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Fear
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“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
Fear is an emotional state generated by a perceived threat, whether present or anticipated.
It can manifest in many areas of life, including fear of commitment, rejection, criticism, failure, and violence. Accurately perceiving a person or situation as threatening is an asset. Perceiving threat where none exists carries its own costs, as described below.
Freud's Pleasure Principle, the imperative to maximise pleasure and minimise pain, helps explain our general response to fear: we avoid it. The specific cause of a fear is individual and often traces back to an earlier experience of hurt that undermined psychological safety. For example, a childhood in which emotional closeness was repeatedly paired with hurt may develop into a fear of commitment in adulthood. The fear serves a protective function by keeping others at a distance, although it also undermines potentially healthy relationships. In short, earlier experiences that produced fear make new experiences feel threatening, whether or not they are.
Therapy addresses fear by identifying the experiences that gave rise to it, distinguishing realistic threat from inherited expectation, and building the capacity to engage with situations that have been avoided. Over time, the protective function the fear once served becomes less necessary, and the range of life available to the person widens.
References
Barrett, L., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. (2016). Handbook of emotions. London: Guilford Publications.
Freud, S. (1896). The ego and the id and other works. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Volume XIX). London: Hogarth Press, 1978.
Hebb, D. (1946). On the nature of fear. Psychological Review, 53(5), 259–276.