3 FEAR

FEAR

The FEAR system, like the other primal emotional systems, behaves like the sinews and muscles of our bodies. The more they are used, the stronger they become. And you don’t have to get up and exercise to work fears. Unattended, they roil and fester in your brain. But you can counter and even use fears to become stronger by being aware without ruminating. You do this through attention therapies like Insight Meditation, Ki Breathing Meditation, and Open Focus.

This primal-affect system runs from the periaqueductal gray (PAG) to the amygdala and back again, passing through the hypothalamus, basically, the same route as the RAGE system. When suddenly aroused, the system produces terror, and it promotes chronic anxiety in response to milder, more sustained arousal. 

When fear stimuli are far away, the higher cognitive or tertiary parts of the brain, such as the medial frontal cortex are aroused.

FEAR System

But when a fearful situation is right before you, then the lower regions of circuitry, especially in the midbrain PAG, take over. These unconditional lower circuits are what compel the mouse to take flight or freeze.

Panksepp demonstrated this innate objectless system by electrically stimulating the PAG  area of the brain of rats who never experienced pain or danger or early trauma. This direct stimulation arouses fear itself. Like the other six prime-affect systems, it is at first objectless and becomes connected to the outside world through learning. In other words, evolution created the capacity for fearfulness in the brain but did not (and could not) inform us of the things we might need to fear and avoid. These things have to be learned.

We are like other animals in that our FEAR system is designed to anticipate bad things, but we go beyond other animals in creating fears for ourselves beyond the imagination of any other species. Our imaginations run wild with all kinds of phantoms that can be set off just by being alone in the dark.

We don’t have to think deeply to find moments in our lives when we were consumed with fear, especially when we were young. I recall lying on my bed in my bedroom and suddenly bathed in fear when I realized I was going to die. I don’t mean die then, but I came to the sudden realization of my mortality. I was only five and never had experienced anyone dying. But again the fear was so terrifyingly vivid that I can picture the scene now in my eighties as clear as lying back in my childhood bedroom right now.

Trauma

The FEAR system becomes hypersensitized when we have been traumatized, especially as a very young child. At birth, FEAR is objectless and can be activated by only a very few unconditioned stimuli such as pain. But when traumatized, fearful memories build that can be triggered by previously neutral events.

Trauma can produce an over-responsive FEAR system in all mammals, especially in cases of early trauma. Any trauma gradually penetrates the soul. When mixtures of pure FEAR connect to learned fears, you may develop PTSD. As your emotional system becomes oversensitized, you may begin to experience the debilitating agony of FEAR itself, sometimes spiraling into out-of-control panic attacks and persistent feelings of anxiety that gnaw at your sense of security.

Not only humans experience PTSD. All mammals can be afflicted with PTSD because we all have very similar ancient FEAR systems. Harry Harlow’s infamous experiments with rhesus macaque monkeys deprived of maternal love from early on produced monkeys that were psychotically fearful for the rest of their lives.

Harlow’s Macaque Monkeys

I gained insight–not solutions–into my problems when I read Harry Harlow’s experiments with macaque monkeys. I had virtually experienced his Pit of Despair for the first several years of my life. The stress was intense, incessant and at some point early childhood, I was aware that it must be doing damage.

Having lived from 1905-1981, Harry Harlow grew up when psychologists, psychiatrists, even the US government warned of the dire consequences of affectionate coddling and mothering. Harlow’s research with rhesus macaque monkeys set out to disprove the steely behaviorists’ thinking and end an era. He set out to show that an expressed loving relationship is important between a mother and her infant child.

Out of context, this sounds absurd. But through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, most psychologists and pediatricians denied a beneficial relationship between mother and child other than offering food. Many professionals in the field of child development were saying that a physical demonstration of motherly love was harmful to the young child’s emotional development. This view held strong through the 1940s.

Attempting to show that motherly love was needed in child-rearing was a hard stance for a psychologist starting his career in 1930. After one year at Stanford University, Harlow relocated to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and was given a small office in the basement of a building with no lab for his work. He finally persuaded the university to give him a lab in an old building and spent twenty-five years working with the learning abilities of rhesus macaque monkeys.

In the 1950s Harlow began his iconoclastic experiments, the ones that would show the world that mothers are not seen by their offspring as mere food sources. He took a group of newborn rhesus macaque babies and put them in a cage with two surrogate mothers. One of these substitute mothers was constructed of wire mesh and the other of wood covered with sponge rubber and covered again with tan, soft terry cloth. Hidden behind the terry-cloth mother, a 100 watt light bulb radiated warmth. Both the wire mesh and terry-cloth mothers were the same height and width.

For one of the experiments, one group of monkeys received milk from the wire mother, and the other group received milk from the terry-cloth mother. According to the theories of the time, the wire fed babies should have bonded to the wire-mother surrogate and the terrycloth fed babies should have bonded to the terrycloth-mother surrogate. But both groups spent the most time with the warmer terry-cloth mother whether or not she was feeding them. So something other than the milk they were receiving attracted them to the warm, cuddly terry-cloth mother.

These experiments are what Harlow described in his talk at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association on August 31, 1958, and first published in American Psychologist,13, 573-685.

Isolation Chamber – Wikipedia

At this APA meeting, however, Harlow did not report the experiments he conducted that involved isolating and abusing the monkeys. Harlow referred to these experiments as “Pit of Despair.” 

This was a vertical chamber apparatus with a stainless steel trough and sides that sloped to a rounded bottom with a wire mesh one inch above the bottom. Waste material fell through the wire mesh and drained out of holes drilled in the stainless steel. The top of this pit was also covered with wire mesh. A small mirror allowed experimenters to look in, but the monkey could not look out.

After allowing the rhesus monkeys to bond with their natural mothers, Harlow placed monkeys between three months and three years old into the Pit of Despair alone for up to ten weeks. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to climb up the cold slippery steel sides. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. Most never recovered.

Other monkeys were placed in these steel containers soon after birth and left there from thirty days to a year. After thirty days in the container, they were incapable of having sexual relations. When placed with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death.

Other of Harlow’s experiments involved taking the terry-cloth mothers that the monkeys bonded with and turning them into evil mothers. Some had the terry cloth mother’s breast area that held the milk bottle, rigged to shoot blunt spikes at the clinging infant monkey. Some of the terry-cloth moms shook so violently the infant was severely shaken up. Other terry cloth mothers were spring-loaded and violently threw the clinging baby away.

Terry-cloth mother

What happened when the spikes stopped shooting or the violent shaking stopped was that the babies kept coming back to cling to the mother. They had been comforted by and bonded with this terry-cloth mother and this was their only source of refuge. So the terry cloth mother was now loving and evil by turns.

Harlow and his researchers concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it lasted less than 90 days. He estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred.

Throughout his life, Harry Harlow experienced bouts of depression. At school, he did not fit in. He (and I) grew up when psychologists discouraged “an overly loving” mother. His mother, he wrote in his partly finished autobiography, was not a warm woman. In the early 1970s around the time his wife died of breast cancer, he had a series of electroshock treatments.

Survival Fear

Rats are instinctively afraid of cats. The odor of cats sets off their FEAR system, even if they have never seen a cat before. Recognition of certain threatening external stimuli becomes encoded in the brain-building DNA of their ancestors, yielding innate fears of stimuli that caused pain or forewarned of danger. The innate capacity of rats to fear the smell of cats promotes survival because the inherited FEAR system motivates them to hide and freeze and flee if the cats get close.

It works this way in humans, too. After his first professional match, a one-round knockout over Hector Mercedes, Mike Tyson was asked by a reporter, “Were you concerned when that bell rang and you saw this big man coming at you?”

“No, I was not concerned, I was afraid. No normal boxer can enter the ring fearless. Fear is a friend of every good and reasonable athlete.”

We don’t want to give up all fears. Like Mike Tyson, we need to be aware and use FEAR protectively.

Breathing

Breathing becomes faster and so you inhale more when you are in a panicky fearful state. Your heart rate increases and you shift into a sympathetic state of fight, flight. ready to lash out or escape. This is good when you encounter a wild animal, but we no longer encounter wild beasts so often. But some people remain in this sympathetic state and you do not want to block their care on the highway. But it is a miserable life-shortening  long-term state.

I spent much of my life in this stressed-out state and it was not until my fifties that I finally found relief in Ki Breathing Meditation. I practice it every day now and it makes a profound difference. I spend more time in a relaxed parasympathetic state that for me is a different existence.

Video: Ki Breathing Meditation

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body