This is giving me a lot of thoughts on the nature of fear, anxiety, and trauma.
With the experience of fear, how are cognition and emotion related? This is very hard to answer because there is so much diversity in how humans experience cognition. Many people experience an "inner voice" where, when they have thoughts, they picture those thoughts being spoken in their head. But some people don't experience this at all. Is a "thought" a sentence, an image, a sensory echo in the body? Is a thought different from a feeling?
In many non-Western cultures (outside of the Euro-Monoculture), mental and physical illness are not separate. In fact, I've read things suggesting that people from non-Western cultures tend to experience "mental illness" as more physical symptoms, such as pain, stomach ache, and feelings of heaviness or unease in the body.
But are their bodies behaving differently, in a biological way? Or is it simply a cultural difference in how we perceive the division between mind and body?
Ten years ago, I thought that a stomach ache from anxiety was a physical symptom (in my body) caused by the emotion of fear (in my mind). Fear seemed very thought-based: I had fearful thoughts, and these thoughts perpetuated more fear.
Now, I think that the stomach ache is the fear. But it's not just that my perspective has changed, the way I experience fear has changed. I can feel fear without consciously thinking anything.
I think it's possible that the following things are true about fear, at least sometimes:
fearful thoughts are manifestations of a physiological state of fear in the body (they aren't the origin of the experience of fear, and making thoughts go away doesn't make fear go away)
fearful thoughts potentially serve a purpose of helping you understand and make sense of your instincts?
fearful thoughts don't necessarily reflect what the fear is "about" or what causes it. Like, at all. I think someone in a state of unsafety, who is physiologically in a state of fear, could become "afraid of" something random (like maybe hurricanes, or sharks in the pool like another commenter said) because we have a need to connect our instincts with something in our surroundings we can respond to.
physiological states happen because of something.
So maybe the real problem I have with the idea of "rational" and "irrational" fear, is that it connects fear and cognition too closely.
As a child, I had a lot of fears that seemed to be "thoughts:" If X happens, that means that Y is going to happen. As an adult, I often feel anxiety physically without any thoughts linked to it at all.
I feel that it was potentially a mistake to characterize my childhood anxiety as "anxious thoughts," and to focus on treating/addressing those thoughts, when the thoughts manifested as the following:
detecting threats in my environment,
finding or imagining causal relationships that could allow me to predict the threat,
anticipating potential ways a threat could get at me,
rehearsing my responses to a threat
These thoughts are not themselves the fear. These thoughts are adaptive behaviors of an organism that senses a threat in the environment.
I wish my fear had been addressed using a different approach. Therapy focused overwhelmingly on "getting rid of" thoughts and feelings that were "anxious," but this was an aimless slog of silencing the "wrong" thoughts without any sense of why they were wrong or what "right" would be.
Safety is a fundamental need that humans have. I think addressing fear should always begin with exploring the question: "What is safety?" What does it mean to be safe? What different dimensions are there to safety? What safety needs do I have? What does it mean for my safety needs to be met? What actions do I take to ensure my safety needs are met?
It is ridiculous that therapy for anxiety doesn't always start with this.
I think that fear is much more elegantly evolved and useful than we give it credit for. Everything I know about my safety needs, I have learned from my fear. Exploring and listening to her, as an adult, taught me about what safety would look like. I paid attention to the things she most jealously demanded for me.
My fear wanted me to live and thrive. My fear wanted me to be free from pain and suffering. My fear wanted me to be treated well by people who would respect my boundaries. My safety needs did not simply encompass physical protection from danger, but also wellbeing and dignity.
In my personal experience, fear gets much more destructive and harder to control when it is treated like a problem to be destroyed. I have had great success making progress on my medical fears by imagining my fear as something that stands guard over my body and protects me, something that enforces my safety needs. Strangely, simple things like doctors and dentists appointments and vaccinations have become much easier when I imagine my fear as the part of me in control. Her job is to protect me, and I put my trust in her to do that.
You would think that this would lead to me running away screaming hysterically, but it turns out that Fear is very content just wrapping around me and growling threateningly until the pharmacist is done giving my flu shot.
My experience might be totally different than everyone else's, with different causes and different solutions! Or maybe this will help someone else. I don't know. There is room for diversity.
