How Do We Put a Dent in FEAR?

It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.

Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.

Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.

“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.

I read the above quotation in today’s New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.

For the carers in this morning’s workshop, much of this unhappiness could be attributed to uncertainty about future security and well-being. For some of the people, this uncertainty might be diminished by being able to place confidence in support from the local council, the state or the NHS. Yet a lot of the current news stories about cash-strapped Primary Care Trusts, shortfalls in council budgets and intended reductions in Incapacity Benefit and other benefits are contributing to uncertainty. Many of the carers should be unaffected by these changes, but they have apprehensions that have immediate emotional and physical consequences for them.

Carers need reassurance and confidence in their ability to continue to care. The statutory bodies who deal with them should be doing a better job of making a dent in the FEAR that affects them.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project