In 1977, at my request, my father took me to see the movie Jaws in the theater. I was four years old at the time and had heard about the movie from older friends. I was scared to see it, but something about it appealed to me, and I somehow convinced my father to take me.
As we went to the box office to get the tickets, I looked at the poster on the wall – the famous one with the shark swimming toward an unsuspecting female swimmer on the surface – and now I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to go through with it. The man in the box office suggested that we watch a little of it and assess whether it was too scary or not. My father and I both agreed that this was a good idea.
I remember approaching the door to the theater hesitantly and feeling my body tense and my heart race. I opened the door and looked up at the screen and what I saw at that moment changed my life. It was the scene at the end of the movie where the veteran fisherman Quint battles with the Jaws shark.
Jaws attacks the boat, and Quint sinks down into the shark’s mouth where it proceeds to devour him. Jaws clamps down on Quint’s mid-section, causing blood to squirt out of his mouth, and then drags him down into the ocean.
By accident, I, at four years old, had walked in on perhaps the most horrifying scene in the history of cinema. I turned and ran out of the movie theater screaming. We didn’t stay for the next showing of the movie.
My limbic system did its job in the moment, as staying for the next screening of the movie would have been a terrible and potentially traumatizing two hours. Yet the after-effects of this experience were profound. For the rest of the summer, I was too afraid to go swimming. This made sense when it came to the ocean, but my fear generalized to the local swimming pool in which you could clearly see that there were no sharks anywhere.
My fear extended to the adjoining kiddie pool which was only about a foot deep. I was terrified of being eaten by a shark and refused under any circumstances to go in the water. My parents and others tried to use logic and reason to convince me that I was not in any danger, and that there were no sharks in the swimming pool, but I refused.
The limbic system is a blunt instrument that is inherently conservative. It paints with broad strokes and generalizes far beyond where it needs to go.
Remember that my four-year-old self never saw an actual shark, it saw a movie in which there was an image of a shark projected on a screen. Yet to my four-year-old brain there was no discernible difference. My brain then reasonably applied this fear to the ocean, and ocean avoidance the summer after Jaws was released was a noted cultural phenomenon. Yet my brain generalized it beyond the ocean where sharks might be to all bodies of water, or any place that one might swim.
Even though my rational brain knew there were no sharks in swimming pools, and I could see clearly that there weren’t, my limbic system overrode what my senses were telling me and kept me out of the water.
When our limbic systems become activated and we are in fight or flight, we are entirely convinced that the threat is real, even if there is clear visible evidence that there is nothing there.
My four-year-old brain could see that there weren’t sharks in the swimming pool, yet my brain was telling me, “You never know.” It’s fair to say that even though I was 99 percent sure there were no sharks in the swimming pool, I wasn’t 100 percent certain, and after seeing Quint get eaten, this was not a risk that I was willing to take.
How did I get over my fear of sharks in the swimming pool?
With a lot of coaching and coaxing from others, I gradually entered the pool and swam around. I did this repeatedly, and within a month or two, my fear around swimming pools went away. Through repeated exposures, I created new learning that the swimming pool no longer represented danger. It inhibited my old fear enough for me to return to swimming. My old fear from the movie never went away, but the new learning was enough of a counterbalance to compete with it so that I was able to swim again.
This strategy worked for a year until 1978 when the fear became reignited yet again by… you guessed it – the release of Jaws 2.
For some reason, I ended up seeing this in the theater in its entirety. I can’t remember much of the movie except the end when Roy Schneider’s attempts to rescue a group of children from Jaws. I again became afraid of going into the local swimming pool and avoided it at all costs.
This was a phenomenon now known as the “return of fear.” The original fear learning from the first movie had been reignited by my watching the sequel. To reenter the local swimming pool, I would have to start the exposure process over again. Within a few weeks, I was able to go swimming and even joined the swim team that summer.
Many years later, while my fear of sharks in swimming pools has gone away, and lakes don’t scare me at all, I still have a fear of the ocean. Even though I have lived in Los Angeles for twenty-five years, I have been in the Pacific Ocean maybe three times. I have never been a beach person and surfing doesn’t interest me, so this doesn’t affect my life at all, yet my passive, low level avoidance of the ocean has been with me for so long it is hard to tell whether this was fear-based or expressing a personal preference or some combination in between.
How much did that viewing of Jaws when I was four affect my life?
What we see as preferences or character traits are often the result of phobias that we develop as children that influence what we like and don’t like for the rest of our lives.
Our early fear experiences help shape our character and preferences.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia
Brilliant analysis of fear and overcoming it. Enjoyable read.