In the late 1970s my parents took me to see an evening screening of a gothic horror film staring Frank Langella titled simply "Dracula". I remember walking home from the theater with them after the movie and being impressed by how dark and quiet the city streets were at night. There is a scene in this film where the vampire hunter, Van Helsing, opens the grave of one of Dracula's recent victims to find that the newly undead vampire has clawed a hole in the bottom of its coffin and escaped into the catacombs beneath the church graveyard. Van Helsing climbs down through the hole and into the catacombs where he is confronted by the wraith in a flowing white gown staring at him with glowing red eyes.
This image kept me awake at night for years. While falling asleep, on the edge of awareness I would slip into a semiconscious state where the red eyed wraith would confront me. I would jolt back into wakefulness, heart pounding, feeling completely unnerved and sensing the breath of the thing in the room with me. I had a copy of Frank Herbert's novel Dune at the time, which I read cover to cover to distract myself at night before falling asleep. I might have read it twice, it seemed to take forever to get through.
Within Dune there is a scene where the main character is given a test where he puts his hand in a box that induces pain, although he is told that the box will not actually harm him. He is also told that if he cannot control his impulse to withdraw his hand from the box he will fail the test- and that failure will amount to death. To control his fear he recites the following litany:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
I typed out this short poem on a small piece of paper which I carried around with me. Eventually I memorized the litany and often recited it at night to try to manage my fears. Probably tracking the long details of outer space politics described in Herbert's novel Dune had the strongest effect in putting me to sleep, but I believed in the magical power of the litany to dispel fear and I remembered it for years.
I still enjoy horror films although they very rarely induce the same sort of terror that they did when I was young. The quality of what frightens me on a day-to-day basis and prevents me from falling asleep now is quite different. My beliefs have changed, for better or worse I am quite convinced that there are no vampires or ghosts that can hurt me while I sleep, and so when my rational mind is in control these fanciful spectres are easily dismissed.
Today it is the details of the practical and the mundane that have far more power over my subconscious than any subterranean wraith.
I think the insidious difference is that my fears today do not recede in the daylight but will manifest there as compellingly as they do late at night. Years ago the stigma of mental health issues bothered me immensely. When I would go out in public I would struggle with the idea that people knew what was wrong with me, that they knew I was unemployed, and that they could tell that I was the type of person who had spent time recuperating in a psychiatric hospital ward.
It has been many years since my hospitalization and today stigma is less of an issue for me than it was in the past, nevertheless some nights I still lay awake worried and unable to sleep. I worry about certain bills, whether my job will still be there at the end of the year, what should I do about the awkward social exchange I had with some person that I met the other day, and on and on.
While these fears are perhaps less intense than my preternatural childhood fears, they have a persistence that I find very difficult to dispel. At times these practical worries have dominated my thought process in a way that blotted out meaningful experiences. My daytime waking nightmares would permeate my mind and take me prisoner, dulling my ability to think clearly and act. What they lacked in heart throbbing intensity and jump scare factor they more than made up for in tenacity. The day-in-day-out quality of the paranoid realistic experience of "practical" worries at times became a marathon of endurance testing my ability to withstand the endless unresolvedness of the issues.
Dr. Abraham Low writes:
If phobias, compulsions and obsessions dominate the symptomatic scene the resulting fear is that of the mental collapse. After months and years of sustained suffering the twin fears of physical and mental collapse may recede, giving way to apprehensions about the impossibility of a final cure. This is the fear of the permanent handicap. The three basic fears of the physical collapse, mental collapse and permanent handicap are variations of the danger theme suggested by the symptomatic idiom.
Another source of defeatism is temper. The patients are taught that temper has two divisions. The one comes into play when I persuade myself that a person has done me wrong. As a result I become angry. This is called the angry or aggressive temper, which appears in various shades and nuances: resentment, impatience, indignation, disgust, hatred, etc. The other variety of temper is brought into action whenever I feel that I am wrong. This gives rise to moral, ethical and esthetic fears or to the fear of being a failure in pragmatic pursuits. I am afraid that I sinned, failed, blundered, in short, that I defaulted on a moral, ethical or esthetic standard or on the standard of average efficiency. This is called the fearful or retreating temper which may express itself in many different qualities and intensities: discouragement, preoccupation, embarrassment, worry, sense of shame, feeling of inadequacy, hopelessness, despair, etc. The fearful temper is likely to lead either to a feeling of personal inferiority or to the sentiment of group stigmatization. Whether it be of the angry or fearful description, temper reinforces and intensifies the symptom which, in its turn, increases the temperamental reaction. In this manner, a vicious cycle is established between temper and symptom.
In Recovery we say "replace an insecure thought with a secure one", and I think this tool can be quite difficult to use. The first step is always to simply identify the insecure thought, for me its often something like "...I will crash the car into oncoming traffic," or "...I will lose my job within the next six months due to the incompetency of the director," or "...I have nothing to say to anyone at this social function; I'm awkward and people don't like talking to me."
The quality of the fear in each of these cases has a quiet unspoken irrationality to it, in this way these grown up fears are the same as my childhood fears. They whisper nonsense in the back of my mind, through implication and innuendo they suggest the things that will go wrong and pretend that they arise from some hard to speak truth. If I fan the flames of these irrational fears by buying into them they become more real, more persistent, and can spin up into a vicious cycle that grips me day and night.
These thoughts for me are all rooted in partial truths, so to me they are compelling, but in each there are flaws. The first thought, about crashing the car, is related to a false belief regarding my inability to drive competently. I don't like driving, and I am not a practiced driver, but I am not so hopeless that there is a high probability that I will drive in the wrong lane. In Recovery we acknowledge that nervous persons often have "the passion for self-distrust", and that this perspective is not realistic.
If I practice Recovery methods and I spot the physical symptoms associated with the fears; I notice that I am griping the steering wheel, that I'm hunched in the drivers seat or that my leg is tense as I switch between the brake and the accelerator. By noticing these physical symptoms I can control my muscles, and intentionally relax my grip on the wheel and lean back in the seat. By forcing my muscles to relax I also reduce tension in my mind. By noticing my thoughts, where I imagine veering into oncoming traffic I can label them as false beliefs. This won't necessarily make the fears go away immediately but it does keep in the fore front of my mind that I am having a fearful temperamental response and that the ideas aren't real.
By spotting my fearful temper I am able to suppress the vicious cycle, I refuse to feed the fear by buying into it as a reflection of reality. I label the fears for myself as they happen which gives me a better chance to realize that they are no different than my childhood fears of vampires, hobgoblins and glowing eyed wraiths. My adult fears are real in appearance, but this is just a mirage created by my adult mind to give these fears credibility.
Fears don't go away overnight, I still struggle with many, but I now have tools to work on them. Like childhood fears, adult fears are most often rooted in false beliefs, although those beliefs are not so simple as red eyed monsters under graveyards. If we work at it we can identify beliefs which are untrue, and learning to tolerate fears when they do arise, and not respond to them impulsively, enables us to survive them. Much like the poem about fear I learned many years ago, we let the fear wash over us, and after it has gone only we remain.
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