Like so many other experiences growing up, I always thought that fear was something reserved for dangerous events and private thoughts. People in war and natural disasters were always excused for their understandably inappropriate behaviors while under duress. Aggressive and destructive words and actions, even to the extent of murder, were all in context. The crisis eventually resolves and moral lessons are learned. Cue the heroic musical score and slowly roll credits.
Then a real pandemic came to town.
In this last year, a whole new script has emerged in which instead of being a symptom of circumstances, fear is now the story. How to create, replicate, and broadcast distress to a world-wide audience. The bad behaviors now expected of all, not just the flawed characters of a story.
Marketing 101: Make the Customers Fear
Fear marketing has been around for ages. While the techniques are advertised as ethical, the reason for the continuing to scare people is because it works. Fear temporarily hijacks the frontal lobes of the brain, where our rational thinking takes place, and engages the parts of the brain concerned with survival. Not much thought but lots of action (read: emotion). This just happens to make people really easy to manipulate.
(Chronic fear also wreaks havoc with our body’s normal biology. Long-term changes to physiology can be precursors to the development of disease.)
Survival mode is messy. Not the best decisions are made and consequences are hardly considered.
We have all lived at least one survival mode too. It was called childhood.
At that stage of course, our brains had yet to develop, so we had good reason for being emotional wrecks and making pretty bad decisions. Thank goodness we become adults that make better choices, right?
Losing It
In my younger days, I worked in Public Social Services. I eventually left there a much older person than my years. I am grateful for those lessons to today.
At one time, I worked with a young client who had some obvious communication difficulties. He had been frustrated by the bewildering system of government programs before we even met. His mother had sheltered him from many of the tougher realities in life but she had recently died. As a result, at eighteen, he was facing the world and lacking oh so many of the necessary skills needed to navigate.
We stood in a booth with a countertop between the two of us. My answers to his questions were not getting at what he wanted and his anxiety continued to rise. Voices were raised, sentences got shorter, and communication began to breakdown.
Then he began to do something in all of my salty years in the Agency, I had never seen. He began to hit himself in the face with his fist.
Born of fear and anxiety, this young man took out his frustration – on himself, which is from where he thought the problem arose. As misguided as his actions were, I understood the emotion.
A New Direction
I see much of our current national conversation resembling the actions of that young man frightened by circumstances he did not understand. Death, loss, and a new lifestyle nowhere near normal, converging on all of us. Some of us are constructively responding to circumstances. Others are responding to the fear and acting self-destructively against themselves and others. Canceling others, rioting under the banner of righteous beliefs, storming and occupying government buildings are symptoms. Raging against the unfairness of it all fails to assuage the anxiety and, in all likelihood, this failure contributes to greater apprehension. As emotions rise, our thinking brain stays offline.
Like all good temper tantrums, the results of this national one will eventually resolve. Cooler minds will ultimately prevail. We will gradually realize that hurting ourselves does little to solve problems at hand.
In the meantime, understand that we are all concerned with COVID-19. Working at responding constructively goes much farther towards rebuilding than adding more disruptions. Empathy for our fellow human beings and focusing on positive actions are constructive.
Now is the time for building. Now is the time for healing.
For nobody would understand,
And you kill what you fear,
And you fear what you don’t understand.
– “Duke’s Travels” (Banks, Rutherford,Collins)
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