How Fear Influences Relationships

Fear is a surprisingly broad category of emotional experiences. It ranges from anxiety to terror, fight to flight, cold sweats to adrenaline rushes. It may include panic or freezing, butterflies or shouting, withdrawal or paranoia.

Naturally Fearful

Peter Paul Rubens, The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt

Early neurologists and psychologists were confused by this variety of responses. They assumed that fear was a cluster of abnormal emotions, exceptions to the baseline experience of peace, but this led their experimentation to dead ends, and their research came to a standstill. They reassessed their assumptions and instead approached experimentation as if the brain adapted to manage threats, as if fear were the normal state and the safety of typical experiments was abnormal. Research models aligned, and science again progressed.

This concept is critical to understanding ourselves, so let’s repeat it. Our brain and attached senses have adapted to contend with a dangerous world. The normal brain does not feel safe, unafraid, or at peace, but alone and in danger. We have not survived by adapting to safety but by adapting to danger. We organize chaos to create safety. Our default emotional state is fear; it is only through exploration and organization of the unknown that we recognize threats, predict danger, and find safety.

Conscious States of Fear

This truth presents problems for our physically-safe, modern society. In a country where just 6% of the population will experience PTSD in their lifetime, we still feel that the world is unpredictable, danger is the norm, and we are afraid. This is both understandable and unreasonable. Homosapiens are a species of predators, so we are surrounded by the eyes of hunters. Yet we are exceedingly safe compared to our ancestors. Few people directly experience fear which is justified by actual danger. Instead, we fear danger, especially the possibility of feeling afraid, and we fear that our ordered systems may go away. The fear of future emotion is a state called anxiety.

This fear of future emotions is due to our dualistic brain, which is divided hemispherically to handle chaos (right brain) and order (left brain). Consciousness is a long-term problem-solving mechanism in the prefrontal cortex. The “self” is a variable in unending problems, linking thoughts about ourselves to threats and therefore to negative emotion. In the present absence of significant bodily danger, our focus revolves around the problem of our future feelings. This is why we avoid talking about ourselves and why some individuals have trouble going to therapy. If we avoid discussing something, it resists clear form and can be denied, repressed. If we speak it, the problem becomes true, and we must deal with the negative emotion produced.

Object Relations’ Utility

The prefrontal cortex is balanced by object relations in the occipital (rear) lobe. Both are connected to the rest of the body by a chemical (i.e., emotional), action-oriented nervous system. The brain does not see objects or people. Instead, it perceives utility or harm — we act on objects or consider that we may be acted on as objects. Even robots cannot recognize objects without this object-action context.

We then wrap our understanding of object utility and threat in contexts of probability and past experiences regarding our environment and people. We rationalize responsive action to align with these maps and to organize our behavior to find safety. We see this more clearly in mammals with smaller brains. For example, gazelles see hunting lions as objects fundamentally different from sleeping lions, as if they were two different creatures. They only flee when gazelles detect hunting behaviors.

Why We Stay in Abusive Relationships

Human consciousness and object relations work together to create safety. Children are perfect examples. They rationalize relational deficits or trauma by modifying their behavior to adjust for acceptable threat/benefit margins. Children normalize mental illness in family behavior and adapt to dominant narratives to protect connection, minimize stress, and maintain safety. These adaptations typically keep them safe until leaving home but prove inadequate when encountering others in the real world. When a child leaves home, family adaptations often inhibit success across future relationships and work environments, according to the behavioral severity and trained resistance to change.

These adaptations for “safe space” make it hard to leave an abuser. Tenuous safety in an explored space still feels safer, more comfortable than the greater fear that we may experience in the horrific unknown. Our brain adapted to reduce fear; mapping and mitigating known threats begins in a single location called home. These maladjusted maps of responsive action and ordered safety are survival features of the brain. Consider Stockholm Syndrome, the kidnapping trauma that causes captives to empathize with their captors. It allows captives to adapt to a bad situation and survive yet prevents escape so long as the physical threat stays at tolerable levels. Permanent adjustment to life in captivity was useful for most of our ancestors, who survived and thrived for tens of thousands of years of conquering and slaving. It even allowed them to continue to reproduce and eventually throw off their bonds of slavery or integrate their genetics with the ruling class.

The point here is not to condone slavery but to explain how the brain calculates risk and adapts, even in less than ideal situations. The brain desires the opportunity to adapt and will seek out challenges, opportunities to experience fear, and even physical pain if the environment lacks sufficient opportunities to experience these things, especially if there is a reward. Haunted houses, scary movies, BDSM, and relational fights are all examples. There is always a benefit, a reward to learned behaviors.

Staying Might Be Safer

While not ideal, staying in an abusive space may also be justifiable. Animals remain in explored yet dangerous spaces because the danger is mitigated — the unknown threat is more dangerous than an unknown threat. An abused dog caged all its life will die if it escapes and cannot adapt to roads quickly enough. An abused partner who leaves a bad relationship may be the target of an even more emotionally unstable individual, become homeless, lose family, or suffer more significant harm from their ex-partner through litigation. Creating a safe space requires knowledge of the external world, interpersonal skills, time to build, a non-judgmental support network, and courage — things most abused men and women lack to varying degrees. Leaving can be difficult and dangerous.

Some may argue that death is preferable to staying in an abusive situation. However, leaving relies on the individual's resilience, skills, adaptability, and past experiences of freedom or lack thereof. A second cage feels far worse than the cage one was born into; some may even prefer returning to a similar cage. There are many factors to consider in staying or leaving an abusive situation. Conditioning allows survival, and conscious problem solving may improve the situation, although it is far from ideal. However, understanding this does not encourage it; recognizing the various factors is critical to successfully changing our circumstances, yet for some, leaving first and figuring things out later may be worth it.

Anxiety Can Create Abuse

While abused partners and children are joint in the news, they are in the minority, just as PTSD is uncommon. Anxiety, however, is not. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) estimates that 40+ million adults in the U.S. (19.1%) have an anxiety disorder, while 7% of children aged 3–17 experience issues with anxiety each year. Many more may have or joke about having non-clinical anxiety symptoms.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, depicting King Herod’s massacre

During Covid, I watched an elderly couple scream five years of grievances towards their neighbors, displacing their fears and past hurts onto families who continued to allow their children to play outside. Their projections were met with firm, healthy boundaries, so they became more honest and hostile, revealing their subconscious emotions' ugliness. They resented and envied their neighbors, mocking the sense of joy and freedom, the vitality and courage they did not possess. Their nihilistic vengeance projected insults while attacking the family unity they lacked but craved.

Dehumanization occurs when a person has lost connection to consciousness due to fear, much like a drowning victim will attempt to climb a rescuer and drown them both. Empathy seems like a trap. Courage shames cowardice and reduces felt status. An individual in a fight or flight state will make wild attempts to regain dominance of their environment in the short-term, even at the cost of long-term goals. An individual who cannot reestablish status will lash out and seek to dominate or destroy individuals who cause their stability to feel threatened. Unsurprisingly, most cultures have a saying equivalent to

“The tallest blade of grass gets cut first.”

Fear of danger or loss leveraged as control can also create abusive relationships, a common outcome of Borderline Personality Disorder, even spawning a bestselling book titled “I Hate You — Don’t Leave Me.” While most abused individuals do not abuse others, it can be helpful to remember that most abusers were abused and most unstable individuals were destabilized. For treating therapists, our goal is to restabilize these individuals with empathetic compassion, teach them emotional coping tools leveraging cognition, and strategize new behaviors for a lasting connection.

Summary

Fear is our default limbic state. We are built to act to make our naturally unsafe environments psychologically and physically safe. We do this by exploring, testing, establishing territory, controlling unknowns, defining our domain, and resting in it. Fearful minds which cannot gain control of their environment will displace aggression into attack and withdrawal, “neuroticism” in personality psychology. Fear and its method of being — assumption — are mind-killers.

Transforming risk into strength is the ideal goal of consciousness.

In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis conceptualized hell as a place where people continued to move farther and farther apart from one another while shrinking anatomically. Napoleon was a tiny silhouette barely visible in the lamplight of a faraway tower window. In contrast, heaven was a place of vivid colors where our vices became redeemed tools, and the world grew exponentially with emotional strength.

Transforming risk into strength is the ideal goal of consciousness. It can override the default state of fear in environments where biological fight or flight is unnecessary. It allows us to avoid or respond to physical threats before they occur, without running or fighting, but by acting courageously with full awareness. It allows adaptation and exponential expansion in environments where it has successfully converted existing threats into solvable problems. That is the process of individuation or divinization. It is aiming at your best, heroic self and growing into a fully rounded individual.

~ Dave S. Wallace, MS