"The Architecture of Fear."

If you’re anything like me, your panic- or anxiety-fraught periods produce a sense of place that’s particularly attuned to anything even potentially fearsome. For example, usually I love crowded events, feeding off the energy of the audience, the thrill of watching something happen in person – ballgames, concerts, theater. But when I’m feeling anxious, even the sight of a sports stadium or concert hall gives me the willies. (As do highways, bridges, subways, shopping malls, airports, office buildings, supermarket freezer aisles, crowded sidewalks, parking structures, the gym…. Raise a glass to agoraphobia!)

What if it’s not just your panic or anxiety speaking, though? What if there are ways that “be afraid!” messages are embedded in many aspects of society, whether intentionally or not? This is the kind of question posed by the art in “The Architecture of Fear,” a show at the Belgian gallery Z33.

From the show’s catalog:

The society of fear is more than just a feeling…Think of the many government warnings, the health messages and increased safety measures. Risk elimination is the word…The question of course is how and to what extent this affects an individual. Do these countless warnings not only inspire more fear? Does that camera above the station tunnel not suggest that something is wrong? 

…The fact that fear is used as a life style choice, as a sales pitch or as political bait makes it no less real. The question is how we deal with fear, what kind of world we want to create for ourselves.

Some cool stuff here, in a variety of media. (My inner conspiracy theorist is particularly drawn to Trevor Paglen's "limit telephotography" of secret military bases.) Wish I could afford a quick trip to Belgium!

On emotion, anxiety, panic, and fatherhood.

I grew up out of touch with my emotions. If you consider those with emotional self-knowledge, with an emotional fluency that permits them to discern a wide and nuanced range of their feelings, as being akin to the Sami people of northern Europe, with their ability to identify and name many types of snow (for which they have more than 100 words), I was more like a Floridian whose vocabulary for frozen precipitation is limited to "snow," "sleet," and "slush."

In other words, my understanding of my emotions was simple and stunted. If you asked me how I was feeling, I'd say "great" or "okay" or "bad." I didn't realize there were gradations of feeling beyond these. 

This inability to understand what I was feeling extended even to physical ailments. Even when I was under the weather, I didn't trust the feelings telling me that was the case. I'd tell my mom I didn't feel well, that I had a cold or flu and thought I should stay home from school, but deep down inside, despite the physical symptoms -- the sweat-stained sheets, the sore throat and raspy breath -- I'd be wracked by guilt, by the belief that I was trying to pull something over on my parents, on the school, on everyone who was trusting me to do and be my best. Only when my mother showed me the thermometer, with its reading of well over 100 degrees, would I begin to believe what my body was telling me.

This went on for years. For instance, in graduate school, 20 years ago now, I missed two weeks of classes because I was unable to get out of bed to do much more than cross the street to go to the grocery store. I believed I was depressed, or agoraphobic, or some equally invalid form of invalidism, that what I needed was not medical attention but sufficient willpower to suck it up and power through. In retrospect, I probably was depressed, but that wasn't all that was going on. Months later, a blood test revealed that, in fact, I'd had mononucleosis during that time. Imagine: I had mono, but was unable to accept that I was sick.

It went on for years, and it still goes on. Maybe it's partly a genetic thing; I don't know. But I do know that it was at least partly learned. I grew up in a time and place that frowned upon any display of vulnerability among boys and men, and in a family where anything less than perfection was experienced as a disappointment. Fortunately, good grades came easily for me. But sadness, anxiety, fear -- these were for neurotics, for weaklings. A comedian might get away with expressing these things for a laugh -- think Woody Allen -- but real men were cut from the same kind of cloth as Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen. And so I spent much conscious effort molding myself in my teens into something more than just an honors student, and became a cocksure jock.

As a result, I never learned to name my more difficult emotions, much less accept them. I never learned that they could be faced and managed, that they could even be transmuted by artistic endeavor into something universal and sublime. These were lessons I would only learn on my own, as an adult, during the passage through periods of tremendous confusion and pain, periods tainted by the severe cognitive dissonance and shame that accompany having to completely rethink who you are and can be.

As I understand it, some people come to panic by modeling the anxious behaviors, the fears and anxieties and depressiveness, of their loved ones. This was not remotely my experience. Rather, I'm convinced, I came to panic by having no model for experiencing an entire swath of my more challenging emotions. I'd been taught to push down those emotions, to disregard them. To disregard my body and a good part of my mind. This had its upsides when it came to performing in the classroom or on the athletic field, but eventually, when panic smashed the dam holding back my darker emotions and my psyche was flooded with knowledge about myself that I was not ready to accept, I was left broken, overwhelmed. Drowning in shame at who I'd become, utterly unable to reach out to others for help, and driven to commit mistake after mistake after mistake as a result, before finally realizing that the ways I knew to make my way in the world were not working and that I'd have to make some major changes if I didn't want to end up slicing my wrists or caked in soot and living under a bridge, a raving lunatic.

So it was with interest that I came across this article, from Psychology Today. Here's a taste:

"I met someone when I was in grad school, and I had butterflies in my stomach," Lisa Barrett, a psychologist at Boston College, says. "I thought this meant that I was in love, but I actually had the flu."

The episode comes up frequently when Barrett describes her conceptual-act model of emotion, an entirely new paradigm that challenges decades of psychological thinking (and won her a $2.5 million NIH grant in 2007).....

Barrett argues that you can learn how to change how you interpret internal states, and even increase your emotional granularity: "If people have 20 words for anger (irritation, fury, rage, hostility), then they will perceive 20 different states and better regulate their emotional states as a result."

It's interesting stuff, stuff that maps to what I've learned doing CBT, psychotherapy, and meditation, and it's absolutely going to inform the way I raise my son. If I have anything to say about it, he will know that all his feelings are valid, and none to be feared; that mistakes are a good thing, a chance to grow and learn; and that he is loved unconditionally, regardless of any stumbles he should make on his path through life.

Adult anxiety: another reason not to hit your kids. (As if anyone should need one.)

Like the Catholic Church scandal before it, the Penn State story has pedophilia on everyone's mind. The details of that story are horrific (as a father, I can say I'd have a difficult time preventing myself from putting Jerry Sandusky or Joe Paterno in the hospital if I were to run into them), but I have to hope that the fact that abuse is now so dramatically on our national radar screen ends up having some positive effects -- that it will embolden victims of and witnesses to abuse to speak out, and result in more accountability among perpetrators.

Of course, pedophilia isn't the only flavor of child abuse. While we've come a long way from widespread acceptance of the "spare the rod and spoil the child" philosophy, non-sexual physical violence is still part of far too many children's lives. (For instance.)

That the ramifications of violence can be severe and long lasting should come as a surprise to only the most cold hearted among us. According to one recent study, even those "without a history of physical or sexual abuse during childhood" can be adversely affected by "slapping and spanking":

...those who reported being slapped or spanked "often" or "sometimes" had significantly higher lifetime rates of anxiety disorders...alcohol abuse or dependence...and one or more externalizing problems...compared with those who reported "never" being slapped or spanked...There appears to be a linear association between the frequency of slapping and spanking during childhood and a lifetime prevalence of anxiety disorder, alcohol abuse or dependence and externalizing problems.

The lesson: Spare the rod. Period.

The best of PANIC!: Perfectionism and anxiety.

"'Good enough' may be good enough for other people, but it's never good enough for me."

"When I make a mistake, I feel like a failure."

"I study hard because I'm afraid to disappoint my parents."

Do any of these lines sound like something you'd say? Then you're a perfectionist.

According to "Pitfalls of Perfectionism", from Psychology Today, perfectionists "are made and not born, commonly at an early age." Once established, perfectionism tends to get in the way of one's ability to live life to the fullest:

Perfectionism seeps into the psyche and creates a pervasive personality style. It keeps people from engaging in challenging experiences; they don't get to discover what they truly like or to create their own identities. Perfectionism reduces playfulness and the assimilation of knowledge; if you're always focused on your own performance and on defending yourself, you can't focus on learning a task. Here's the cosmic thigh-slapper: Because it lowers the ability to take risks, perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation—exactly what's not adaptive in the global marketplace.

Yet, it does more. It is a steady source of negative emotions; rather than reaching toward something positive, those in its grip are focused on the very thing they most want to avoid—negative evaluation. Perfectionism, then, is an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

Perfectionism, of course, leads to heaps and loads of anxiety. Nobody's perfect, after all -- so expecting perfection is by definition a doomed enterprise. No wonder, then, that it's so prevalent among those with anxiety disorders:

Perfectionists fear that a mistake will lead others to think badly of them; the performance aspect is intrinsic to their view of themselves. They are haunted by uncertainty whenever they complete a task, which makes them reluctant to consider something finished. "People may not necessarily believe they made a mistake," explains Frost, "they're just not quite sure; they doubt the quality of their actions." Intolerance for uncertainty characterizes obsessive compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, too.

Unfortunately, according to the article, more and more Americans are growing up to be perfectionists. Why? Parents who overschedule and overmanage their kids' lives:

"I don't understand it," one bewildered student told me, speaking for the five others seated around the table during lunch at a small residential college in the Northeast. "My parents were perfectly happy to get Bs and Cs when they were in college. But they expect me to get As." The others nodded in agreement. Today's hothouse parents are not only over-involved in their children's lives, they demand perfection from them in school.

And if ever there was a blueprint for breeding psychological distress, that's it.

So lay off your kids. Let 'em know it's okay to make mistakes -- that mistakes are in fact valuable, in that they provide important lessons. I don't mean you should stop holding your kids to high standards, just that you should strive to let them know you'll love them just as much whether they succeed or fail in whatever they do. Maybe, just maybe, it'll give them the self-acceptance and flexibility of thought and behavior they need to avoid developing panic, anxiety, or OCD.

How we're making our children more anxious and depressed.

When I was a kid on Long Island, summertime would unleash a gaggle of us to roam the streets and sidewalks of our suburban neighborhood from morning 'til dark, with breaks only for lunch and dinner in the kitchens of our ranches and split levels.

Today, those same streets and sidewalks are devoid of children. Why? Here's what a recent Atlantic article says:

"Since about 1955 ... children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children's activities," says the author Peter Gray, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at Boston College...

..."It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing uniforms and following the directions of coaches while their parents dutifully watch and cheer."

Why has this happened? Fear: "...parents mentioned child predators, road traffic, and bullies as reasons for restricting their children's outdoor play."

Never mind that the actual threats facing our kids are likely no greater than they've ever been. If kids' lack of unstructured, self-directed play seems like a bad thing to you, you're onto something. It's the rare kid who doesn't find it stressful having a parent looking over his or her shoulder, and as we've discussed before here on PANIC!, stress is bad news. And the costs to children of not being able to explore and socialize and make mistakes and come to decisions on their own can be high, and may include an increased likelihood of anxiety and depression as they grow up:

There has been a significant increase in anxiety and depression from 1950 to present day in teens and young adults and Gray cites several studies documenting this rise. One showed that five to eight times as many children and college students reported clinically significant depression or anxiety than 50 years ago and another documented a similar trend in the fourteen- to sixteen-year-old age group between 1948 and 1989.

Suicide rates quadrupled from 1950 to 2005 for children less than fifteen years and for teens and young adults ages 15-25, they doubled.

Of course, this doesn't recognize that anxiety and depression rates depend on unknowable changes in rates of people seeking treatment for these problems and psychiatric diagnosis standards, but it seems pretty likely to me that driving our kids harder and giving them less space to find their identity and learn to manage their emotions on their own is a recipe for anxiety and depression later on.

The bottom line for parents? Try a little less structure and a little more "just be home for dinner."