Under Construction

So here’s a thought: our fears are learned. 

I’m still not sure I know the root of my arachnophobia although I can recount several instances where the loathsome creature scared the snot out me.

John B. Watson really gave us a lot of insight into this sort of thing even though poor little Albert was never the same.  Whether it is a creepy crawly thing, a person, or any other unconditioned stimulus, because it was somewhere along the way connected with what is often a negative stimulus, we thus learned (and learn) our fears.  Some are insignificant while others hinder our lives in greater ways than we most likely realize often because we’ve lived with them for so long.  Once the responses of these conditioned stimuli are internalized we find ourselves overreacting to what anyone else would let roll off their back. An example from my own life follows:

The sound of a garage door opening – harmless, right?  No cause for fear or any kind of emotion or reaction for that matter.  It is a neutral, or unconditioned stimulus.  However, when repeatedly paired with a negative stimulus (my dad’s daily belittling, interrigating, predictably unpredictable anger) my response then become conditioned.

This conditioning doesn’t have to be negative.  For one person a garage opening might mean dad is coming home: he will walk in smiling with arms open to give and receive the love from his child he’s missed all day while away at work.  Thus the garage opening means love, safety, warmth, happiness. 

For me the garage door opening meant dad is coming home: he will walk in with a frown on his angry, weary, wounded  face to his child who inevitably screwed something up in the two hours she’s been home from school.  There is a glass on the kitchen counter; the dishwasher hasn’t been unloaded; the marks the vacuum leaves on the carpet are perceived to give the impression that the carpet was not thoroughly cleaned; and the TV is on.  One or a combination of these dreadful things results in a rarely comprehensible degrading of the daughter he’s been away from all day, yet clearly has not missed. Thus, the sound of a garage door opening elicits, to this day, a sense of dread, of fear that rises up from the depths of my being as I scurry around to check (although I have a hundred times already) if things are just in order the way I think he might like them today. 

I hope that one day I can be reconditioned to feel excitement, love, and security when a garage door opening means my husband is coming home to greet me with a hug, a kiss, and genuine, “I missed you. How was your day, baby?”  

It isn’t so hard to understand PTSD after all.  Never judge ones seemingly irrational or hypersensitive reaction to an event, person, or circumstance by your own neutrality to the situation.  One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that people do things for reasons. What if, instead of making judgements or telling them to “get over it because it’s not that big a deal” we sought to understand where they’re coming from and walk alongside them in their fear (or anger, or sadness or whatever it may be) we could become the new “stimulus” to that fear (etc.)?  What if we could, by our love and understanding, recondition what was so traumatic in ones life to something positive, and bring peace?  That is part of what good therapy can do, but ultimately that is what our relationship with God does – if only we give Him the chance.

What fears have you learned?  What are you doing to help alleviate someone else’s?

“Do not hold strong opinions about things you do not understand, or wish to understand.”