TRANSCRIPT
Several people have recently asked that I make a video analyzing phobias. Analyzing where do phobias come from? What really are they? Well, on the surface, phobias are irrational fears of something, something in the outside world. I’ve heard some people have irrational fears of birds, having irrational fears of certain insects, insects that will do no harm to them, certain irrational fears maybe even of mice, things like that. Terror, absolute terror of them.
I know people who have phobias of snakes, snakes that actually are harmless, that aren’t poisonous at all. The last thing the snake wants is anything to do with a person, but the people are terrified of them.
Well, I think of some of the phobias in my life, and my basic understanding of phobias came from analyzing my own phobias. Well, when I was a child, one of the basic phobias I had was sleeping alone in my own bedroom and having someone break in through the window and harm me. I had that for so many years.
My first big clue about this as a phobia happened when I actually got away from my family system. I was 20 years old, and I was off hitchhiking in Wyoming, in Yellowstone Park and south of Yellowstone Park. Sometimes I would end up sleeping off in the forest on the side of the road, knowing that there were grizzly bears around. I remember one time I found a grizzly bear poo like 50 yards from my tent, and I thought, “I am in grizzly bear territory, and there are no cars coming. There’s nobody that’s going to pick me up, and it’s night.” I guess I have to sleep here, and there is serious risk here. There is a 600-pound predator somewhere nearby that probably knows that I’m here.
I was able to put my food up in a tree with a rope, but I thought, “I’m at risk.” And the thing that really surprised me is that I was able to sleep, and I wasn’t so scared. I was more scared of someone breaking into my house and hurting me, robbing me, beating me up, and killing me when I was a child, even a late teenager, 19 years old in my family’s home. And that was a clue. It’s like, wait a second, if I’m not scared when there actually is a really realistic threat really near me that could kill me and probably wants to kill and eat me, and I am actually terrified when there is no actual threat.
I was living in a neighborhood. I was on the second floor of a house. Nobody could even get in that window, but I was so scared of it happening. It was a clue. And the thing that I realized, and I think this is true, in fact, I would go so far to say damn well I know it’s true, is that a phobia is a displaced fear. There is something really legitimate that people are afraid of when they have a phobia. There’s something underneath the surface that they really are scared of and terrified of, something that they really should be scared of. Something really bad has happened to them, and they’re terrified of it happening again. And perhaps it is happening to them again and again, but for whatever reason, they’re not allowed to be conscious, be aware of what this fear really is. They’re not allowed to acknowledge to themselves what this fear is because that would just make it worse.
I think often it’s a pretty similar fear with a lot of people. For me, it came down to the childhood trauma that I had experienced, the violations that I had suffered, the people who had broken through the window of my psyche and invaded me and harmed me. And what’s so sad is it was the people who were the most responsible for my nurturance and my development, my parents. The people who created me, they had a lot of problems. They had a lot of unresolved anger, shame, rage, desire to humiliate, desire to get revenge because of what had happened to them in their past, in their childhood. And in all sorts of different ways, overt and subtle, they took it out on me. They harmed me. They violated me. They broke me. They shamed me.
Sometimes my father physically attacked me, assaulted me, threw me out of the house physically for nothing that I did that was really even significant. Sometimes all I did was just react to the violations against him, and he didn’t like the fact that I was sticking up for myself, so he violated me even worse. Or my mother rejecting me, giving me the silent treatment, pulling away, letting me know that she would never ever protect me. And she never did protect me, even against my father.
Well, that caused me significant pain and turmoil. And yet what I learned from a very early age is that I had no good defense in protecting myself against the violations of my parents. When I tried to defend myself, the problems, the violations only got worse. They only got worse. So it was safer actually for me to play out my unresolved terrors and fears of being violated by them again and again, to displace it against the outside world, to displace it onto the outside world, to see bad people out there, bad criminals, the kind of people I watched on television, on the news: rapists and burglars and violators and thieves and child abusers. I was terrified of those strangers out there, the stranger danger that we were being taught in school and on television. They were going to break into my window, they were going to harm me, and I had to protect myself.
As soon as I was able, I got a BB gun, and I kept my BB gun often loaded next to my bed. And later, as I got older, I got 16 years old, I bought a shotgun and a rifle, and I wanted to protect myself against those bad outside people. And I had nightmares about them, and sometimes I was afraid to fall asleep at night, even though my parents were downstairs and would have protected me. But the irony being it was my parents I was really scared of, and I was displacing it onto these outside strangers who never did harm me, never did break into my house. There were no break-ins in my whole life. None of these outside strangers. The damage that happened to me was inside my family’s system.
Well, when I’ve heard of other people having phobias, people who are terrified of birds and spiders and things like that, sometimes there’s a little incident. Maybe they’re a little scared of a bird; some bird flew too close to them. But I think of people who are terrified of pigeons, terrified of rats. Most of them have never ever, ever been attacked by a rat. Okay, maybe once there was a rat in their apartment, but the rat didn’t attack them. And people who are scared of birds, how many people? How ironic. There’s some animal over there right behind me. It could be a rat. Can you hear it? Probably just a squirrel burying a nut, or maybe it’s a raccoon or a possum. Who knows? But anyways, how many people actually—there it is! It’s so distracting. Irony. Oh, there it is! I can see it’s a little chipmunk. Let’s see if I can get it on camera. Oh, he just went back in. No, no, no point. But anyways, it’s a chipmunk.
I know people who they’d be terrified. I remember once it happened on the street in New York City. A guy tried to assault me at night. He was furious and enraged at me because he thought I crossed the street to get away from him, and he got really ashamed by that, and he was furious. It actually had nothing to do with him why I crossed the street, but he followed me, and he wanted to fight me. I ended up calming the situation down using some of the things that I learned as a therapist, and he actually wanted to talk to me. And he actually—we sat down on a stupid, like, two in the morning, and he shared his life story with me for an hour. And I remember the reason I bring this up is because while this guy, who literally said, “I wanna punch you in the face,” and he was standing with his fist next to me, and I was like, “Why?” Well, after he calmed down and we were talking on the street in New York City in the East Village where I was living, a rat came out from behind a garbage can.
And the guy grabbed me and tried to pull me. It’s a rat! He was terrified of it. This is a 200-pound man. “Get away from it! I don’t bite you!” I’m like, “It’s just a rat.” He had a terrible phobia of rats. The funny thing is, this is a guy who came very close to knocking out my teeth and wanted to do it. He was a guy who actually would get into fist fights. He showed me his hands; one of his knuckles was smashed in. He had scars. All he had teeth knocked out, but he was scared of rats. It’s like, really? What was he scared of? Well, interestingly, he told me about a childhood that he had that was horrible—of neglect, of having no dad, of being abused by his mom, of being abused in foster care, of being rejected by his mother entirely at a certain point, of getting put on psych drugs, of being in jail. But he wasn’t, “I’m not scared of that! I can take care of myself in prison!” and all this. But he was terrified of rats. It was a displacement. The thing that I gathered from him is that he had never really had a safe environment in which to talk about his life story. He was desperate to talk about his life story. So not only was he displacing his terror onto externalized things like rats, he was displacing his rage onto people like me—someone who was an innocent, who did nothing to him. I think that’s very common for people. They protect their traumatizers, and they protect the wounded parts of themselves— that vulnerable, terrified part of them that was so harmed and so shut down—by displacing all these feelings: the fear, the rage, the sadness, the anguish, the hope, the feelings of salvation. So many people play those feelings out by romance, by falling in love, by having tons of sex. They really want to get loved, but they’re playing it out through sex. Even with prostitutes, paying money for people to play a part that they want—a part of love, or a part of hatred, or a part of submission, abuse, whatever it is. People can play all sorts of unconscious buried feelings of theirs out. And I think of other areas in which I played out my unresolved terrors and fears. I remember swimming in a lake a lot of time as a kid. Even though it was completely irrational, I was terrified that a shark would come out and attack me. It would rip me apart! Okay, I’d seen the film Jaws, and it was embedded in my mind that a great white shark could come out of the depths and rip apart a human being. But I was in a freshwater lake that had no connection to the ocean. Nothing was going to come out and rip me apart, and yet I had a phobia of it. Well, really what it is, was I was afraid that out of the darkness of my family system, my dad was going to humiliate me and attack me and break me down and make me just want to die inside or kill me inside—that my mom, who loved me so much sometimes, sometimes could just turn it off. I could just be so full of anguish and had no one to go to for love, such that I had to bury my personality, bury my feelings, bury my natural spontaneity, be whatever she needed me to be in order to get loved—crush my soul. And what happened to all that terror? That terror that she’s going to do this again? I couldn’t live in consciousness of this. I had to believe my parents loved me more than anyone. I had to believe that I came from a great family—sometimes even a perfect family. And those terrors, well, I put it on a shark ripping me apart. It’s better to be afraid of a shark in the middle of a freshwater lake in upstate New York than to be afraid of my horrible mother or horrible father—or better said, the horrible parts of my mother and the horrible parts of my father. I’ve seen people who are terrified of cockroaches. It’s like, cockroaches? Cockroaches! Okay, they’re annoying and they’re ugly, and you know they’re vermin, but they’re not going to really do anything bad to you. And yet I know people who are terrified of them. And yet, oh, they said they came from great families. Even though when I’ve listened to the stories and I’ve looked at the photographs of their lives, it’s like, no, they didn’t come from a great family. There were horrible things. So fundamentally, what I see this phobia thing is—I’m just going to repeat it one more time and close this video. It’s the parts of people’s childhoods, the parts of their violators, the parts often of their parents, the other people who had so much control over their lives, responsibility for their lives—the people who they need to believe loved them more than anyone else in the world. And sometimes the people who actually did love them more than anyone else in the world. But those people had sides of themselves that violated them, that rejected them, that abandoned them, that harmed them, that physically attacked them, even sexually abused them. And so many times, people, because they need to believe in the sanctity of the family, the sanctity of the family system, the goodness of their parents, they have to block out all that bad stuff. And all that bad stuff and that fear and that terror, it has to go somewhere else. And sometimes a phobia, as irrational and crazy-seeming as that phobia is, is actually the only chance they have to feel any of those feelings. And so that’s where they put it. And sometimes, if they never can resolve that ancient historical trauma, that phobia is going to stay there, perhaps forever.