Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

world is the way I see it and everyone has to agree with me.’ People who do not agree with the powerful person’s definition of reality are fought with, punished and, if defeated, silenced. Powerful people may be effective in controlling their own fear, but they establish and maintain their power by creating fear in others. We each, naturally, define reality in our own individual way, and we give up our definitions only under the threat of rejection, loss, contempt, humiliation or pain. So in the struggle for power, whether in the family or in the state, many of us suffer great fear.

      However, becoming powerful does not eradicate the experience of fear. The powerful person has few friends, and so fear returns as loneliness and the fear of abandonment.

      Powerful and would-be powerful people are often angry and irritable. Anger is our natural response to frustration, and when we seek to impose our own definitions on the world we often find that the world is recalcitrant and will not always conform to our wishes. Thus the more we try to impose our definitions on the world the more frustration and anger we feel. The discovery that the world does not conform to our expectations can fill us with fear, and, rather than admit that fear, we can turn it into anger. Despots are dangerous because they are frightened and will not admit their fear.

      The world that refuses to conform to our wishes can be the natural world. The sun will rise, the rain will fall, and the wind will blow, all indifferent to our pleas and threats. Or the world that refuses to conform to our pleas and threats can be the world of people, and here our pleas and threats can have an effect. We can inflict pain on other people to force them to do what we want them to do. However, we are people too, and if we hurt other people we can perceive their pain, suffer and feel frightened. One way to protect ourselves from such suffering and fear is to refuse to acknowledge that the people who do not conform to our demands are really people. They are in some way subhuman. They may look like human beings but they do not have feelings as we do, and they have no right to claim such feelings. If they are black and we are white, then we may suggest that blacks do not get depressed, no matter how poor and dispossessed they may be. If we do not wish to share our country’s wealth we can claim that the poor of Asia and eastern Europe have no right to want to better themselves by migrating to wealthier countries. If we are men, then we may propose that a woman is not really a person as a man is, and that all she wants and needs is to be a sex object, or our mother, or our wife. If we are adults, then we know for a fact that children soon forget their troubles. After all, childhood is the happiest time of one’s life.

      However, in denying that other people have feelings we have to deny our own feelings. Objects - stones, mud, cement, machines - do not have feelings. When we deny that other people have feelings we treat them as objects. When we deny that we have feelings we treat ourselves as objects. Thus we become much less the person we might have been.

      Why do we do this?

      How do we do this?

       Chapter Four Learning How to Deny

      Newborn babies are noisy and spontaneous. What they feel they feel totally. A happy baby is happy from top to toe. A hungry baby is possessed by hunger pangs and greed. An angry baby feels total and absolute anger, unrestrained by guilt or the fear of hurting others. A baby’s feelings are fully felt and fully experienced, and the baby acts with complete unselfconscious self-confidence. Yet by the time the babies become toddlers, gone is the birthright of being simply themselves. Now self-conscious, toddlers have learned how to deny their thoughts and feelings and thus who they are. All babies must enter into a relationship with their mother in order to survive both physically and as a person, yet it is through this and other relationships that babies learn how to deny themselves and their feelings.

      As babies enter into their relationship with their mother they become increasingly aware of their mother’s feelings. A baby does not understand causal connections - that exploring the texture of the mother’s face by pinching her cheeks causes her pain - but he is sensitive to her moods. Her joy or anger or fear are part of her baby’s experience.

      This experience of emotions and the means by which they are expressed, in smiles and frowns, cries and words, touches and cuddles, creates and maintains the relationship that joins the baby to the human race and to life.

      Babies have been around for as long as human beings have been, yet it is only in the last forty years or so that they have been systematically studied. What is clear now is that babies come into the world primed to make relationships with other people. In the womb they learn to recognize their mother’s voice, and, perhaps, their father’s voice. When they open their eyes and see the world, what they look for is a face. A photographic study by Lynne Murray and Liz Andrews¹ shows little Ethan being born. One minute later he is comfortable and relaxed as he is held by his mother, Julie. He opens his eyes and looks directly at her. He watches her intently, his eyes scanning the details of her face. As Julie talks to him, his face becomes more mobile and expressive. A few minutes later Ethan is handed to his father, John. He gazes intently at his father and is totally absorbed. Then John slowly and clearly protrudes his tongue, and Ethan attends closely. He appears to be concentrating completely on his mouth as he frowns and shuts his eyes, then he looks back at John and protrudes his own tongue. He is fifteen minutes old.

      These photographs show that not only is a newborn baby immediately and deeply interested in faces, and able to imitate the movement of another face, but that the emotions he expresses are not random but arise directly and meaningfully out of his experience. When the midwife interrupted Ethan’s first examination of his mother’s face he complained vociferously, and was not satisfied until he was back looking at his mother.

      At birth babies know that a happy tone of voice goes with a smile. At nine months they can tell the difference between expressions of happiness, sadness and anger, and understand something about the emotions that produce these expressions. At eighteen months they know that other people see things differently from them. By two they have that deep knowledge of other people which we call empathy.²

      Just as we were born with the ability to breathe, so we were born with the ability to experience our emotions fully and to be aware of other people’s emotions. Small children might not be able to put an accurate name to what another person is feeling, nor to understand why the person is experiencing a particular emotion, but they can see and feel what the other person is feeling. One of the most moving photographs to have emerged from the conflict in Kosovo in 1998 was one taken by Andrew Testa. In this a young woman refugee is sitting on the ground in a state of complete despair. We can see from her clothes - leather jacket, jeans, jewellery - that she has been dispossessed of a reasonably comfortable life (no Albanian had a completely comfortable life in Kosovo under the rule of President Milosevic). Her daughter, four or five years old, is squatting in front of her, her head on one side, her hands held out at body width and curved facing each other in that gesture we all use when we want to indicate compassion for the other person. We can see that the little girl is talking to her mother and we know that she is saying, ‘There, there, Mummy. Don’t cry. We’ll be all right.’

      The little girl’s gesture of empathy shows that as well as her own suffering she can also feel the suffering of her mother. Empathy enables us to leave our own limited world and enter, through our imagination, the world of other people. Thus we are able to have the closest and strongest relationship with others and to expand our own world, not just in knowledge and understanding, but in developing what is best in human beings - tolerance, kindness, generosity, love. However, empathy comes at a price.

      Empathy may enable us to establish and maintain good relationships with other people, but it also means that we can more than double our own suffering when we have an empathic knowledge of another person’s suffering. We feel the pain of pity, and this is often multiplied by feelings of helplessness when there is nothing we can do to reduce the other person’s suffering. In order to protect ourselves from the pain of pity, many of us refuse to empathize with those who suffer. We call people fleeing