The Fear of Everything
Everything has ground to a halt, and it seems impossible to imagine the light ever breaking through again. We find ourselves huddled in bed, terrified by the idea of being unable to get up, horrified by drifting through the day in a state of frozen terror, disgusted that this is what it has come to, and consumed by a self-cannibalistic, soul-chewing sense of sadness and despair.
It is as though the person we once were has been kidnapped and replaced with someone so frail and weak that they seem barely alive.
In this era of very public and published confessionals there are thousands of graphic descriptions of what depressed despair feels and looks like—the agony, the loss of self, the degradation and abject aloneness, and again that deep, visceral fear of everything. What seems to be written about or talked about less is what is happening to us physically.
At that time, we really need to know what might be possible when we have reached that place that feels bottomless—’under a frog’s arse, down a coalmine’, to use the gloriously descriptive Hungarian expression for a situation that just can’t get any worse.
What can we learn from our physical state?
Under the frog’s arse could be described as a symptom, as in that feeling of being incapable of any form of action, of even any physical movement at all.
When curled up as a foetus in the darkness, who can really judge whether the body is physically no longer able to move, or if thought is powerful enough to cause a form of temporary disability? Perhaps something else is happening and the body stops moving because the wisdom of the mind-body connection has concluded that a short-term form of paralysis will protect us from possibilities that might be too high risk for our survival. What might happen if we were to be out and about in the fast-moving world with slowed reactions, foggy thinking, our every reaction dimmed when faced with by a fast reversing lorry, a bus swinging around a corner, a surging crowd on an underground platform?
What is sometimes referred to as stupor, or a variation of catatonia, could be an extreme version of the freeze aspect of our fight, flight or freeze response. Research is keen to persuade us that catatonia—a state of reduced motor function or stupor–is caused by disturbances in the brain systems controlled by dopamine (the brain’s reward messenger), GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid, the brain’s calmative messenger) and glutamate (the brain’s normaliser messenger). It does not really matter which lexicon helps any of us to understand why this happens, the fallout remains the same. As the result of too much physical and mental stress, either in one huge wave or over an extended period, parts of the brain begin to work against us. This puts a level of pressure on the nervous system roughly equivalent to shaving a pat of butter with a razor blade. There is a point where there is nothing left to shave away, and so everything has to stop for a while, to recover and reset.
The word catatonia stems from the Greek for being ‘stretched tight’. In this state, if stretched to our furthest edge or limit, could it be that our own inner wisdom is triggering enforced rest, shutting everything down for a while in order to allow for an inner reset? If this is so, what might it mean to someone in this frozen state to know, understand and to trust this?
If it is one of us, you or me, lying in the dark, curled in on ourselves, hunched and rigid against the terrors that feel to be threatening every aspect of our being, how different might it be if we believed that this moment was a chance to soften rather than harden, to relax rather than become rigid with fear? Could we learn that our most useful response to the all-pervading terror would be to understand it as a part of the healing process, a vital aspect of our recovery?
How differently might we feel in that moment if we could replace fear with acceptance. And acceptance here does not mean giving in. It is not about rolling over and giving up. It is something else, an affirmation, the very quiet voice of the soul singing out ‘Yes!’. ‘Yes, I understand why this is happening, that there needs to be a particular kind of silence now to allow for the locked in wounds of the past to be released, those hurts that have been sitting inside, packed down, the pressure building until it could no longer hold. I understand that, in order to release and so digest this lifetime of stored pain and hurt, I must be still enough to grasp what it is that I am letting go.
‘But, most of all, I understand that I do not have to be afraid. If I lie here for a few moments more, I can nudge my attention away from the pervading dark stories and redirect it towards something real that is happening now, in my body. I can count ten breaths, feeling each one, down to the detail of whether it is moving into the three lobes of my right lung, or into the two on the left side. As the breath releases, I can sense it letting go, right down to the pit of my belly.’
If we have the strength to do this, to shepherd our focus away from the fear and despair, and onto our breath, we also have it in us to release the knots and scars of our life’s pain in the same way as we let go each time we exhale. We can release right down into the depths of the coalmine, just as we exhale to the pit of our belly, and so we make our first bold and vital bid to escape from under the frog’s arse.