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Re-experiencing childhood fear, anxiety later in life

Imagine that you are driving to pick up your 11-year-old from elementary school.

She normally waits by the school driveway and has never before been late. All sorts of worries and anxieties begin to percolate through your mind. Did something horrible happen to her and the school wasn’t able to notify me because I left the house early to pick her up? Was there an active school shooter and the authorities are not at the school yet but they are in transit? Given the realities of the world these worries are not isolated or extreme, but are highly rational and lucid.

News stories about school violence impact both parents and their children. In a 2021 study of how the news can frighten children, parents of these school-aged children have observed that the exposure to news of school shootings is positively correlated with a frightened response and a sense that the world that they are residing in is unpredictable and dangerous.

A book written in the 1960s, titled “Children and the Death of a President,” focused on how children responded to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, although the Zapruder film was not immediately available due to the theory at the time that the American public was not emotionally ready to watch such a horrific event on video.

The undersigned remembers clearly, about one month after the Kennedy assassination, having bad nightmares about this event. It focused on the assassination itself and the sound of the Secret Service rushing to the car. When a little older, my friends and I reacted the same to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Several of us talked about how we would sleep with the pillow around our heads to prevent a bullet from killing us. I even developed a fear, before it was rational, of being shot in the movie theater. It is ironic how much that fear portended what was to become more commonplace. My mother used to tell me that I am not important enough for someone to shoot me. As we have observed, that rationalization is not valid in the United States presently.

A different type of worry and anxiety occurs regularly in high school students who are waiting to take a test for standardized test scores. For those who are near the top of the class, and are hoping to be accepted to an Ivy League college, their test scores are crucial to their success. They have worked diligently and authentically achieved their academic success. Yet the worry about the results of a single standardized stress might increase anxiety to a fever pitch in students who ordinarily are self-confident and sure of their accomplishments.

Furthermore, the presence of test anxiety and performance on tests has been studied in a doctoral dissertation from 2016. A total of 50 fourth grade students were evaluated for test anxiety by measuring pulse rate. The pulse rates were measured just before the the New York state standardized science tests were taken. A test anxiety questionnaire was also administered before the tests were given. It was discovered that there was a significant relationship between anxiety levels as determined by the pulse rates, but no correlation between the test anxiety score and test results.

It has been thought that there is a deficit in the ability to move one’s attention from a negative valence to a positive one. The theory notes that if one is unable to detach from negative observations or experiences, that anxiety can be markedly unchecked or limited with.

Paradoxically, it has also been demonstrated that efficiency in avoiding negative information is associated with increased anxiety. In some instances, it can be conjectured that the energy involved in cognitively shifting from negative to positive environmental stimuli produces the very anxiety and worry that one is attempting to mitigate.

Personality and attachment styles can also play a role in worry and anxiety. John Bowlby noted that some individuals were raised in an environment where parental or guardian behavior was inconsistent and unpredictable.

This type of parenting creates a sense of anxiety — and even fear — when there is no clear concordance between the manner in which the parents conduct themselves. Often, these types of anxious attachments can create a “please me” personality where the individual believes the only way to navigate this is to denounce one’s own needs and focus solely on the needs of the parent.

This style becomes a transference to all of the others in the orbit of this identified patient. Since one experienced the primary relationship during the first five years of life as a terrifying and uncomfortable dynamic, the individual can often create a self-fulfilling prophecy where all future relationships are unconsciously primed as a result of the earliest and most important relationship with parents.

This can contribute to an expected fracture in all future relationships, and a fear of reprisal for any behavior the individual may naively recreate. For example, an individual at work may get a call to come to the boss’s office to discuss something. Those with an anxious attachment style will immediately experience a tachycardia or nausea or shakiness and fear that the only reason the boss wants to meet with them is due to something negative or inefficient that they have engaged in. These triggers can lead one to regress to childhood and re-experience the fear and primitive emotions when they might have been responsible for doing something wrong.

For example, I remember my senior year of high school where my friend — who was ultimately admitted to the Yale Music School — and I pretended to have an alter ego for reasons of rebelling and using curse words all the way down the main hall of the high school. As we turned the corner the principal, Ed Tines, ominously caught us, and I was terrified. First, we had never before been inappropriate with our language throughout the three years of high school, and I was worried we might be expelled. That didn’t happen, but the veracity of the principal’s anger and disappointment in us has stayed with me all of these years later. I am now 65 years of age, but the fear of getting in trouble, like Joe and I did, has stayed with me. Any time an authority figure wishes to meet with me, I re-experience the shame and guilt that Joe and I experienced in our teens, and worry that I am about to receive very bad news.

Memories of the past can have an antagonistic impact or a supporting impact, and the unconscious mind that harbors these memories remains powerful throughout our lifetime.

Anxiety and worry can ultimately produce a positive impact if we utilize our introspection and insights to understand the source of our discomfort and learn to overcome it. Defying these traumatic memories by intentionally believing in ourselves and recognizing that we possess the wherewithal to overcome obstacles, can weaken the primitive memories and minimize them and dilute them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his personal essays, noted that we possess, and can transcend, the fears and worries we carry with us. Instead of encapsulating us, we can learn to encapsulate these triggers and build new memories that reinforce our confidence and abilities. In the same way that we can begin any relationship anew, we can also recreate our relationship with ourselves. Jungian psychology notes that when we engage in creative activities, whether that is through writing, painting, songwriting, or acting, we in fact recreate ourselves.

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