to her. Regardless of her husband’s intentions, any suggestion that she does
will sound to her like an accusation that she’s having panic attacks on pur-
pose to get out of doing things she doesn’t want to do. At some deep, dark
level, she’s afraid she is.
Jane hates baseball, but she’s never told her husband because she was
afraid he’d get mad. When they were dating, she went to games to show
him how much she loved him. Now she doesn’t want to go, but feels com-
pelled by love to do so. Panic resolves the conflict for her, at least after a
fashion. She doesn’t have to think about her mixed feelings until her
husband inadvertently throws aside the curtain between her and what she’s
hiding from herself. The only possible result is more panic.
Later in treatment, after Jane gained some control over her fear, we
were able to talk about her internal conflicts, but not when her husband made
the remark about baseball and bunko. Insights that come too soon are worse
than useless. They can only be taken as attacks that create a greater need to
run away. Even if you don’t talk about secondary gain, you should still do
your best to prevent it.
AVOID AVOIDANCE. Amidst the swirling doubt, confusion, and painful
emotion that surrounds fear disorders, this adage is the one fixed star. The
more you try to protect people from what they fear, the more they fear it.
Avoidance is the hardest thing in the world to unlearn, because there’s
never an opportunity. That’s why I make such a big deal about overmed-
icating and not treating panic, phobia, and PTSD as handicaps that
require accommodation. Once you start down that road, it’s almost impos-
sible to get off.
Fear disorders get worse through the process ofgeneralization. First
you avoid what you fear, then things that remind you of what you fear
become frightening, so you avoid those. Then things that remind you of
things that remind you begin to seem scary. Through generalization,
phobics tend to pull back further and further. Neil was once able to do
yard work, until he realized that there were ground-dwelling spiders as
well as the ones in bushes and trees.
Neil’s wife is rewarding his phobic behavior by doing the outdoor
chores herself. But what else can she do? The leaves need raking, and Neil
is scared to death that spiders are lurking beneath them.
The Psychology of Fear ❧ 107