Last week I was able to attend the Charleston Child Trauma Conference in South Carolina. The sessions focused on supporting children and teens who have been victimized by different forms of neglect or abuse. Although this is a difficult topic to consider, the mental health profession is recognizing the immediate and long-term risks faced by young people who have been mistreated.
We cannot erase the overwhelming situations that impact a portion of youth in our society. We can recognize the impact of mistreatment and work to help them cope with the stressors they face.
Dr. Karen Horney wrote about children adjusting to significant stress in their lives in her 1945 book, Our Inner Conflicts
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"...the child gropes for ways to keep going, ways to cope with this menacing world. Despite his own weakness and fears he unconsiously shapes his tactics to meet the particular forces operating in his environment. In doing so, he develops not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become part of his personality...At first a rather chaotic picture may present itself, but out of it in time three main lines crystallize: a child can move toward people, against them, or away from them...In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third."
Dr. Horney recognized that children tend to develop a strategy to deal with their sense of being alone and overwhelmed in a dangerous world. This is most pronounced for children who have been victimized. She went on to explain that children who present as helpless try to make connections to gain support and move toward people. Children who are hostile move against people because they lack trust in others and look to fight so that they can feel stronger and protect themselves. Children who isolate themselves move away from connections with others because they feel misunderstood and do not make the effort to connect or fight. We have all encountered children and teens who predominantly behave with one of these three attitudes that were described over 70 years ago by Dr. Horney. We are sometimes quick to think these children are simply misbehaving. We can describe them as needy and clingy; oppositional and rebellious; or aloof and conceited.
It is rare that we will know the personal histories (especially the traumatic histories) of the young people who we coach, teach, supervise or otherwise encounter in our daily lives. We should take the time to consider that the youngsters we find challenging might be doing the best they can to cope with stressors many of us could never imagine. Youngsters often need our kindness and understanding more than they need our criticism.
The quote above is from Our Inner Conflict: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis pp.42-43 by Karen Horney; 1945 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Most of us spend more time than we would like worrying. And in most cases, we worry about what might happen. We sometimes think about past events too, but the worry is usually focused on what might take place because of what we already said or did. This sense of anxiety we experience has a future orientation. We want to know what is going to happen next so that we can be prepared for it. If the next thing that comes at us is going to be bad, we want to prevent it.
It is impossible to know exactly what will happen next. Sure we can set goals and make plans and prepare ourselves so that our lives move in a general direction. But then suddenly a hurricane moves up the east coast and it moves slower than expected and rains a lot more, and the damage is from inland floods, instead of winds and surf on the coastline. Many of the situations we struggle with in our lives are events that we could not have planned for or events that did not follow the script we had put in place. In fact, some of our most challenging struggles come from situations we never thought of worrying about; while those situations that fueled our anxiety, interrupted our sleep, and ruined our appetite, like our car breaking down on the way to a job interview, never materialized.
Carl Jung wrote about how the unpredictability in day to day life leads to anxiety (he called it neurosis back then) in his 1917 essay, On The Psychology of the Unconscious
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"Much indeed can be attained by the will, but, in view of the fate of certain markedly strong-willed personalities, it is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at all costs to our will...But has it ever been shown, or will it ever be, that life and fate are in accord with reason, that they too are rational? We have on the contrary good grounds for supposing that they (life & fate) are irrational, or rather that in the last resort they are grounded beyond human reason. The irrationality of events is shown in what we call chance, which we are obviously compelled to deny because we cannot in principle think of any process that is not causal and necessary...In practice, however, chance reigns everywhere...The plentitude of life is governed by law and yet not governed by law, rational and yet irrational."
Here Jung is wondering if it is reasonable to worry. He questions whether it makes sense to be anxious about future events. Many of us would say that we should absolutely be anxious simply by pointing to how badly events turn out for people. Jung points out that all the energy we put into our worries and all the time spent being anxious will not allow us to make sure our plans are followed perfectly. Chance events cannot be prevented by better planning or by spending more sleepless nights with our minds racing.
Ninety-nine years ago Jung wrote about the fact that we need to expect some unexpected events to occur. We all hope and try to convince ourselves that certain actions on our part will always lead to the best anticipated outcomes. We also know that this is impossible, which leads us to worry and become anxious and we even end up missing out on the pleasures that life can offer us.
We would be better off if we accepted that we cannot always control the outcomes of events and that when situations do not go the way we would like it does not always mean that we were unprepared, or naive, or foolish for setting high expectations. It simply means that life happened and nature followed a different path which we could never have predicted. We can still enjoy life anyway if we give ourselves permission to reduce the worry and the anxiety about events that are beyond our control.
The quote above from Carl Jung was originally published in 1917. I quoted a 1953 publication of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (p.49) by C.G. Jung, which was published by Bolligen Foundation, Inc. in New York, NY.
People worry about things. It is normal to think about all the items on our to-do lists, or the health of loved ones, or those projects at work. When the worry becomes more intense we may even become fearful. Generally, we are afraid of what might go wrong. A certain amount of stress about these worrisome or frightening situations helps us to focus our energy and take action. We complete a task, offer support to a sick friend, or plan a strategy to meet the deadline for that project. Our worries and fears are situational and temporary. When we take steps to confront them, they don't linger. They may be replaced by another stressful situation, which also leads to action, and then that worry fades. This is a typical cycle for most of us in our fast-paced culture.
Anxiety is a different condition which confronts people from childhood through the retirement years. Rollo May wrote about the contrast between anxiety and fear in his 1983 book titled, The Discovery of Being
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"The understanding of anxiety as ontological illuminates the difference between anxiety and fear. The distinction is not one of degree nor of the intensity of the experience. The anxiety a person feels when someone he respects passes him on the street without speaking, for example, is not as intense as the fear he experiences when the dentist seizes the drill to attack a sensitive tooth. But the gnawing threat of the slight on the street may hound him all day long and torment his dreams at night, whereas the feeling of fear, though it was quantitatively greater, is gone for the time being as soon as he steps out of the dentist's chair. The difference is that the anxiety strikes at the central core of his self-esteem and his sense of value as a self, which is the most important aspect of his experience of himself as a being."
When Dr. May writes about anxiety being ontological he means that it is a state of being or an indication of who we are. By contrast, fear is a temporary emotion that we have and it is not what we are. May and the other existential psychotherapists of the mid to late 20th century recognized that being anxious was part of being human.
Everyone experiences a certain amount of anxiety in her or his life. It is an unavoidable condition. There is variation in how effectively we can live and cope with our own unique sense of anxiety. The next blog posts will focus on where anxiety comes from and how we can manage the experience.
The quote in the post above was taken from page 108 of The Discovery of Being
by Rollo May; published in 1983 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
