Fear and PTSD

Overall, once a person has become an adult he may be normal in some situations (where self-pity is absent), but in other situations he may be fragile (when self-pity rises in the background of his mind). Often in old age the will (or will power) becomes weak, with the result that self-pity can become dominant in the subconscious mind, thus creating fragility. For such people the result is that they become both psychologically and physically frail. This mirrors childhood fragility: as a child, especially around the time of puberty (which increases the intensity of psychological stressors), I often thought of myself as a weakling, giving up very easily when faced with a difficult or unpleasant task.

Fragility is caused by acute psychological trauma, such as being rejected by a parent or by someone that the person has faith in. The trauma induces intense self-pity so that it creates a state of shock. The self-pity is far greater in intensity than the ordinary levels of self-pity which the average child experiences in its childhood. When the self-pity becomes intense enough the child reaches breaking point – its will breaks. The child may not be able to do anything except lay on the floor and wail and cry for a long time, as self-pity engulfs it. Breaking the will means annulling all reasons for using the will.

The breaking of the child’s will has the effect of de-stabilising the ego and creating the potential for future episodes of mental disorder. The child becomes unable to handle in a competent way the kind of relationship that broke its will. It will become afraid of facing such situations again. In other aspects of life that do not feature the disruptive relationship, then the child can act in competent ways.

For example, assume that the breaking of the will was due to the child feeling rejected by the parent. The result will be that as it grows up into an adult, the person is likely to be wary of entering into an intense emotional relationship with anyone in case it gets rejected by that person. The fragile person may try to override its inhibitions by generating a state of excitement so that it can initially engage with the other person in an emotional relationship, but then finds, when the excitement wears off, that it cannot handle the normal difficulties that emotional relationships produce. Any strong disagreements or suggestion of rejection or threatening behaviour from the other person will usually end the relationship very quickly.

The fragile adult may be able to establish normal relationships with other people at a superficial level, but may find that becoming involved in intense relationships confuses it and it may feel that it has become trapped in an unrewarding situation. Intensity in a relationship will mean for it that all its emotional difficulties that it had with its parents will emerge into the relationship and take the limelight.

Form and Content

There is another way to look at vulnerability, using the theme of form and content. Significant problems that were created in our childhood are a mixture of psychological and psychic difficulties: psychological difficulties make us sensitive and the psychic difficulties make us fragile. Within this format, I make a generalisation.

Psychic difficulties produce the form; psychological difficulties produce the content.

The form is the particular kind of problem that the child experienced. The content is all the occasions when this problem was felt and all the negative interpretations that the child made about his distress. The negative interpretations magnify the child’s sensitivity to negative moods.

Suitable psychological therapy can resolve the psychological factors and reduce the level of sensitivity. At present there is no reliable method of treating the psychic factors. However, the resolution of the psychological factors makes psychic difficulties easier to manage.

PTSD

Experiences of fear and fragility can happen to a mature adult at any age. The emotions may be intense enough to generate trauma. Adult trauma may occur as a completely new trauma, or it may occur because the distressing situation mirrors in some ways a similar childhood situation that had caused trauma. If the latter possibility is true, then the present trauma is really a replay of that childhood trauma.

How may trauma happen to the adult? He finds himself in a negative situation that is well beyond his comfort zone. Shock cracks the boundaries of the ego, preventing the containment of the negativity. He may feel defenceless or under attack. In my view, the modern classification of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is just a particular version of vulnerability. If a child experienced fragility and/or fear, then once it has become an adult it becomes more sensitive to a re-occurrence of a similar state than if it had not been vulnerable in childhood.

There is the possibility that soldiers in war zones who later experience long-term post traumatic stress disorder may have experienced some degree of vulnerability in their childhood (especially if their father was a bully or an authoritarian, or even a religious puritan).

Perhaps most soldiers will experience some kind of battle shock, ranging from mild to serious. Some significant feature of a battle situation may mirror the cause of a childhood trauma: for example, the soldier may be forced to stay in a situation which is unsafe and terrifying, just as he had to do in his childhood days. Then afterwards, if anything makes him feel that he is under attack again, intense self-pity and fear may erupt into his normal consciousness, creating a fast-onset PTSD episode.

I have experienced episodes of sheer terror during my psycho-analysis, but that terror was unrelated to anything I experienced in childhood. So those episodes never caused any lasting trauma to me. Therefore I assume that soldiers who take a very long time to recover from PTSD have experienced trauma in their childhood whilst those who recover relatively quickly have probably not.

PTSD indicates that the person has become extremely vulnerable. The two factors of vulnerability can give rise to different effects when flashbacks occur. The fear factor may push the person into going on a rampage of violence or he may build himself a fortress against the world. The self-pity factor may result in the person spending months staring at blank walls, or just lying on his bed staring at the ceiling most of the day.

Fragility is more difficult to treat than any other factor of confusion.
Sensitivity can be managed. Ordinary fear can be overcome. Fragility remains.

I consider that my episodes of the little red monkey and catatonia were examples of PTSD [¹]. In the mid-1990s, when I was unemployed for a long time and under extreme distress for much of that time, I often spent weeks on end overwhelmed by self-pity and desolation, spending most of the time lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. Otherwise when I felt fragility arising in me, I went into defensive-thinking mode, muttering the mantra “batten down the hatches”. In this situation, since the person cannot assert himself, one way that he can get some comfort is to keep refusing all demands on himself that are made by others – he just keeps saying No.

Fear

A basic idea to grasp about the mind is that it likes to pair things, such as issues and emotions. So, for example, what you love, you also hate. This pairing acts like a see-saw, with the conscious mind and the subconscious mind being the two opposing ends. Hence, if you consciously like something, then you also subconsciously dislike it. And if you consciously dislike something, then also you subconsciously like it. The liking and disliking have equal intensities.

One important pair is that of fear and excitement. What I fear consciously will also excite me subconsciously. Under certain conditions, the mind switches its values, so that the conscious/subconscious pairing gets reversed. Then what happens is that I consciously like what I used to consciously dislike. I describe, in the article Domination and Submission, what happens when I reverse my feelings towards authoritarian men and women. Instead of fearing dominant persons, I get excited by being submissive to them. This is a feature of abreaction, in that abreaction reverses values. This reversal is usually transient, but under special conditions it can have a lasting effect.

Additionally, when a person has experienced a deep trauma, later on any sudden and rapid stimulus that causes a rising of fear is likely to trigger flashbacks. This is particularly noticeable in people with PTSD.

We usually think of fear as a negative emotion.
However, fear can have positive aspects to it. I list some of these.

a). Fear is an internal control and makes me adhere to rules of acceptable behaviour. The rules help me to manage psychological confusion and prevent me doing to people the negative things that were done to me.

b). It deepens sensitivity, both to oneself and to other people. Creativity is also enhanced by the increased sensitivity.

c). It makes a person cautious and restrained within his relationships, by minimising self-importance.

d). It enhances subjective states of mind and hence introversion, thereby decreasing the relative importance of objectivity.

The main disadvantage of long-term fear is that it increases the impact that other negative states of mind have. The corollary also holds: by accepting life and all its ups and downs, the intensity of fear is also reduced, thereby reducing the intensity of psychic pain too. The hallmark of significantly reduced fear is that the person can now feel good about himself, perhaps for the first time in years or even in decades. This feel-good effect denotes narcissism in love mode [²]. Until a person feels good about himself, he cannot feel good about other people.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I give an example of an historical illustration of the effect of fragility on the adult. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went insane for the last few years of his life. I have never read a satisfactory account of why this happened. It happened fairly instantaneously and so was a fast-onset trauma, and hence could not have been caused by anything other than psychological factors.

According to one account of how it started, he observed a peasant beating an overloaded mule. Then Nietzsche collapsed into madness. Assuming that this incident is true, then I interpret it in this way. He had been experiencing a great deal of resentment and bitterness for the past few years, during his exploration of the subconscious mind. Hence many of his anecdotes in his books have the flavour of that resentment and bitterness. His analysis of the dreariness of Christian morality, as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, reflected his analysis of his own Protestant upbringing, his own religious conditioning. So the badness he saw in Christianity represented the badness he saw in his own subconscious mind. He was plagued by physical symptoms that were probably psycho-somatic, such as his extreme short-sightedness (I am short-sighted as well). So when he saw an ignorant peasant beating a defenceless animal, it summed up everything he considered to be unfair about reality. It summed up everything that the Nietzschean superman Zarathustra was supposed to be free of. At that moment the sheer futility of his long struggles to master his mind swamped his mind with self-pity and broke his will. He gave up, and descended into catatonia, though occasionally switching into paranoia. I assume that he experienced fragility in his childhood due to the rigid Protestant beliefs of his father.

In 2012, during my 60s, in a completely different situation I fell off a short ladder and broke the heel of my left foot and injured my spine. The pain was beyond belief. A few days later my will was broken by the overwhelming feeling of the total unfairness of my spiritual journey and the futility of my struggles in life. I just lay on the floor and moaned and wailed for about quarter of an hour. I call that episode my Nietzsche moment. I did not go mad; I used Stoicism to handle it. I consider that it mirrored the original fast-onset trauma of my early childhood which turned me into a life-long rebel against authority. A long time afterwards, I realised that my wailing was a primal scream, [³], representing my poor relationship to my higher self, since it was my higher self which set up the conditions that caused my foot to break. [ Beginning around 1993, I spent two decades in conflict with my higher self – these were years of profound misery for me].

Resilience

Some children are more resilient to trauma than other children. I suggest that the dominant trauma suffered by resilient children is that of denigration, instead of excessive punishment or rejection. Denigration centres on the induction of jealousy (self-pity mode), rather than that of fear or self-pity, and only produces slow-onset trauma. The slow onset enables the child to adapt to the trauma, which is not as devastating as fast-onset trauma.[4]

When a child lacks resilience, he tends to give up very easily when things go wrong with him, when difficulties become too big to cope with. The reason for this is that when fear and self-pity become dominant in the subconscious mind, they tend to reduce the flow of nervous energy through the body, thereby making it very hard work to attain anything. Only in situations where these emotions are not involved can the person be energetic. For comparison, guilt (in self-pity mode) has the effect of reducing the nervous energy required to do intellectual work, so sometimes I fall asleep when reading; additionally, jealousy (self-pity mode) tends to produce a mood that dislikes making mental efforts – any mental work that is done will be dull.

However, even in situations that do not feature fear, the regular repetition of abreaction over the years acts as a slow process that gradually depletes energy and erodes resilience.

The person’s inability to take criticism is another indication that trauma focused on denigration and fault-finding. The person may become very abusive when criticising his critics (like Galileo and Lenin [5], and it also used to be relevant to some extent to me).

If trauma through denigration is the main sadness in childhood, then it can lead to a noticeable consequence. To bypass the jealousy (self-pity mode) induced in him, he can switch his interests to the forbidden, to the risqué features of life. He can establish a new and exciting identity as the explorer of the forbidden. An example is the life of the 19th century orientalist Richard Burton, who helped translate and publish erotic Arabic texts like the Kama Sutra. Hence there is one route whereby a traumatised child can develop more resilience. That is by becoming a rebel. By being a rebel, the person effectively creates a new identity for himself, one that is not based on trauma. The person desires to be his own idealised self, independently of how others would like him to be. Rebelliousness acts as a by-pass mechanism to fear and self-pity, allowing more nervous energy to flow.

[¹]. Catatonia and the Little Red Monkey are described in the article Childhood Trauma. [1]

[4]. Slow-onset trama and fast-onset trauma are described in the article Childhood Trauma. [4]

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Ian Heath
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