Fear – The Most Misused Emotion
Fear is by far the most misunderstood emotion. In our conventional wisdom it is regarded far less as an emotion, and far more as a sure sign of danger that justifies instant escape, dissolving our awareness of the fear by discharging its energy in action, one form of dissociation. Another is to regard a feeling as a fact that is equivalent to reality. Such a fiction, that feelings by themselves can identify and represent reality, is regarded as borderline in mental functioning. And yet we do it every day with fear. We use the emotion of fear as motive and justification for emotional, and even physical violence.
What we seldom do with fear is to treat it entirely as an emotion, even for a while, to let its energy pass through us, in effect talking to ourselves. Feelings spontaneously emerge to grab our attention, focusing it in a particular direction, with a specific perspective that contains its own peculiar attitude. Such as a sudden feeling of sadness when it’s cloudy and cold, evoking a sense of being unprotected, exposed to hazardous elements, being trapped there – perhaps as a child in some way that produced great helplessness and fear.
Emotions simultaneously carry both small and very large experiential elements. This is nature’s way of offering small upsets that we can manage which are symbolically connected to very large hurts or traumas, almost always having occurred in childhood, brought to our attention via the feeling and its attitudes – just in case we need to remember them in order to survive or to grow psychically. In this way feelings can discover things; facts can’t.
In exploring one’s feelings, what’s most interesting to note is how a specific emotion, and its perspective fit into the whole of who we are. Viewed this way the emotion has brought us a message that probably offers some new information about ourselves, and how we relate to the spontaneous experience that triggered the feeling and its attitude. In other words, it offers us something to learn about ourselves.
Viewed as an emotion, rather than a call to action, fear is most probably the learning emotion. It tries to be, doing what’s necessary to accomplish that role – except that we frequently insist upon using it in an entirely different way, most heinously to justify violence.
This expose of how we use fear doesn’t mean that nobody treats it differently. There are lots of people who have come to realize the enormous power-potential of learning more about them selves by exploring their emotional experience. Yet in that process of discovery, fear is the hardest emotion to feel without dissolving into impulsive panicky action to try and discharge it, to get rid of it. As many wise people have said, what we fear most is fear itself – perhaps more than anything else. It’s very difficult to study something we’re afraid of.
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