Sympathising with someone else’s irrational fear can be a lot to ask. But it is exactly what is needed right now.
Sympathising with someone else’s seemingly irrational fear can be a lot to ask. But it is exactly what is needed right now.
Clear blue skies, a warm breeze, and I was steering a catamaran across sparkling, azure water. Heaven. It was day 1 of a Whitsunday Island holiday with three good mates. But then that afternoon, once safely harboured, I came down with a nasty case of gastro. My friends, all doctors, snapped into action: they isolated me as far away as is possible on a 12-metre vessel. That night, with the boat as still as a picture, they slept, and I heaved.
The following morning I was no better, but we decided to weigh anchor anyway. An hour after setting sail, the sea suddenly turned an inky black, and storm clouds appeared out of nowhere. Picking up speed, the wind made that screeching noise out of the shower scene from Psycho. The boat pitched and bucked like an angry bronco, making my poor, inflamed intestines do likewise. Giant waves smashed over us, the mainsail flapped madly and I watched, with increasing horror, as the coastline retreated into the distance.
The thing that scared me the most wasn’t the certainty that I was about to drown. It was that I wouldn’t see my wife and kids again (I try to keep that in mind whenever I’m instructed to change shirts before going out, or when I discover dirty dishes under our teenagers’ beds). It was a fear so real I could actually taste it, a sour metal taste, that still comes to mind even now on recollection. My mates, on the other hand, were singing the theme song to Gilligan’s Island and having the time of their lives.
As my life (and lunch) flashed before my eyes, my mind replayed our firstborn’s delivery. I’d seen plenty of births as a medical student, so thought I was well prepared. But hubris is a power humbler; I was a mess. My wife was howling in an unreachable world of pain, there were body fluids everywhere – some of which I couldn’t even recognise – as our tiny baby struggled to make her way into the world. After 30 gruelling hours, mother and baby were finally able to meet and rest comfortably; I, on the other hand, required a cold compress.
When she fell pregnant again, now with full knowledge of the pain of childbirth, I asked my wife how she was not terrified. “You’re not a woman,” she replied. “You’ve never had a baby. You could never understand.” All true, and I’m in awe of her. But ask her to reconfigure our wi-fi modem and watch the blood drain from her face – that’s because everyone has their own personal kaleidoscope of fears. Importantly, it is the perceived threat, the subjective interpretation of the situation, that drives the fear. Logic need not be involved – messing up a modem’s setting really can’t cause much damage but squeezing a newborn out of a birth canal looks unfathomably painful. Yet some people find the former more petrifying, which goes to show that logic and fear are only distantly related. Like second cousins at a wedding, they need not even acknowledge each other’s existence.
The disconnect between logic and fear may make someone appear irrational, ridiculous even. For the sufferer, though, their worry is as real and as present as any of yours or mine. They are easy to ridicule – unless you’re able to put aside logic and focus on what the person is feeling. Empathising with another’s anxiety without validating illogical connections, while conversely not minimising their feelings is a difficult balance. Parents do it all the time when their kids are scared of the dark, but then we somehow forget how to do it for our partner and other adults.
Sometimes fear can make people behave like a wounded animal – desperate and dangerous. I’ve seen this and watched as observers shake their head in disapproval. But if we can see beyond the shrieking and flailing then we might begin to see what is driving
THEIR WORRY IS AS REAL AS ANY OF YOURS.
it. Again, this is what we do to calm hysterical kids, and, again, we might forget how to do it for grown-ups because we think grown-ups should know better; they are supposed to be more logical (but remember, logic sits at a different table).
Fortunately, my catamaran voyage ended well. My friends managed to galvanise their boating skills on the spot, and afterwards, the four of us were closer because of the experience.
So, what drove my paralysing fear on the boat? I’m an experienced sailor and had navigated that stretch of water before but I was unable to physically drag myself to the helm to take the wheel. Dehydrated and dizzy from constant puking, I had no control. I’d lost the capacity to make an impact on the situation. And that is the other thing about fear; it loves taking away control. It feeds off our sense of powerlessness, is emboldened by it. Fear pulls off this great magic trick by making us believe that because we have no control, it does.
We are in uncertain times. Our authority over our domains isn’t what it used to be in terms of our jobs, our health, our loved ones’ welfare, or our ability to do what we want each day. We awake each morning to a world that can seem surreal, unfamiliar, turbulent, as if we’re caught in a storm and unsure of when or how or if we are ever going to return home.
Our individual concerns may be different. And how we express them will be as be myriad as there are personalities. Friends and family may seem unrecognisable to us. Not all their fears will appear entirely logical. But now more than ever we need to be kinder, more tolerant, more understanding. More empathic.
We will reach the shore and it will be a different place to where we left. But when we return, like me and my mates, we will be more united, wiser and stronger as a community.
VISIT MiNDFOOD.COM
In times like these, it’s normal to feel worried and concerned at ‘missing out’. Dr Mary Grogan explains this fear of missing out, or FOMO, and looks at the ways we can manage it. mindfood.com/reduce-fomo