Confusion reigns! I watched a movie yesterday in which an actress plays the role of an actress playing a role before interviewers in order to pad her acting resume. But that wasn't the thing that alarmed me. In the role, the actress claimed to have been a victim of extreme fear until she committed suicide and was revived after five minutes of death to "come back" fearless. One of the interviewers leaps up to call her a liar and strip the mask away. Very dramatic, and I'm glad the writer or director of the film stopped that nonsense before we watched a real horror begin. Imagine the trauma to the world if such a thing was reported to have worked. News cameras and their little talking heads covering thousands of victims of extreme fear lining up to be killed for a few minutes in order to return fearless...not good. Extreme solutions to our problems may sound good in a movie, but let's not go there, please.
Is fearless the answer to our problem? At first glance, to cure a fear or anxiety disorder via taking away all fear fits the bill nicely. However, fear is not always a problem. When we speak of fear as a caution, such as not fearlessly placing a hand on the hot burner of the kitchen range, then we have a fear that we want and need for our survival, or at least the survival of the skin of a hand or two. I once fearlessly placed the end of my finger into a car cigarette lighter. I had watched my mother do it before that, in case you asked. Adults know how to skim a finger over a surface quickly to avoid a burn, kids do not. Of course, the lighter 'lit' the end of my finger, though not enough for me to smoke it. I calmly placed the lighter somewhere on the floor of the car, exited the vehicle in a slightly anxious manner, and made it to the kitchen sink after running over one cat and taking the screen door off its hinges. As I ran cold water over my still sizzling digit, I got chewed out for dropping a hot cigarette lighter on the carpeting in the car; the vacuum of my departure evidently failing to clear the hot little beast from the car entirely.
Another kind of fear is closer to the point. The fear played on in the horror movies I watched yesterday that is, or fear of the uncanny as C.S. Lewis named it. Supernatural fear or fear of the ghost in the next room is what I speak of here. These days, thanks to reality television, some of us run in fear from a report of a ghost, others run to see it. The reason such a thing is uncanny is that a ghost should not be seen at all. A thing that does not exist should have the courtesy to not be visible to us. If the thing reflects light and is seen by the naked eye - clothed eyes being somewhat difficult to see with - then it exists. If the thing is 'seen' by our mind or soul, then why do our eyes (or camera) need to be pointed in its direction? And for that matter, why should it be more visible in less light? Uncanny that. I'm not sure we can cure that sort of fear, but it may bear a likeness to the fear we do want to remove.
The fears that arise from mental illness are phantoms in their own way. Anxiety shows us future visions that never come to pass. PTSD flashbacks show us visions of what was and is no more. Certainly, to be fearless of these sorts of visions is a goal worthy of achieving. A flash of vision back to a combat situation should not be freighted with terror for us, but it is. A view of some circumstance that is unlikely at best and impossible in most of our anxious visions should not cause avoidance of an event that should be a time of pleasure for us, but that too causes extreme fear. The vision of the mind is not real, but is it reality?
The body may rest in bed, but if the mind is walking a trail in Afghanistan, Iraq, Beirut, or Vietnam then reality is what the mind says it is. In the moment of the flashback, and the same with the intense daydream of the anxiety vision, the reality is where the body believes it is and the reactions to the fear are real. Severing the mind to body connection might provoke undesirable consequences, so that probably isn't the solution we seek. (There's your "D'oh!" for the week.) Can we make the vision fearless then? Has anyone found a cure for a nightmare?
As long as the mind drags the body along for the ride, I don't see how we can make it fearless. What we are left with is eliminating the vision, or modifying the reaction. If practice alone provided the answer, then all of us would now be experts in flashback effect modification or anxious vision reaction suppression. Unfortunately, my body continues to react to the phantoms, and fearlessness remains a dream for the movie scripts.
Bucky
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