Ask people where fear comes from and most will picture a frightening parent, one who shouted or hit. But fear does not need a parent like that. What matters is not whether somebody frightening was in the room, but whether the child was properly looked after. A child who does not get proper care from a parent is left with fear, even if nobody ever hit him or shouted at him. For a child, not being looked after is in itself a frightening situation. What I want to follow here is what that fear does next.
A country at war
Once fear has settled into a person, the world starts to feel cold and harsh. How do people behave when the world feels like that? They behave the way people do in a country at war. The moment war breaks out, everybody slips into the same state of mind, a paranoid state: people start suspecting each other and stay on guard so as not to be the one who gets hurt. Law and order fall apart, and life is in real danger of sliding back into a primitive, lawless state. One thing produced all of that. Fear did.
The people who commit crimes are people shaking with fear. A person does not become a criminal because he is bad. His crime is the desperate cry of someone struggling to survive, and that cry is what wounds the people around him. This piece follows how the fear a person was made to feel changes direction and ends up aimed at somebody else.
Fear stays inside as one sentence: “Something was done to me”
Being exposed to something frightening is recorded inside a person as a single sentence: Something was done to me. That is the feeling he carries with him from then on.
And people repeat what they have lived through. Good or bad, it gets repeated. So the more fear a person felt as a child, the better he gets at making other people afraid once he is grown and has some strength of his own. He does not stay on the receiving end. The direction flips: the one who was frightened becomes the one who frightens others.
The man who rang only women when he was drunk
There was a case like this: a man addicted to alcohol. Once he was properly drunk he would ring women. He hardly ever rang men. What the women on the other end of the line felt was fear, the kind that sends a chill right through you. Written down, his words would look like ordinary conversation. What frightened them was the sense of threat that came off him, even over the phone. After one of his calls, they were afraid he might turn up in person. That is how strongly one person can pass fear on to another.
As a child, this man had been on the receiving end of just as much fear himself.
He does not mean to frighten anyone
This is the point that matters. He is not handing out fear on purpose. He does not decide to frighten someone and then go and do it. When an old experience repeats itself, it happens unconsciously, without his being aware of it. As far as he knows, he is simply expressing himself, and the way he expresses himself terrifies the people he talks to. In fact, all violence and all destruction come out of the experience of having been frightened.
“It was taken from me, so I have to get it back”
Alongside fear there is a second thing at work: deprivation. Deprivation here does not mean never having had something. It means that something good, such as a parent’s care, was given early on and then taken away.
The feeling of having been robbed creates a very strong urge to get back what was lost. The thinking goes: it was taken from me, so I have every right to take it back. But taking it back can turn into stealing, or someone can get hurt along the way. And what he feels he has a right to take is not only things. For a man it can be women, one after another; for a woman, men. Deprivation also leaves an empty space where the thing that was taken used to be, and he tries to fill it. As he does, greed gets stirred up too, so he ends up taking more than he lost.
Seen from outside, he is plainly intruding on other people, and what he does is violent. But to someone who has been deprived, it feels justified. He does not come up with excuses after he has done it; it already feels right before he does it.
When the brain’s alarm is on, even kind words cannot get in
Back to fear, and to what it does in the body. People are told to stay calm and find some peace of mind, and for good reason: when we are calm, we do not turn aggressive. You can see why in the brain. Deep in the middle of the brain sits a part called the amygdala. It works as an alarm: it sends out the fear signal. Its message is: you are in danger right now, so choose quickly — attack, run, or freeze and do not move. It puts the whole body on high alert. In that state there is no calm left in a person, and no room to take in anything else.
And while that alarm is going, nothing anyone says gets in — not even kind words. Whether it is a husband and wife talking or someone being criticised, the person whose alarm is on stops trying to understand what the other is actually saying. Let somebody criticise you, and all you can think about is how to hit back.
Wanting to hit back when you are criticised is normal for any human being
This reaction is not an illness. It is simply how any normal human being reacts. So if you want to get through to someone, do not criticise him. Criticism sets off his alarm, and from then on he is only thinking about how to hit back. Talk it through with him instead; that is how the two of you actually reach each other. And even when you are not criticising, your words carry a tone. If the tone is aggressive, the other person picks it up at once and starts responding aggressively, whatever the words themselves were.
Related
- Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.
- They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board