Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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       Chapter Three Fear Denied

      We cannot live without denying. We have to shut things out. We have to say to ourselves, ‘No, no, that’s not there. It didn’t happen. I’ll take no notice.’ If we did not do this we would be overwhelmed by the multitude of things going on around us and inside us.

      We ignore the noise of the traffic outside our house while we concentrate on watching television. We ignore our sense of tiredness while we push on to finish an important task. We ignore our fear as we rush to save someone else from danger, and when we are commended for our bravery we say, ‘It was nothing. Anyone would have done the same.’

      We all know that such denial is necessary in times of stress. By denying painful facts and emotions we become brave. However, such denial is just for a brief period of time. Later we can acknowledge the noise of the traffic, or our tiredness, or, in the privacy of our own home, feel the fear unfelt at the time of danger. Now our experience accords with reality and all is well.

      On the other hand, if we do not do this, if we go on and on denying what is happening, then we start to get into difficulties because our experience accords less and less with reality. Denying the aggravating noise of the traffic, we might get angry with our children for being unruly because our denied thought is ‘I bought this house and I’m not going to admit I made a mistake’. Denying awareness of tiredness, we refuse to rest and so become ill, all because our rule for living is ‘It is my responsibility to see that my family are perfectly happy all the time’. Denying awareness of fear, we feel pain and breathlessness, suspect a faulty heart and await imminent death, but we tell ourselves, ‘My father would despise me as a coward if I admitted being afraid.’

Denying Fear as ‘Character’

      Long-term denial puts us further and further out of touch with reality. If we start this kind of denial early enough and practise it assiduously enough we forget that we are denying, and we see the ways in which we deny fear as fixities, part of what we call our personality or character. The long-term denial of fear produces a number of different kinds of ‘character’.

      There is the person who is always practical, sensible and down-to-earth. Such people never indulge in fantasy or consider those questions for which there are no practical answers. In my years in the National Health Service I met these characters frequently. There were the administrators who divided the number of patients attending by the number of staff in a psychotherapy unit, decided that the resulting figure was ‘uneconomic’ and closed the unit, all without taking the trouble to find out what actually went on in such places and without balancing the cost of such a place against the cost of each person who, deprived of his attendance at the unit for one or two days a week, became a long-term in-patient. There were the psychiatrists who would assure a frightened, depressed woman that she had a good husband, a nice home, and that she should count her blessings, without once pausing to consider what it must be like to be forced by an unwanted pregnancy and poverty to share a house with a man who beats you up on a Friday night and enjoys his marital rights on a Saturday night, and to know that such a future stretches ahead with death as the only escape. I have tried to explain the subtleties and complexities of such matters to such administrators and psychiatrists, but it is like trying to explain colour to the innately blind.

      There is the person who is always busy keeping busy. This is not a successful denial of fear, because the busy person is well aware that stopping being busy means becoming frightened. However, rather than face this fear, the busy person keeps dashing around, doing things, often at the expense of loved ones, who would dearly like to be given a generous share of the busy person’s time or be allowed to order their own lives, and their bedrooms, in their own way, not the busy person’s way. Busy people dash around doing things at the expense too of their own needs and health.

      Betty’s husband Roy had come to see me because he could not work. Betty was surprised when I asked whether she would come along to one of our meetings. There was nothing wrong with her, but if it would help Roy she would come. So she did, and talked about herself.

      ‘I’ve always got to be doing something. I can watch television, if I’m knitting, but I can’t settle to reading, and I just couldn’t sit doing nothing. It annoys me to see people doing nothing. I vacuum and dust right through every day. I’d feel the house isn’t cleaned properly if it isn’t vacuumed one day and dusted the next.’

      ‘She’s always doing housework,’ said Roy, who, depressed and unemployed, often sat doing nothing.

      ‘I’ve always worked,’ said Betty. ‘I brought home my first pay packet the week before I turned fourteen. My mother expected us to work. There were six of us. You couldn’t leave one job before you had the next lined up.’

      However, she should not be working so hard now. She had angina, and the doctor said she should rest.

      ‘He says I should rest and put my feet up every afternoon. But I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.’

      ‘Why wouldn’t that be right?’ I asked.

      ‘I don’t know. I’ve always been like that. I’m that sort of person.’

      She said that she was frightened of dying, frightened of having a stroke and ending up like her mother, a helpless invalid. She was no stranger to fear. She knew what it was like to be swept by sudden, drenching fear. ‘I need to be out of the house and with people.’