Some people artificially separate these experiences into two categories, with mad, sad and scared identified as negative emotions, and glad separated out as the only positive emotion. From there, an entire ideology has been developed, exhorting people to do everything they can to avoid the negative emotions, and fill every waking moment with positive thoughts.
The problem with this approach is that every emotion is equally valuable. People who separate emotions into positive and negative categories are apparently not very religious, or big believers in evolution to think that three of the four emotions have no purpose. It reminds me of my childhood when physicians automatically removed children’s tonsils because they didn’t understand what function they had and arrogantly assumed they were unnecessary. Just because you don’t understand what function something has, or find it unpleasant, doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Fear serves an important function. It alerts us to dangerous situations that require our attention. We need fear to let us know when we have to be careful or protect ourselves. For example, some people are afraid of heights. This is clearly an adaptive fear. Being at the edge of a tall cliff that doesn’t have a railing is a really good time to be scared. Your fear puts you on alert, reminding you to be vigilant. A more everyday example is the fear people often experience before going on a first date. Again, this is an adaptive fear. There are the obvious risks of meeting someone you don’t know who might physically hurt or take advantage of you.
In a more everyday sense, going on a first date is an emotionally vulnerable experience. If you’ve been single for a while, you’ve probably made your peace with that and figured out a way to live with being single and still enjoy your life. To go out on another date you have to risk coming out of your protective emotional detachment and allow your hopes and expectations to build again. Fears seems like an entirely appropriate response to that situation.
Attempts to arbitrarily eliminate fears that are adaptive can be dangerous. For example, if you are drinking and pass out, you should be scared. Passing out is your bodies way of stopping you from drinking enough to kill yourself. If we use the bravado of your peers to bypass that fear, it can be fatal.
You can also intentionally condition people to overlook adaptive fears in order to get them to do something that is inherently dangerous that they would otherwise not do. The training of combat soldiers is a good example.
You can lose the beneficial aspects of adaptive fears over time through habit. The more times you do something dangerous without experiencing negative consequences, the more you get used to the fear and it diminishes. Driving a car is a good example. Safe drivers are not thinking of every possible thing that could kill them. On the other hand, drivers who weave in and out of traffic at excessive speeds have clearly forgotten that driving is dangerous and are at significant risk of killing themselves and/or us.
Fears become maladaptive when they are overgeneralized, meaning that you become afraid of things that you don’t need to be afraid of. You become scared of something not because it is a threat to you, but because it is related to something else that was initially frightening. For example, if the person in our example above who is scared to go on a first date has a bad experience on that date, he might be too scared to ever go on another date.
There are two broad approaches to dealing with maladaptive fears; trying to overcome the fear and understanding it. Approaches that focus on overcoming maladaptive fears generally use some variation of systematic desensitization. This is an approach that very slowly desensitizes a person by having them gradually approach whatever they are afraid of, stop whenever they start to feel afraid, and then do relaxation exercises to calm their fears. The idea is to give you increasing confidence in your ability to master your fears. For example, for the person above who is afraid of going on a first date, in the first session we might have him simply imagine going on a date, stopping any time he starts to feel scared and using relaxation techniques to help lower his fear before moving any farther forward.
In the second session we might have him drive to the coffee shop where the date is going to happen and sit and have a cup of coffee by himself, again using relaxation to calm his fears every step of the way. The next step might be to have him go the same shop with a friend he doesn’t know very well, again using relaxation to make sure his fears doesn’t get too far.
Approaches that focus on understanding maladaptive fears start from the assumption that any maladaptive fear has unconscious roots someplace in your history. For example, if your fear of going on a first date has become maladaptive to the point that you are paralyzed with fear and cannot bring yourself to go on a date, that fear is very likely connected to some other traumatic experience in your life. It might be that you were cruelly rejected the first time you tried to make a new friend in elementary school, or more insidiously, it might be that your parents gave you some very undermining messages about not being very likable or attractive. Therapists who use this approach believe that if you just use desensitization to overcome a fear, it will reoccur in some other form if you don’t also work to understand and come to terms with the unconscious roots that drive that fear.
Psychologists have been arguing for over one hundred years about which of these approaches is more effective. Approaches emphasizing overcoming fears have been predominant in our culture for quite some time, but the cultural may be shifting. A search of the word “fear” on Amazon shows the top three sellers all advocate an understanding approach. Fortunately, you don’t have to pick one approach or the other, you can mix and match them in whatever way is best suited to your situation.
Research suggests that you are best served using a combination of the two approaches, which means that you are more likely to resolve a particular fear if you are comfortable using both approaches. If you are not very familiar with either approach, or dogmatically insist on always using the same approach, you will almost certainly run into a fear that you cannot come to terms with. If you’ve tried everything you know to do, and still feel stuck, I hope you will consider getting help from a good psychotherapist.
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