning of spring break and for a while I had more intensive interesting human interaction than at any other time of my life. For a while I did not seem to have any anxiety.
About six weeks later the anxiety returned suddenly and with intensity, but I did not recall my insight. One of the trigger events was reading a book entitled Who Dies. While I cannot recall much about the content, I do recall being terrified of the possibility of reincarnation. It was not that reincarnation seemed plausible. It was that, even if highly implausible, reincarnation seemed so onerous. The other event was recalling a memory from the sixth grade that involved the worst sense of helplessness and isolation that I had ever felt. There are also some less intense childhood memories that relate to feelings about potential isolation. It was only with my current insight that I related these events to the danger of unending isolation. The other factor I spotted as being related was a recurring type of dream whose central theme involves isolation. One of my simplest such dreams is being on campus, with lots of people around, but unable to find anyone I know. These have always been much more distressing than dreams involving any other type of threat. Often in dreams when the threat is something like being chased or being in the water with a shark, I turn and confront or attack the threat. I find in myself the power to nullify whatever danger is involved.
As I understand it reincarnation seems linked to a belief in some spiritual essence, call it a soul, whose existence is independent of a particular embodiment. It is this soul that is the person. Death is only a loss of the particular characteristics of its last reincarnation. The spiritual changes are carried over into the next reincarnation. Whatever those who believe in reincarnation might feel about its desirability, my reaction is highly negative. Having no ontological commitment to some underlying soul, it is these lost characteristics that I value as my spiritual achievements. To me spiritual characteristics relate to my will, and I conceptualize my will in terms of function rather than substance. Thus to talk of me as a will is to talk about what I do, and this makes neither a positive nor a negative ontological commitment to some soul that may survive the death of my body. If there is such a soul, the thought of it returning without the characteristics acquired thru so much effort, and without even a memory linking to them, seems like a horrible kind of isolation. It feels like an isolation of the will I am from the will I was and from the will I might latter become.
In the sixth grade, my father was transferred to
Another childhood memory that I recall was a story about the last person on earth. On various occasions, I have imagined myself as that person. What would I do? As a child I simply felt a kind of quiet hopelessness, altho then I at least believed that after I died I would definitely be in heaven and no longer alone. Once when I imagined this theme I thought about trying to learn how to clone some other human cell or myself if I could find one. However remote my chances, this would at least keep some minimal hope alive.
In one recurring dream, I realize that I am dead. I find myself alone in an unending hallway. I walk forward, but no end or way out appears. This is my worst nightmare. The relation to my fear of isolation seems obvious. In another recurring dream, I am in a room with no window, but there is a door. I go thru the door into another room, also with no windows but with another door. This continues. In one such dream, I finally came out at the mouth of a cave looking out over an abyss. I was no longer closed in, but I was still alone and with no place to go. I realized I was dreaming. I decide that I could jump without harm, altho this still took courage. When I jumped, I landed with out harm in a lovely forest.
Unending isolation is clearly the greatest harm that I fear. Keeping this in focus removes most of my floating anxiety. Realizing this, I can focus on trepidation and even remove part of the feeling that unending isolation is a danger. Some anxiety remains. The threat is too remote to keep in focus. Perhaps if I continue bringing it into focus I can transform even more of the anxiety into trepidation. The harm will then seem even less likely to occur. This worked in my return from my second collapse of will, and the threat there was eternal damnation. After all, my concept of unending relates to expectation rather than to some actual state that is permanent, and the very idea of there being a state that can never change is a conjecture that I find highly implausible.
- A
distressing state for P IS one that causes P to experience a high level of
discomfort.
- Anguish
for P IS an emotional state in which P is motivated to alleviate part or
all of some state that P finds distressing.
- A harm
for P IS a state which is significantly destructive to P’s well-being.
- A
danger for P IS a state which may result in a
harm for P.
- A
threat for P IS a state that P feels is a danger for P.
- Fearfulness
IS an emotional state for P in which P feels as if there is some threat
and is motivated to escape from it.
Being destructive to P’s
wellbeing means that this state inflicts on P distress beyond that which P can
tolerate and still function effectively. The danger of some harm may be immediately present or it may be one that is at least somewhat likely to occur in the
future. An extreme danger is one which could
potentially result in a pathological state for P. I use the Descriptive
Psychology concept of a pathological state as one in which P is no longer able
to engage in at least one ordinary activity in a normal manner?
A pathological state can be emotional, such as extended grief. It can be
spiritual as in being plagued by a sense of sin. A pathological state may be
temporary, such as a broken leg that heals. However a state that briefly
interferes with normal activity, such as being unable to tolerate normal
sunlight for a few hours after having ones eyes dilated, IS not pathological. A
threat may or may not actually be a danger, and P’s awareness of the threat may
vary from extremely vague to extremely clear.
Fearfulness IS of 2
main types, fear and anxiety. Both are related to feeling endangered but they
differ in terms of how the threat is identified.
- Fear
IS an emotional state in which P feels like some specific state is a
threat and P could describe the threat if asked to do so.
- Anxiety IS an emotional state in which P feels threatened
but is unable to bring the harm implicit in the threat into sharp focus,
either because the threat is
not immediately present or because when it is no harm stands out.
Anxiety and fear can occur together or
separately. Floating anxiety IS anxiety without fear, i.e. no threat can be
identified. Anxiety can occur in connection with fear, i.e. when a threat can
be identified. However to have anxiety conceptually implies that some aspect of
the danger is at most vaguely understood. Fear and anxiety relate to feeling
that there is danger. Thus fearfulness may occur when
there is a threat but there is no danger. The problem with anxiety is that it
is akin to fear in feeling threatened, but unlike fear
the implicit harm cannot be clearly identified. This can make anxiety much more
difficult to manage, especially floating anxiety.
Example 1 P reacts fearfully when confronted with a snake. P
says that he is afraid of being bitten, thus identifying a threat. I say that
being bitten may be unpleasant, but hardly dangerous, showing him that this
snake has no teeth. A bite from a snake without teeth cannot even cause minor pain, much less an infection, and certainly you cannot be
poisoned. Even if totally convinced, P may still be fearful, retaining a
feeling of anxiety when trying to hold the snake but unable to identify what
harm could possibly occur.
Dealing With Fearfulness The most direct way to deal with fear is to escape
from the threat. This can also work with situational anxiety. Just take the
snake away and do not ask P to hold it. However escape
is not always possible. Another alternative is to see that the threat is not
really a danger because no harm is likely. When this can be
done fear can be replaced by some other emotional state such as dread or
distaste or indifference or interest or exhilaration. A wasp flies close, I
feel fear, recall being stung, classify this as a minor pain, my fear vanishes.
Having replaced fear by distaste, I still avoid the wasp but feel no need to
escape.
Another way to deal with fear is by acting
with courage. P might decide to hold the snake and risk whatever unknown harm
might occur. Since no harm is possible the risk is
only apparent. However P still acts courageously. It
is only after a firm belief that no harm will occur is established that holding
such a snake will no longer require courage.
When a harm is
possible and is so recognized, risk taking IS courageous. At one extreme harm
can be a major disaster, but most harm is a state that can be reversed. Minor
risk taking involves accepting the possibility of incurring a harm that one
believes can be reversed. And one purpose of minor risk taking can be to
cultivate the trait of being courageous. This can actually reduce the
possibility of harm, since the ability to act with courage in the face of a
threat can be the most effective way to deal with it.
The most extreme
form of risk taking is by deliberately taking an unnecessary risk when the
possible harm would be a major disaster. Doing this may be useful for some
purposes. For example jumping a motor cycle over the
Converting Anxiety Into Fear The strategy I use to convert an anxiety into fear is
simple. It involves clearly identifying threats so that all the feeling about
potential danger and harm are in focus. However this
can be extremely difficult to implement, especially when the anxiety exists
along with other negative feelings and when the danger involved is in not in
the present or near future. Furthermore I find it
difficult to spot a danger I fear when I know intellectually that the harm is
not likely to occur.
Example 2 P is feeling anxiety about an exam but cannot spot
that the main harm implicit in this threat relates to never being able to find
a good job or to losing confidence in oneself rather than to getting a bad
grade. Regardless of how unpleasant a bad grade might be, this in itself is not
a harm. However never getting a good job or losing
confidence in oneself could qualify as a harm. P can
escape this threat without converting his anxiety into fear, perhaps by
convincing the instructor to give the class a take-home exam. However this may not be a viable option. Instead
P asks why the threat of failing the exam is a danger and spots that the harm
is that this failure will destroy his self esteem. Perhaps then
P can do imagine some strategy for tolerating failure without damaging P’s self
esteem.
My Insight One aspect of my insight into my pathological state
of anxiety was a recognition that I had not been aware of the fact that I had
not converted the most significant component of my anxiety into fear, and thus
some significant floating anxiety remained. The level of this anxiety was
pervasive but low because the fearfulness, unlike the fear of helplessness, did
not involve an impending sense of an immediate threat. Strange
as it might seem, altho I knew that I could not endure unending spiritual
isolation, it was only the night of the accident that I explicitly spotted this
as my deepest fear. There were at least two more reasons why it was so
hard to spot this again.
(1) The anxiety was
intertwined with a pathological state of pain and sadness and tension.
(2) Shortly after
recognizing my fear of unending isolation, I intellectually decided that the
likelihood of a state of unending isolation was nil, thus masking the harm I
still feared.
Note The word ‘unending’ is intended not as a synonym for ‘eternal’ but
more as a phase like ‘without any end that I feel I can expect’. I feel my
struggle with diabetes is unending, since I do not expect it to end anywhere in
the foreseeable future. This does not mean that I
believe it will continue after my biological death,
nor does it mean that I must deny the possibility that a cure could be found at
any time. To think of something as unending is thus more an emotional state
than an intellectual one. Intellectually I could always say that if only X
would occur then this state would end. My fear of unending spiritual isolation
extends for a time period far beyond my ability to
intuit very clearly.
It is my attitude towards death that has
played the most crucial role in relation to my basic sense of wellbeing. Before
age 15 I was basically secure and happy, merely
believing that death was a transition to an even better life in heaven. I do
not recall having any concerns about dying. Even in situations that were
threatening, any fearfulness seemed linked to dangers that might merely involve
more discomfort than I felt I could tolerate. When my religious heritage disintegrated I spent considerable intellectual effort
trying to ground a belief in personal immortality in more reasonable deistic
beliefs. Later as I tried to cultivate a deistic faith, the phenomena of death
became extremely significant to me, both in relation to fear
of damnation and a distaste for oblivion.
According to my religious heritage, my
deistic beliefs and the attitudes in which they were rooted would condemn me to
eternal damnation. Intellectually this only helped to convince me that the
beliefs I had acquired from my religious conditioning were wrong. However
regardless of how implausible these beliefs might be, and no matter how well I
can reason, I knew that I was fallible. Thus the mere
existence of a heritage that believed in infinite harm was a threat to my
emotional wellbeing. I had a far better than average ability to relate to
Pascal’s wager, and could easily see why extremely unlikely infinite consequences
would obviously outweigh all finite considerations. However
I never understood how it was possible to choose to believe.
While attempting to formulate my deistic
ontology, I was majoring in philosophy at a secular university. I had
considerable confidence in my conceptual ability to see the weakness and biases
of the prevalent physicalistic ontology I was expected to accept. Still the
fact that the mainstream of contemporary philosophy did not even consider deism
worth arguing against also had a negative emotional impact.
On the one hand was a religious tradition
that said my death would result in eternal torment, while on the other was a
philosophical tradition that said it would result in oblivion. My early struggle with these traditions were at least partially
instrumental in my first collapse of will. An account of this can be found in
Section 1 Chapter 1 of "My Net for Doing". The eventual failure of
this struggle was the primary factor in my second collapse of will. The recovery
from this second collapse was directly related to what at the time was a
radically new attitude, and which is presented in detail in Chapter 6 of
"My Net For Doing". This attitude was
closely linked to the sense of power and joy that permeated my life for about
15 years, although it was being eroded even before 1989 when it was shattered
by my accident.
I think it was some time in early morning
after my accident that I had the most disturbing explicit thought of my life.
What if I would have died biologically and found that I was totally
alone and helpless, there being no supernatural persons and no other
paranatural persons who had ever survived biological death? This was the danger
involved in my deepest anxiety. This was the harm I could not
endure. It was not the damnation my religious heritage
had conditioned me to expect nor the oblivion that my physicalistic
tradition had conditioned me to find inevitable. A belief in isolation after
death would not have been a live option before had I so radically questioned everything
I had read or been told about what might happen after death.
However I realized that my understanding of what I am
is related to function rather than to substance. The uncertainty about death
that this had opened for me was staggering.
Both my religious and philosophical
traditions were rooted in beliefs about what is, and it is such beliefs that
imply what happens when a human dies. My religious heritage says that God is a
spiritual being, and that man is made in his image. Thus
a person’s essence is a soul, which is an indivisible immortal spiritual
substance. While I can state this, I find the underlying concept of substance
far too vague to find the the statement meaningful.
My philosophical heritage says that a human is a highly organized complex
physical system. I could interpret this as one perspective for thinking about
many aspects of what a human does. However the
conclusion that is drawn is that when this system breaks down the person ceases
to exist. This conclusion seems to be linked to a very strong ontological
belief, namely that everything is physical. Altho this now involves a way of
thinking that involves the sophisticated idea of physical taken from modern
physics, rather than the older notion of a material substance, it seems that
the thinking still relates to what a human is rather than to what a human does.
My concept of a human is that taken from
descriptive psychology, namely a human is a person who is a member of the Homo Sapiens species. To be a person is to have a history of
deliberate action, and thus this concept has as a central focus what a person
does. Furthermore the concept of a species is
biological rather than physical, and while biology may utilize the notion of a
physical system, it also focuses on behavior. Having no preeminent cosmic
version and lacking sufficient relevant paraceptual information, I have no
preferred conjecture about what might happen to a person after biological
death. None or some or all may continue to exist. My
perspective on this is developed in Chapter 7 of "My Net for Doing".
For now I merely reflect on the extent of my
uncertainty and spot how it relates to the floating anxiety that still lingers
from my third collapse of will.
The explicit insight that my most fundamental
fear was of unending isolation disappeared shortly after its first explicit
occurrence and did not return until just before I began this paper. Unlike my
fear of eternal damnation, it was not something I had been conditioned to
believe. Thus even its emotional plausibility faded
easily. This was especially the case due to what soon followed. My accident
occurred at the beginning of spring break and for a while
I had more intensive interesting human interaction than at any other time of my
life. For a while I did not seem to have any anxiety.
About six weeks later the anxiety returned
suddenly and with intensity, but I did not recall my insight. One of the
trigger events was reading a book entitled "Who Dies". While I cannot
recall the content, I do recall being terrified of the possibility of
reincarnation. It was not so much that reincarnation seemed more plausible, it
was just that even if highly implausible it seemed so onerous. The other event
was recalling a memory from the sixth grade which
involved an extreme sense of helplessness and isolation. There are also some
less intense childhood memories that relate to feelings about potential
isolation. It was only with my current insight that I related these events to
danger of unending isolation. The other factor I spotted as being related was a
recurring type of dream whose central theme involves isolation. One of my
simplest such dreams is being on a campus, with lots of people around, but
unable to find anyone I know. Isolation dreams have always been much more distressing
than dreams involving any other type of threat. Often in dreams when the threat
is something like being chased, I turn and confront or attack the threat,
finding in me the power to nullify whatever danger is involved.
As I understand it, reincarnation seems
linked to a belief in some spiritual essence, call it a soul, whose existence
is independent of a particular embodiment. It is this soul
that is the person and death is only a loss of the certain
characteristics of its last reincarnation. However the
spiritual changes from the reincarnation are carried over into the next.
Whatever those who believe in reincarnation might feel about its desirability,
my reaction is highly negative. Having no ontological commitment to some
underlying soul, it is many of these characteristics
that I value as my spiritual achievements. To me spiritual characteristics
relate to my will, and I conceptualize my will in terms of function rather than
substance. Thus to talk of myself as a will is to talk about what I do, and this
makes neither a positive nor a negative ontological commitment to some soul
that may survive the death of my body. If there is such a soul, the thought of
it returning without the characteristics acquired thru so much effort, and
without even a memory linking to them, seems like a horrible kind of isolation.
It feels like an isolation of the will that is now me, from the will that was me and the will that might latter be me.
In the sixth grade
my father was transferred to
Another childhood memory that I recall was in
connection with a story about the last person on earth. On various occasion,
including some even recently, I have imagined myself as that person. What would
I do? As a child I simply felt a kind of quiet
hopelessness, however then I at least believed that after I died I would
definitely be in heaven and no longer be alone. The last time I imagined this theme I thought about trying to learn how to clone
myself or some other human cell if I could find one. However remote my chances,
this would at least keep some minimal hope alive.
In one recurring dream
I realize that I am dead. I find myself alone in an unending hallway. I walk
forward, but no end or way out appears. This is my worst nightmare. The
relation to my fear of isolation seems obvious. In another recurring dream I am in a room with no window, but there is a door. I
go thru the door into another room, also with no windows but with another door.
This continues. Once I finally came out but I was at the mouth of a cave
looking out over an abyss. I was no longer closed in, but I was still alone and
with no place to go. At that point I realized I was
dreaming. I decide that I could jump without harm. However
this still took courage. When I jumped I landed with
out harm in a lovely forest.
Unending isolation is clearly the greatest
harm that I fear. Keeping this in focus removes most of my floating anxiety.
Realizing this, I can focus on the fear and even remove part of the feeling
that unending isolation is a danger. Some anxiety still
remains. The threat is too remote to keep in focus. Perhaps if I continue
bringing it into focus I can transform even more of the anxiety into fear. The
harm will then seem even less likely to occur. This worked in my return from my
second collapse of will, and the threat there was eternal damnation. After all,
my concept of unending relates to expectation rather than to some actual state
that is permanent, and the very idea of there being a state that can never
change is a conjecture that I find highly implausible.