Lisa sits in a street cafe and holds her two-year-old son in her arms. A flower seller approaches her and offers to buy roses. The kid is confused – he looks inquiringly at his mother. She does not want to communicate with the merchant and pushes her chair back. The boy immediately starts crying.
Sonya and her five-year-old daughter, almost burying their noses in the bars of the cage, are looking at the monkeys. Suddenly, one of them jumps down from its branch and starts pounding on the fence above their heads. The girl looks at her mother with fear. Sonya laughs. The girl is too.
We are filled with fears. We are afraid of spiders, elevators, planes, tunnels, emptiness, bridges… But where do these fears come from? Maybe this is just a manifestation in our modern life of archaic genetic attitudes: our genes have programmed us in such a way that we avoid dangerous insects, closed spaces, abysses?
All monkeys raised in nature are afraid of snakes. It probably helps them survive. However, laboratory monkeys that did not live in the wild absolutely do not react to the presence of a live snake, regardless of whether it is dangerous or not … This means that their fear cannot be considered genetically programmed. At the University of Wisconsin (USA), researcher Michael Cook demonstrated an interesting phenomenon. Monkeys who have never been afraid of snakes in their lives become afraid of snakes very easily – for this they just need to see how another monkey is afraid of them. And one single example is enough.
Like monkeys, we have all learned from our parents, brothers, sisters, friends, what to fear, even if we ourselves have never been exposed to such dangers.
And, fortunately, we can learn confidence in the same way. At the very beginning of her first pregnancy, Katya began attending childbirth preparation courses that a friend advised her. She hoped to alleviate her anxiety a little bit about the fact that a baby would be born through her vagina … But she did not suspect what she would discover in herself. A woman came to talk to the group who had given birth to three children without anesthesia and pain pills. Katya, who was fascinated by this story, decided to try to repeat the experience of this woman.
In the remaining months of her pregnancy, she interacted with mothers who had also gone through similar experiences, and carefully prepared for childbirth, like a marathon race. On the day of the birth, one of them was always next to Katya. When the contractions seemed to have reached every cell of the body, this woman advised Katya to think of them as waves that pass through her and drive a small boat with her precious passenger to the shore. Katya seized on this voice, imbued with his calmness.
He gave her the confidence she needed to overcome her fear. The birth went well, and Katya felt a strength in herself, the existence of which she had not even suspected until that day. Self-confidence, like many other things, life can give us at the most unexpected moment.
Our fears, our strengths are not given to us from birth. we accept them from those who surround us and lead us through life
Our weaknesses and strengths partly define us. They are not given to us from birth. To a large extent, we learn them from those around us. Then, in turn, we will pass them on to those who, looking at us, are trying to better understand the world in which they will live. We are the product of the many influences of our environment, of which we ourselves are a part and which we ourselves influence. And it makes sense for each of us to try to generate a feeling of fear around us as little as possible and confidence as often as possible.
* M. Cook, S. Mineka «Observational Сonditioning of Fear-relevant Versus Fear-irrelevant Stimuli in Rhesus-monkeys». Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1989, vol. 98.