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“To overcome fear means to find a foothold outside the situation,” says psychologist Dmitry Leontiev. In this way, we can not only act boldly, but also become stronger than before.
In what situations do we have to be bolder? In extreme, that is, those that go beyond the usual. Throughout our lives, since childhood, we are faced with a huge number of repetitive situations, we learn how to behave correctly and accurately in them. And this experience is stored in our memory on many different “tapes” (now we would say – files). We replay these tapes when the situation is right. But their peculiarity is that they reproduce only what is recorded on them.
Psychotherapist James Bugental used this metaphor: a family comes out of a movie theater – mom, dad, a child of inquisitive age, and he asks: “Dad, mom, are we alive or on film?” And Bugental says it’s the most important question of our lives. An extreme situation is what destroys all our films, all our previous experience. In an instant, we find ourselves in a position where we cannot lean on it, because something is happening that has never happened. The most powerful fear in a person’s life is just such uncertainty.
A family comes out of the cinema – mom, dad, a child of inquisitive age, and he asks: “Dad, mom, are we alive or on film?”
Psychologists in the last two or three decades have been actively studying the state and behavior of people in situations where it is normal to react only in an extreme, unusual way. It turns out that the ability to withstand all sorts of threats depends not only on our worldview, but also on our ability to incorporate what is happening into the larger picture of the world. In the 1970s, psychologists described post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. Later it became clear that those of us who had contact with extreme reality suffer from symptoms of a stress disorder (depression, problems with sleep and memory, apathy, feelings of isolation from other people) for many years afterwards. Psychologists and psychotherapists have developed different approaches to help manage this disorder. One of the main ones is the ability to reunite the integrity of one’s life, that is, to connect the experience that was obtained in extreme conditions with the experience of everyday life. It is worse for those who are trying to erase time spent in an extreme situation from their lives, forget it or perceive it as the only truly real part of their life.
A paradoxical effect is also known: post-traumatic growth. Having survived an extreme situation, those who saw some meaning for themselves in this situation turn out to be more mature and psychologically stable. Someone could find an explanation for what is happening, for example, this: “We are sinners, and this is the retribution for our sins.” For some, the meaning was close people who needed to be rescued. This is the meaning as a guide to action: something terrible is happening, something catastrophic, but next to you are those who need help to get through it all. Those who find meaning in such a terrible situation, as a rule, then cope with stress better than other participants in events.
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- What life principle prevails in you?
This fact is also important: people who behave heroically in an extreme situation, and before that were attentive to others. They were not indifferent to those around them. Now we have been contacted by colleagues from the Moscow fire service. One of the problems: many go to the fire department to perform feats, and so assert themselves. But firefighters exist not so much to put out fires as to save people. And the problem is how to make a shift in their consciousness, to shift the focus of attention to other people. When this happens, it turns out to be handy and easier to deal with fears. Fear is when you think only of yourself and feel threatened. And you look at the situation in which you find yourself from the inside. If you can look at the same situation from a bird’s eye view, you will begin to understand how to act. And just the orientation to another person turns out to be what allows you to see this situation in a broader context.
Book on the topic
Linda Leonard
“Meeting a crazy woman. To live, overcoming fear, anger and resentment “
There are many cases when a woman abandoned her talent, suppressed her creative impulses. Examples can be found in myth (the Morgan fairy), in history (Rodin’s lover Camille Claudel) and among our acquaintances. The reasons why this happens are different – shyness, fear of condemnation, the desire to save the family and be “like everyone else.”
My wife, Elena Kaliteevskaya, a psychotherapist, uses a wonderful technique to help people suffering from traumatic experiences. She gives them a piece of paper, pencils and asks them to draw a situation that causes them strong emotions. After that, he takes out a sheet of drawing paper, attaches this sheet there and says: “This sheet of drawing paper is your whole life. What else is there in your life besides this critical situation? And it turns out that there is still room for much more. By itself, this difficult situation does not disappear, it just takes its place in life. Fear always arises when we become attached to events and become addicted to them. And it is possible to overcome it when we enter the situation into a wider context and find a foothold outside of it.
The lecture was given as part of the Summer with Psychologies project on May 24, 2015.
Dmitry Leontiev, Doctor of Psychology, Head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Professor of Lomonosov Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov. He is the author of several books, among which is The Psychology of Meaning (Meaning, 2007).