Two Kinds of Fear in the Mind

Often when we are stressed, afraid or angry, feelings just come to us. Sometimes our responses make perfect sense. For example, if a car nearly misses you when you are crossing the street at an intersection your heart rate will instantly increase as you realize the danger. Shouting at the driver or stepping quickly away from the car are both reasonable and average responses. This kind of reaction is instinctive and understandable, but we can have other apparently built-in responses that aren't so understandable. For some people walking through a crowded shopping mall is enough to make them nervous. The feelings can seem overpowering and be confusing at the same time because we may be fully aware that there is no real danger. For some, overstimulating social situations may create irrational feelings and impulses to escape. Specific scenarios can trigger our fear and we consciously learn that there are basic tasks that we have difficulty performing, perhaps going out, driving a car, talking to new people, making phone calls, riding in elevators or other common tasks become difficult or impossible. A few "phobias" may just make you feel a little quirky, but after a while if they pile up you begin to think of yourself as paranoid and get the sense that something more general has gone wrong.

While anxiety can be a general experience that drags us down on a day to day basis, fear in the moment can be quite intense. Fear usually has an immediate stimulus. With fear, we see a snake and become apprehensive or we look down from a tall building with unease. Anxiety in contrast can arise without any physical stimulus, sometimes remembering a painful past event or thinking about something in the future that we'd rather avoid can lead to anxious feelings. There is a natural feedback loop that occurs between fear and anxiety. A shock in the moment creates an impression, one that we don't want to experience again, so we worry, and spend time planning to avoid an imagined unpleasant future event. If we spend a lot of time ruminating on fearful experiences our general levels of anxiety may creep upwards. Sometimes fearful thoughts become intrusive and can invade our experience seemingly out of our control. Anxiety driven by rumination and fearful experiences can turn into a painful vicious cycle that takes on a life of its own.

There is a part of our thinking that we can direct, and there is another part that seems to arise on its own. Even those of us who struggle with mental health issues have a strong measure of control over most of our own thoughts. We can plan, decide, make choices, and solve complex problems with varying degrees of effort. In contrast, some ideas arise spontaneously without our bidding; dreams, imagination and inspiration all fall into this category and are positive examples of spontaneous thoughts. The same sort of processes may also be at work with our fears. Some fears are rational and based on deduction and reason. While its troublesome to pay my taxes I know that I should because the consequences of not doing so can be unpleasant, and essentially, I fear those consequences. I don't do my taxes for love of the government, but more for fear of what will happen if I don't. I also have irrational fears, for example, when the phone rings my first instinct is to not answer it because I imagine that whoever is calling wants something from me and is going to make accusations and burn up a lot of my patience and time.

How is it that our thought processes become split? Do only some people feel this way? How can we be in conflict with ourselves? Joseph E. LeDoux described a fear response that is based on two pathways within the brain. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on the biological underpinnings of emotion and memory, especially brain mechanisms related to fear and anxiety. LeDoux studied fear using a simple behavioral model based on Pavlovian fear conditioning in rodents. This procedure allowed him to follow the flow of information resulting from a stimulus through the brain as it comes to control behavioral responses by way of sensory pathways. LeDoux identified two sensory roads to the amygdala (the memory and emotional center), with the “low road” being a quick and dirty subcortical pathway for rapid activation of behavioral responses to threats and the “high road” providing slower but highly processed cortical information. His work has shed light on how the brain detects and responds to threats, and how memories about such experiences are formed and stored through cellular, synaptic and molecular changes in the amygdala. LeDoux’s work on the amygdala's processing of threats has helped us to understand exaggerated responses characterized by anxiety disorders in humans. Studies in the 1990s showed that the medial prefrontal cortex (rational thinking part of the brain) is able to stop the threat response and paved the way for understanding how exposure therapy reduces threat reactions in people with anxiety by way of interactions between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

LeDoux Fear Response From "Abnormal Psychology" by W.J. Ray

The LeDoux fear response is made up of two pathways for the processing of fear. One pathway is fast and outside of awareness, while the other is slower and has a conscious component. In the previous figure, visual stiumuli (a snake) are first processed by the thalamus which passes rough, almost archetypal information directly to the amygdala. This quick transmission allows the brain to respond to the possible danger by raising the respiration and heart rate and creating tension in the muscles so we are ready to act. Meanwhile the visual cortex also receives information from the thalamus and, with more perceptual sophistication and more time our mind can process the actual threat level and develop a clearer understanding of what is going on. This allows us to either dismiss the stimulus as not a real threat, or we can develop a plan of action more sophisticated than jumping out of danger's path. We have a sense of conscious control over this second pathway, and while our "jump" response may have already been triggered, with some thought we can choose a more comprehensive sequence of steps to deal with the situation.

While our initial reaction may be incorrect, there is an evolutionary advantage to being prepared for danger as soon as possible. We always have the second opportunity to consider in more detail whether the threat is actual or not. However, for some of us our initial response has become too sensitive. We feel always on alert, and we have begun to believe our intuitive response and accept it without considering it carefully. If we always believe this initial response we aren't using our rational facilities to reconsider what is going on and we are only seeing a portion of the picture. Can we then simply anticipate this response and crush down our irrational or instinctive nature? Given the absence of conscious control over this process the answer is no. Our initial response is determined by past experience, instinct, and other difficult to control aspects of our mind. So what can we do?

In the chapter titled "Intuitive Versus Discursive Thought in Temper" from MHTWT Abraham describes a dual response and argues that we have very little control over the initial response, but we need to be aware that we can exert a measure of control over the secondary response and that it is in this secondary response where we have the opportunity to change our experience.

 E: ... a temperamental outburst runs in stages. First, you explode and go into a rage. In a given instance, you may rave on for two or five minutes. During this time you are "out of your senses" and will not be likely to exercise a great deal of thought. You will certainly not stop to consult your memory recalling what I told you about control of temper. So I take it that during this initial stage of your explosion you will not think of the instruction I gave you. You will simply rave on until your anger will subside. I shall call this initial stage of your temper the "immediate effect of the temper outburst." I hope you realize that when I want you to practice avoiding intuitive conclusions, I do not ask you to do that during this stage of the immediate effect. But after the immediate effect is over, you enter a "cooling off" process which may last some ten or fifteen minutes. This is the temperamental after-effect. Once the after-effect sets in you begin to think, perhaps not very clearly, but sufficiently so to be able to remember what I told you. Whatever thinking you do during the immediate effect is intuitive, vague and dim. But in the after-effect your thought becomes discursive again. You can then reflect and meditate. The question is whether your type of reflection will be rational or emotional. If it is emotional you will continue to fume, will brood over the outrage of which you were the "innocent victim." Burning with righteous indignation, you will justify the explosion which you released during the immediate effect and will give it your endorsement. Once you endorse your outburst as justified, you are primed for another explosion; you fairly itch to pay that fellow back" and thus keep your temper boiling in anticipation of another bout. This is the last stage of the uncontrolled temperamental cycle which we shall call the stage of anticipation. It is called the stage of anticipation because in this third phase of the temper outburst you anticipate a renewed squabble in which you expect to come out on top. You anticipate a victory which will wipe out the "disgrace" of the present defeat. You will understand now that the so called temperamental cycle if left to itself without an attempt to control it consists of three discrete stages; (1) the immediate effect, (2) the after-effect, (3) the anticipation of a renewed outburst. Can you tell me now which stage of this cycle you must make use of for the purpose of remembering what I told you in matters of control?

P: You said it can't be done in the immediate effect. So I think it will have to be done after that.

E: That's correct. You will have to make use of the aftereffect. Of course, I do not expect you to succeed the first time, nor do I expect full success the fourth, fifth and sixth time. Instead, I presume you will become emotional in the first few beginnings of your practice and your after-effects will be spent in spells of fussing and fretting, with the result that the temperamental cycle will be run unchecked through its immediate effect, after-effect and the anticipation of the next temperamental "comeback." I hope, however, that after repeated practice you will finally manage to stop short at the end of the immediate effect and that henceforth the after-effect will be given over to a sane, rational appraisal of the situation in which you will refrain from endorsing your explosion, thus avoiding the anticipation of and preparation for the next outburst. This will come to pass if, after a few initial failures, you will not permit yourself to be discouraged and will continue practicing with solid determination. You will do that if you have the genuine will to remedy and check your temperamental habits.

I found reading about LeDoux's investigation in to the dual pathway to be quite interesting. Abraham Low's description of the stages of a temperamental response to a situation is mirrored by LeDoux's experimental biology. Learning to manage your feelings isn't necessarily about gaining complete control over them, or having the ability to squash unpleasant feelings whenever they arise. Within our brains the biology dictates that a portion of our emotional response will be instantaneous and automatic, so we will never be able to fully control every thought that we have. The goal is to recognize that while we can't control this immediate reaction, we can recognize it, and we don't need to let this intuitive response dictate our whole response.

In Recovery meetings we always acknowledge that you are "entitled to your initial response", we recognize that for everyone the immediate onset of a conflict, surprise, or upsetting situation is intuitive and outside of our rational control. All we need to do is observe the reaction and be aware of it and accept that while it may be reasonable there is also a good chance that it may not be reasonable. After the initial response you have the chance to work on it and this is the point where we can apply tools. In meetings participants practice this exercise by describing in a concisely reported fashion, first their initial response to a difficult situation, then their conscious efforts to understand and manage their responses. This formula allows us to learn new automatic responses over time, we effectively are changing our past conditioning. After successive attempts to understand our initial response and decide which parts must be addressed and which parts must be ignored we can reduce our tendency to see troubling situations as emergencies, and we can take the time to accept and understand our own reactions as average.


More Information

The Physical Response to a Fight or Flight Impulse

The Biology of Depressions Vicious Cycle

Feelings are Not Facts

Emotional Intelligence and Sales Resistance

"Emotional Intelligence" is a term that seems to define itself, and without thinking too hard about it we have a sense of what it probably means. We've all known individuals who are cool under pressure, tend to understand us, don't fly off the handle easily and are approachable, reasonable and expressive. We think of them as warm and being together, working well with others, and able to lead, follow, or compromise in all sorts of difficult interpersonal situations. There is a 2009 book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, written by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, which provides a detailed definition of the term, and backs up most of its claims by pointing to an Internet EQ test (Emotional intelligence Quotient self-assessment test). Once you purchase their book you can learn your own EQ score by taking the test and find areas to focus on improving. This test has been taken by hundreds of thousands of individuals and the aggregated results, according to the authors, have provided enormous insights into the usefulness of working on improving your EQ. In the first chapter the authors write:

People who develop their EQ tend to be successful on the job because the two go hand in hand. Naturally, people with high EQs make more money--an average of $29,000 more per year than people with low EQs. The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every increase in EQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven't yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren't tied closely to EQ. In order to be successful and fulfilled nowadays, you must learn to maximize your EQ skills, for those who employ a unique blend of reason and feeling achieve the greatest results. The remainder of this book will show you how to make this happen.

The preceding description leaves me feeling, hopeful- that my high EQ score will translate into 10s of thousands of dollars of extra pay per year. It also leaves me feeling a little suspicious because this pitch really sounds like a make-money-fast advertisement. This book is primarily addressed to managers who want to improve their own performance and that of their work groups. I spent a number of years working for a junior corporate manager who talked about "passion" for software development, the importance of developing my own "personal-brand" and of being ready for "change". This kind of talk often comes across as being not entirely sincere whenever I encounter it these days.

It was this sort of talk about "readiness-for-change" that preceded the downsizing of the department that I used to work in. My job, and the jobs of a score of my peers were re-assigning to a team in Asia. Our group had decades of experience working together on the product and by all accounts our software was selling well and making good money for the company.  The company reorganized our division because, well... because they are a big company, and they could and somebody I've never met looked at my pay stub on a spreadsheet and figured they could hire 3 junior developers in another country for what they were paying me, who, despite lacking my years of experience would collectively fix about as many bugs as I was able to fix. That's business. So, this book engages my sales resistance and parts of it trigger my temper because talk of "passionate-synergistic-change" rings hollow for me. But, not to be thwarted by my own biases, and trying to maintain an open mind I forged ahead and read Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Briefly, here are a few of my thoughts:

Many of the ideas in this book are fine and worth thinking about. In the third chapter titled "What Emotional Intelligence Looks Like" the authors write:

The only way to genuinely understand your emotions is to spend enough time thinking through them to figure out where they come from and why they are there. Emotions always serve a purpose. Because they are your reactions to the world around you, emotions always come from somewhere. Many times emotions seem to arise out of thin air, and it's important to understand why something gets a reaction out of you. People who do this can cut to the core of a feeling quickly. Situations that create strong emotions will always require more thought, and these prolonged periods of self-reflections often keep you from doing something that you'll regret.

Self-awareness is not about discovering deep, dark secrets or unconscious motivations, but, rather, it comes from developing a straightforward and honest understanding of what makes you tick. People high in self-awareness are remarkably clear in their understanding of what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons. 

...

The need for self-awareness has never been greater. Guided by the mistaken notion that psychology deals exclusively with pathology, we assume that the only time to learn about ourselves is in the face of crisis. We tend to embrace those things with which we're comfortable, and put the blinders on the moment something makes us uncomfortable. But it's really the whole picture that serves us. The more we understand the beauty and the blemishes, the better we are able to achieve our full potential.

Emotional Intelligence is broken down by the authors into four basic categories: 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) social-awareness and 4) relationship-management. I found the first section of this book which discusses self-awareness to be the most insightful, although the other sections are also interesting. In particular for each category the book provides a list of practical strategies to work on. The self-awareness strategies discussed in this book are as follows:

1. Quit treating your feelings as Good or Bad

2. Observe the ripple effect from your emotions

3. Lean into your discomfort

4. Feel your emotions physically

5. Know who and what pushes your buttons

6. Watch yourself like a hawk

7. Keep a journal about your emotions

8. Don't be fooled by a bad mood

9. Don't be fooled by a good mood

10. Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do

11. Visit your values

12. Check yourself

13. Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music

14. Seek Feedback

15. Get to know yourself under stress

Each strategy is presented in a 2-4 page writeup and in my opinion these are all fairly reasonable strategies for improvement. In Recovery meetings we talk very explicitly about several of these principles. We focus on dealing with discomfort, not necessarily assuming that feelings are equivalent to facts, the physicality of emotions, observing our own responses to stressful situations, and learning from these encounters. I also like the notion that EQ isn't necessarily a cure for the mentally ill, but rather something that anyone can learn and practice to improve their lives.

Sales resistance is a natural response that we all have to someone trying to get our attention, especially if their goal is to engage us in some sort of cash deal. It's the bane of the cold call salesman. If you've ever had a job where you went door to door either canvasing for a charity or trying to actually sell a product you will be familiar with the phenomena. People are suspicious of strangers, and rightly so. There are lots of individuals who unscrupulously want to take our money or time in exchange for whatever, not necessarily anything we might want or need. Automatically rejecting a sales call is an average intuitive response and often a very reasonable one. While I appreciated a lot of the ideas in Emotional Intelligence 2.0 it continued to trigger my sales resistance. When taking the EQ test online the experience strongly reminded me of the talks from my past corporate manager and how she use to brag about reading far more than anyone else in the office, and claimed that her broad base of knowledge was part of the reason why she was hired and would be very successful. The books that she read were books just like Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Several of her favorites are listed as recommended reading by Bradberry and Greaves. I also appreciate that many people feel this way when they first hear about Recovery meetings. Indeed, I was quite unsure of what I would encounter at meetings before I attended. I read a lot of the primary Recovery text to try to get a sense of what Recovery meetings would be about before I went. In the preface to MHTWT Abraham Low writes:

Since Recovery places the emphasis on the self-help action of the patients, it must ignore investigations and explorations which are not within the province of inexperienced lay persons. Complexes, childhood memories, dream experiences and subconscious thought play little part in the class interviews conducted by the physician and are entirely eliminated from the self-help effort carried on by the patients. The psychoneurotic individual is considered a person who "for some reason" developed disturbing symptoms leading to ill-controlled behavior. The symptoms are in the nature of threatening sensations, "intolerable" feelings, "uncontrollable" impulses and obsessive "unbearable" thoughts. The very vocabulary with its frenzied emphasis on the "killing" headache, the dizziness that "drives me frantic," the fatigue that "is beyond human endurance" is ominously expressive of defeatism. The first step in the psychotherapeutic management of these "chronic" patients must be to convince them that the sensation can be endured, the impulse controlled, the obsession checked. Unfortunately, the physician is far from convincing. His attempt to "sell" the idea of mental health arouses the "sales resistance" of the patient. "The physician doesn't dare tell me the truth," muses the patient. "It would be against his ethics to declare me incurable." The resistance is easily overcome in the group interview. The fellow sufferer who explains how he "licked" his frightful palpitations after years of invalidism cannot possibly be suspected of trying to sell something. That "colleague" is convincing. He convinces the novice that "chronic" conditions are not hopeless.

For most of the doctors and counselors I've spoken to, and probably every self-help book I've read my sales-resistance has always been strong. Perhaps my initial reaction isn't always entirely rational, but my response to professional advice is that there must be some ulterior motive. I still maintain this perspective to some degree, in my opinion a little suspicion is healthy. I always laugh a little when I read Dr. Low's acknowledgement of this as an average disposition, and I have found that meeting individuals in a peer support setting who describe the benefits that they have attained can be quite convincing. While I think that Emotional Intelligence 2.0 says some interesting things, I'm not entirely convinced by the self-appraisal test that this book is based on.

The EQ 2.0 test is composed of a list of about 30 multiple choice questions that are blunt and completely subjective and answered with a range of "never", "sometimes" and "always". Self-reported measurements, like the EQ test, are susceptible to manipulation. I observed this first hand when taking the EQ test where if I answered "always" and "never" to appropriate questions I was easily able to generate an EQ score of 96/100 which put me in the highest category. To me this test didn't seem very objective or able to filter out my biases about my own ability. This is an issue because of the Dunning Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. If I have a low EQ, when asked a question like "Do I understand what others are really thinking?" I might honestly answer always! regardless of whether or not that is actually the case. If you think you have a high EQ you will do well on this test. If you think you have a low EQ you will do poorly. In my opinion you might as well just answer the question- rate yourself between 40 and 100 on your EQ. I took the test twice- first with the idea that I was an average person, but for my second trail I assumed that I was an expert. Some of my scores are reported below:

Wikipedia summarizes a collection of criticisms of Emotional Intelligence. From the Wikipedia page:

Landy distinguishes between the "commercial wing" and "the academic wing" of the EI movement, basing this distinction on the alleged predictive power of EI as seen by the two currents. According to Landy, the former makes expansive claims on the applied value of EI, while the latter is trying to warn users against these claims. As an example, Goleman (1998) asserts that "the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. ...emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership". In contrast, Mayer (1999) cautions "the popular literature's implication—that highly emotionally intelligent people possess an unqualified advantage in life—appears overly enthusiastic at present and unsubstantiated by reasonable scientific standards." Landy further reinforces this argument by noting that the data upon which these claims are based are held in "proprietary databases", which means they are unavailable to independent researchers for reanalysis, replication, or verification. Thus, the credibility of the findings cannot be substantiated in a scientific way, unless those datasets are made public and available for independent analysis.

Having pointed out these concerns with Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I'm not saying that this book isn't worth reading or that we can't learn better self and social management from the authors. I think we can learn these skills and I think the ideas in the book are good, although not necessarily for the reasons that the authors say that they are good. The "research" described by the authors seems questionable to me at best but that doesn't necessarily mean that all their ideas are wrong. Their motives seem to be fairly plain, they want to sell their Emotional Intelligence training programs to businesses, and present it in the most positive light possible to maximize interest in their product. I don't regret buying their book, they have some good ideas, I'm just pointing out that their approach may not be as shiny as they claim.

If you ever wonder about my motives for writing these blog pages they are also fairly simple: after years of attending Recovery meetings and watching my improvement and the improvement of the other attendees, I really want our group to thrive, and I want other people to have some ideas about what we are doing. I'm not an expert, I don't put my name on this blog, or collect any income from the group. I'm just a regular guy who has attended these meetings for years and found them helpful. In these blog pages I try to connect what we do in meetings with other self-help ideas that you may have heard of so you can make your own decision about whether or not what helped me might help you. I want to see the groups in Hamilton and the surrounding area grow and be well known. We have several good dedicated leaders in the area who provide their time voluntarily, and if you ask them why they continue to run meetings they all say the same thing; they have benefited from the program, they believe in the program, and by hosting meetings they receive support and help from the other members. We recognize that new attendees feel sales resistance, and that is average and okay. We hope that you will give our meetings a chance and find the same benefit from them that we have found.


More Information

The Imposter Syndrome, Competency, Self-Esteem and Rejection

Narcissism Self Esteem and Humility

Games People Play