Healthy and Unhealthy Fear
Overcoming our fear is not always a good thing. We ought to have feared drinking, suggests the Big Book, for we knew how much suffering and humiliation it had wrought. But we did not. We lacked “the kind of defense that keeps one from putting his hand on a hot stove” (p. 24). Fear can keep us from risking or incurring harm. It can also keep us from inflicting it. Fear inhibits and constrains. That is part of the reason we deem it a negative emotion. But sometimes we need to be inhibited and constrained. Like when we want to cheat and steal. “There are times when fear is good,” wrote Aeschylus in The Eumenides, “It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.” Otherwise, it is self-will run riot.
Well, yes, we might concede, we should heed our fears if they’ll keep us from hurting ourselves or others, that’s true. But we should not let our fears prevent us from standing up for what we believe and fighting for our rights, or from realizing our dreams and succeeding in life. That’s where fear is bad. But that depends on the content of our dreams and beliefs and what we consider our rights and success to be. We cannot get around the moral issue.
Fear can be a strong moral disincentive. Until we reach that point in our spiritual growth where we want to do the right thing for the right reason (love of God and neighbor, for instance), fearing the consequences of doing the wrong thing may keep us from doing it. It may have a restraining effect and help to preserve the good. Thus, fear’s presence can compensate for virtue’s absence—if only provisionally and imperfectly. As Bill Sees It recognizes this when it says that fear doesn’t always have to be destructive, that it can be a steppingstone to prudence and to developing a decent respect for others along with other “positive values,” an indirect reference to other virtues and the right concerns intrinsic to them (p. 22).
Less typically yet not less significantly, fear can motivate us into morally right action. Fear that people will die of hunger and disease following a natural disaster may induce us to contribute our money, time, skills, and other resources to relief efforts. Because we care about human life (that is the requisite, underlying concern), the threat we perceive to it prompts us (it hardly “triggers” us) to act. This is not a case of overcoming fear and being courageous, as it would be if, let us say, we volunteered in field rescue operations and potentially risked bodily injury. We are acting because of our fear, not in spite of it. We are sacrificing, not risking. The sacrifice is prompted by our fear’s consequent desire to spare the victims further suffering.
Taking Inventory
There is healthy fear and unhealthy fear. One prevents harm, the other causes it. The latter is what the AA texts address. When the Big Book talks about fear being the product of a failed self-reliance and the 12& 12 about its being the chief activator of our defects, they are not referencing fear in general. They are describing a fear that is a telling symptom of our illness, an emotion that under the influence of our spiritual disease has become seriously disordered. Not fear but “self-centered fear” is the soul-sickness, the evil and corroding thread.
Self-centered Fear: Possessive and Demanding
The nature of the disorder is not always clear. Self-centered fear is routinely described in the rooms as “fear of losing what we have or not being able to get what we want.” This is an unfortunate oversimplification of the 12& 12 text. Paraphrasing it this way is understandable. It is easier to remember. But it entirely misses the point.
“The chief activator of our defects,” goes the exact quote in Step 7, “has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded” (p. 76). Notice that it doesn’t say “had,” but “possessed.” Notice that it doesn’t say “wanted,” but “demanded.” There is nothing in the statement that equates self-centered fear with fear of losing what we have or not getting what we want. That formulation describes only fear of loss and failure plain and simple. Such fears can and do become a problem, but they are not necessarily the problem. As we have noted, they are common and totally normal. There is nothing inherently self-centered about them.
Surely we would be less than human if we did not experience them. We ought to fear the loss of life and limb and the threats posed to it by illness, accident, natural disaster, violence, and war. It is natural to fear the loss of a loved one to separation or abandonment, together with the loss of companionship, support, protection, and safety such losses might entail. It is normal to fear the potential losses that major changes and turning points might portend. Failing to get into the right school, to choose the right career or job, to make enough money, to find a mate, get married, have children, and build a family—these fears are all normal. So are the fears of failing to rise to the difficult challenges we all frequently face, of making wrong decisions, of not succeeding in our professional, business, or family lives. These and the rest of the fears we cataloged earlier involve legitimate goods, important components of a full and flourishing life. We ought to fear the prospects of losing or failing to attain them.
Fear of loss and failure—of losing what we have or not being able to get what we want—does not by and of itself constitute self-centered fear. The 12& 12 suggests a narrower and more specific definition. The suggestion is that fear becomes self-centered when we become possessive of what we have and demanding about what we want.
An examination of how these two terms are used will bear this out. While Bill normally uses “possess” interchangeably with “have,” its use in Step 7 can be more accurately seen in the context of its previous use in Step 4. There, “possessiveness” is listed together with fear, greed, and pride as contributing to some of our worst behaviors in the areas of financial and emotional security (p. 51). This more robust use of the term is found again in connection with taking inventory in Step 10, where we read that we need to abandon the idea of being “possessively” loving of a few while ignoring, fearing, or hating the rest (pp. 92–93).
As regards “demand,” Bill confirms its obviously strong connotations twice in the same paragraph where he defines self-centered fear. He does this first when he attributes our emotional disturbances to our living on the basis of “unsatisfied demands” (S7, p. 76), and second when he contrasts a demand with a simple request. Moreover, as we might recall, in his piece on emotional sobriety for the Grapevine, Bill attributes our emotional disturbances to the unhealthy demands issuing from our unhealthy dependencies, a view we noted is already latent in our two basic texts.
Both possess and demand, therefore, can be rightly read as forceful terms in the characterization of self-centered fear. This raises two crucial questions. How do we go from just having to possessing, from simply wanting to demanding? And how does this turn fear into a self-centered emotion?
To become possessive and demanding suggests that the problem of self-centered fear arises from a distortion of the value that we place on the things we have and desire, and of our consequent concern to keep the ones and secure the others. The terms connote excess and inordinacy: becoming too attached to the good we have, too desirous of the good we want. To possess conveys not just the plain fact of ownership but an attitude, an orientation of the heart. That attitude is one of control, indeed, of complete and exclusive control. A possessive person wants to dominate. What I possess is mine. The more I prize it, the greater my wish to hold on to it and the greater my fear of losing it.
To demand is to want on stilts. We want what we want when we want it. There is an urgency and an insistence about it that flows from its inordinate importance in our own eyes. There is also a possessiveness about it. Bill linked the two concepts in “Emotional Sobriety.” As we noted earlier, he recognized that his demands were for the possession and control of the people and circumstances surrounding him. To demand connotes an unwarranted sense of entitlement. I demand what I regard as my due, what I have coming to me, what is my right. The more it is worth to me the greater my desire to acquire or achieve it and the greater my fear of failing to do so.
In both cases, the distortion of value distorts the resulting desire to keep or to get, and with that our perception. It makes us overly susceptible and unduly sensitive to anything which may appear to threaten our ability either to retain what we have or to attain what we want, thus potentially increasing the incidence and the intensity of our fear. We are rendered vulnerable and insecure, seeing threats, obstacles, and difficulties that may not be as ominous or as imminent as we might imagine or that may not even exist at all.
Being possessive and demanding reveals a disordered concern for the things we have and want. That is the basis of the disorder in self-centered fear. What might otherwise be a normal fear of loss and failure becomes abnormal.
Self-centered Fear: Excess and Disorder
The disorder takes two closely interconnected forms. One is excess. We eat, we drink, and we grab for more of everything than we actually need says the 12& 12, for fear that we will never have enough (S4, p. 49). We live upon the basis of unfulfilled demands and in a state of continuing upheaval and aggravation (S7, p. 76). Because when something becomes too important to us, we can never have enough of it. We always want more. The more we have, the more we have to have. It becomes an addiction. That is why alcoholism is said to be a disease of more. Excess is one of its defining features. In our drinking as in so many other things, there is often a drivenness about us, a tendency to go beyond the limits of what is necessary, appropriate, or desirable, even safe. We are truly an insatiable breed.
The other form of the disorder warps the relationship between the various goods we have or desire. We put second things first, a lesser good before a greater good, a lower love above a love that is higher. When we looked at a job as no more than a way to make money rather than a good opportunity to give service, we read in the 12& 12, when acquiring money and becoming financially independent seemed more important to us than a right dependence upon God, we remained the victims of irrational fear (S12, pp. 121–122). When something becomes too important to us, we put it first. It is that simple. We subordinate other things to it, neglecting what we should not neglect, making sacrifices we should not make, and taking chances we should not take.
When we place money ahead of service, we are reversing their spiritually ordered relation and construing work self-centeredly, in terms primarily of what we can get and not of what we can give. This reversal of value opens the door to becoming possessive and demanding. We begin to feel entitled to our job, trying to extract as much as we can from it while contributing as little as we can get away with. We put things off, or at best labor halfheartedly and drag our feet (S4, p. 49). It is as if the world somehow owed us a living.
Professionally, this is a recipe for loss and failure. It can only undermine our prospects for successful employment or a rewarding career, creating instability and hence insecurity. The obverse is that we become too demanding of ourselves. Money and financial security may be so critical to us that we work ourselves to death, perhaps putting in 80-hour weeks or holding two jobs. This is a recipe for loss and failure as well, especially in those areas we will inevitably neglect: our health, our marriage, our relationship with our children and other loved ones, our friendships, and our spiritual growth. This of course will usually boomerang and end up having a negative impact on our work. In both cases we will create conditions that are inimical to our wellbeing and can only generate fear.
The 12& 12 text points to another higher good in relation to work. It declares that dependence on God comes before dependence on money. Money can be properly seen as a means to financial independence. But the good of financial independence can become for us a substitute for a higher good, indeed for the highest and ultimate good, which is God. If we are financially secure, we might tacitly assume, we will be emotionally secure as well. We will be able to handle anything. We won’t have to depend on anyone. In practice, “anyone” ends up including God. Hence the ancient metaphor that “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Financial independence promises power. If we have it, we won’t need a Higher Power that much—or maybe not at all
Self-centered Fear: Self-sufficiency and Self-reliance
This generally unconscious tendency to build our lives independently of God is what the Big Book means by self-reliance, and it drives the manifold aspirations and ambitions we pursue through work. For work is not always about money and the financial independence it can buy. It is just as much about the less tangible and less material valuables we referenced earlier: image, status, respect, reputation, influence, and, again, power. We can make the satisfaction of any and all of these things—rather than God—the ground of our emotional security and of our happiness. The same is true of the satisfactions we seek outside our work: in family, friends, and romance; in social, political, and religious causes; and in a variety of other, to us meaningful pursuits. We come to depend primarily on them as opposed to God—and sometimes in opposition to God.
Such self-reliance is based implicitly on a particular self-construal, on a certain view of ourselves which we referenced earlier in connection with human freedom. This is the view that we are self-sufficient. We are a power unto ourselves, masters of our fate and captains of our soul. We seek independence in all areas of life. We seek complete moral autonomy. We wish to be the sole and sovereign arbiters of what is right as it pertains to the things we have and want and of the rightful means to secure them. We alone can decide what has value, for in our worldview all value is subjective and relative to the self. Things have only the meaning that we ourselves attach to them. Good and bad and right and wrong are matters of individual choice. Ultimately, we can only depend on ourselves, on our own personal judgment and effort.
Self-reliance is ambitious. It projects a great deal of self-confidence and involves a lot of self-assertion and self-will. That is not surprising. Self-reliance is a form of self-centeredness. It is what turns fear from a normal into an abnormal, self-centered emotion. It makes everything revolve around us: what we have and what we want, what we possess and demand. It makes our success a go-it-alone proposition, an outcome that is completely dependent on us. This turns out to be more bravado than bravery. It saddles us with a heavier burden than we can reasonably bear. The result is that we become inordinately focused on the possibility of loss and failure.
But there is another reason why self-reliance is counterproductive and tends to heighten our fear. Why is this? Because while we may think we are depending on ourselves—our intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, talent, skills, drive, energy, and hard work—in the end we are really depending on others: on their assessment of those things, their recognition, their approval, their reward. Like Bill, we are resting our emotional security on the shifting sands of people and circumstance.
People are fickle and fallible. Even those we love and trust the most will fall short; even when they have the best of intentions, they will disappoint us; they will fail us; they will not always give us what we need. Circumstances too are, well, circumstances. They change with the ebb and flow of life. We have no control over them. The most solid company may collapse; rising stock markets and home values will fall; there will be accidents, natural disasters, epidemics and pandemics, wars, illness, and death. Any gains we make and any security we achieve are at best fragile, partial, and temporary. Eventual loss and failure are not only possible, but likely, and not only likely, but inevitable. Whatever we have and whatever we get sooner or later we will be forced to forfeit. The very personal strengths on which our confidence rests will erode with time and age. Indeed, the day will come when they will fail us along with everything else. We will lose it all.
That is why the Big Book declares that self-reliance will fail us and result in what the 12& 12 describes as self-centered fear. The extent to which we can rely on ourselves alone is limited. We are inherently dependent beings. We are not in charge. We are not in control. Our human resources are not sufficient to deal with the challenges, the complexities, the vicissitudes, the risks and dangers inherent in life.
Besides, we are inconstant. We are constitutionally unreliable creatures. The self on which we claim to rely is an unruly jumble of changing and conflicting views, interests, desires, drives, instincts, plans, goals, and ambitions. Our inventory will reveal instances of things we once desperately wanted for reasons we cannot even fathom now. Why did we want that graduate degree so badly, or that job, or that relationship, or that apartment, or that car? Why were we so intent on expanding our business, doubling its size, opening up in still another location? Why was it so crucial that we move to this or that city? Who is “our” selves anyway, who is the self that we put so much faith in if not a product of circumstances over which we did not have, and ultimately will not have, any control?
If there is an illusion connected with fear, self-reliance is definitely it. It is based on a self-construal that fosters self-deception. It creates a false sense of independence that backfires and ends in a false dependence, the kind of dependence Bill W. writes about in “Emotional Sobriety.” Why does being overly dependent on people and circumstance lead to becoming possessive and demanding of them, as Bill suggests? Because such dependence creates a “dependency” that works as an addiction. If we are addicted, the object of our addiction is an absolute necessity. We must have it at all costs. We must literally possess it. People become the suppliers and circumstances the conditions which make the supply possible. They simply must not fail us. Hence our attempt to control and dominate them; hence the demands that we impose on them to deliver and come through for us, on our terms and timetable.
But as we have already observed, addictions cannot be satisfied. This is true whether the addiction is a craving for alcohol, drugs, sex, food, or gambling, or whether it is for achievement, approval, status, money, power, prestige, or any other thing on which we come to depend as the thing we must absolutely have in order to feel good about ourselves. Because the fix won’t fix us, we will always demand still another fix.
Overdependence is the flip side of domination and possession. Either we persist in dominating those we know, says the 12& 12, or we become far too dependent on them (S4, p. 53). We try to dominate them precisely because we depend on them too much. For that very same reason, we become demanding of them. Dependence, domination, and demand are futile attempts at emotional security, as we are further told in the 12& 12 (S12, p. 116). They are about having our way. The result is that we are constantly being thrown into “unworkable relations” with people. Leaning “too heavily” on others and expecting too much attention, protection, support, and love from them can only ensure their eventual failure, for they too are human and limited and can in no way meet our ceaseless demands (S4, p. 53). Some will fail us; others will distance themselves from us; still others will abandon us altogether. There will also be those who resist our impositions and push back in anger. Such attempts at security can only backfire They set us up for more insecurity and fear.
Self-centered Fear: Chief Activator of Defects
Self-sufficiency and self-reliance result in an overdependence which makes us possessive and demanding, which in turn generates the excess and disorder that are the marks of abnormal fear. This is the dynamic that makes self-centered fear the chief activator of our defects. Pride, prompted by either conscious or unconscious fears heads the list, declares the 12& 12 (S4, pp. 48–49). Fear of what? That we will lose what we possess or fail to get what we demand. Because if that happens, it only confirms our deepest fear about ourselves: that we are not good enough. Our pretensions to self-reliance and self-sufficiency, to possessing and demanding, betray a vulnerable ego filled with a false and overcompensating sense of power and control. Loss and failure have a deflating effect. They are perceived as diminishing us, as reducing our worth and tarnishing our image in our own eyes and in the eyes of those whose verdict matters to us and on whose validation we ultimately depend.
Our self-esteem constantly on the line before the prospect of loss and failure, pride entices us into making unreasonable demands upon ourselves as well as upon others, demands which cannot be possibly met without distorting or abusing our God-given instincts, explains the 12& 12 (S4, p. 49). When satisfying our instinctive drives for sex, security, and society become the single object of our lives, it adds, pride then steps in to rationalize our excesses.
If, as the 12& 12 suggests, our natural instincts, desires, and concerns are good and given us by God and are thus inherent in human nature, and if they are naturally directed to the satisfaction of created goods which also proceed from God, then it follows that our pursuit of such goods is warranted and spiritually sanctioned. It is perfectly right that we should endeavor to satisfy them. But when their satisfaction becomes the “sole” (or the main, or the overriding) object of our lives, we end up “perverting” and “misusing” them.
This is where we go astray. This is the disordering, the warping, the absolutizing, the idol-making process which drives self-centered fear. Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied drives us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not” (S4, p. 49). We are trapped in a vicious cycle of fear and defect, with fear generating defects and defects fear. “These fears are termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of whatever sort of life we try to build,” the 12& 12 concludes. They are, to recall once again the Big Book’s metaphor, an evil and corroding thread.
Hence the fundamentally spiritual nature of self-centered fear. The corrosion comes from the corruption of the good things God has granted us, from their misappropriation and misuse. Valuing the creation above the Creator, we see these goods in isolation, independently of and apart from him. We claim them as our own, fashioning them into human constructs we can selfishly possess and demand. We take them to be our final end and goal in life (S7, p. 71). We make them into ultimate things, into functional gods which take the place of God. We build our lives around them, rather than around him. We let what are God-given desires for God-given goods exceed the purpose for which they were intended (S6, p. 65). We are willful in our demand that they provide us with more pleasures and satisfactions than are proper or possible (S6, p. 65), exceeding those God has naturally ordained. We have to have them, and because we feel entitled to them, we will not be denied, we will “fight” for them, as Bill said he did.
But it is a losing struggle. For nothing is ever enough. What Bill calls false dependencies are false not only because people and circumstance cannot satisfy them, but because they themselves cannot give us the satisfaction we seek even when we do attain them. They too fall short. They too leave us wanting. There is a spiritual hole in us which nothing seems to fill: not sex and romance, not family satisfaction, not work and achievement, not recognition and approval, not power, wealth, or material possessions. Why is this? Why is it that the glow and the glitter fade so fast? Why is it that no sooner have we reached a goal than we are already straining for the next? Why is it that we can never be satisfied? Why are we so insatiable?
Because deep in our heart it is not just the things we want, but what we think the things can give us: personal worth, meaning, significance, purpose. These are the things for which we really hunger and thrist. We need to know that we matter, that our lives matter, that life is not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But if worldly success and satisfaction are not enough to grant us the assurance, perhaps they were never meant to. Created goods are great goods, but they cannot replace their Creator. Created good are finite. Desire is infinite. Only and infinite Good can fill it. The Greater Good is God. That is why St. Augustine said God created us for himself. He alone can satisfy the deepest longs of our heart. We cannot get second things by putting them first, as C.S. Lewis writes. That is ultimately the reason why self-reliance will fail us and leave us striving and grasping.
Emotional Sobriety
Our inventory of fears is intended to help us come to a point in our spiritual journey where we recognize our radical insufficiency and admit our complete dependence on God. That is where the decision we made in Step 3 to turn our will and our lives over to his care is intended to take us. We are naturally dependent beings – “dependent rational animals”, as Alastair McIntyre puts it. That is irrefutable. The question is whether we recognize the true nature of that dependence.
If we don’t we cannot but default to a false dependence. For depend we must. Bill attributed his chronic depression to this repeated failure to satisfy his unhealthy dependencies and demands.
It works like that with fear. Unhealthy dependencies and demands produce unhealthy, self-centered fears. Something has become too important for us. We want it too badly. As we examine each fear, therefore, we need to ask ourselves what this thing is. What are we so needy for, that the prospect of losing or failing to get it fills us with such apprehension? What are we so hooked on, so attached to, that it renders us so possessive and demanding? To what extent are we relying on this thing for our self-esteem and our self-worth, for our significance and security, to fulfill our needs for meaning and purpose? To what extent have we become dependent on these things for our happiness?
As important as these questions are, however, they address only the proximate cause of our defective fears. They are necessary to our inquiry, but they are not sufficient. Behind them lies a bigger, ultimate question. And this is whether these things have become so central to our lives that they have taken the place of God in them. For if we are not to miss the forest for the trees in examining our unhealthy dependencies and demands, we need to see that, in the end, the unhealthy dependency is resting our hearts in anything but God, the unhealthy demand demanding that it give us what only he can give us.
The Basic Antidote
“Perhaps there is a better way,” suggests the Big Book as it describes a process that weans us away from self-reliance and brings us to a point where we start to live on a totally different basis: “the basis of trusting and relying upon God” (p. 68). If self-reliance—understood in all its spiritual and moral dimensions—is at the root of the disordering process that results in self-centered fear, then to be free from such fear entails a reversal of that process. It entails a spiritual reordering that reorients our heart and restores our vision with regard to the distorted concerns and perceptions on which those fears are founded. The fact that it can effect such a reordering explains Bill W.’ s claim that a spiritual awakening is the “basic antidote” to fear (As Bill Sees It, p. 196). We undergo a deep inner transformation whereby we come to trust “infinite God rather than our finite selves” (Big Book, p. 168), or, by extension, any other finite self or thing. This answers the existential question we said lies at the heart of fear. We live in God’s universe (Big Book, p. 25). God is in control. God is with us.
Trusting and relying upon God is not a pious proposition. It is not some abstract or conventional religious tenet to which we are asked to give our mental assent. Nor is it a function of willpower, something we supposedly “choose” to do. It comes about as the result of a spiritual transformation that involves a fundamental change in perception and concern, in the way we view and value things. This transformation is what frees us from fear. It is the product of a faith that works, a faith that, by the grace of God, practices specific spiritual principles in specific ways.
What the Big Book describes in Step 4 is the working out of a process prefigured in Step 3. Referring to a right reliance on God, we read that “Established on such a footing, we became less interested in ourselves, in our little plans and designs.” We become less self-centered and the things we want for ourselves become less important. They lose the allure that makes us possessive and demanding of them. “More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.” We become more concerned with giving than with getting. “As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter” (p. 63).
The description of this transformation is continued in the 12& 12, which zeroes in on two specific areas of concern. As time passed, it says, we began to lose our fears surrounding work and money. We could perform “humble labor”—no longer seeing it as menial or beneath us—without having to worry about the future. If things were good, we didn’t have to fear a change for the worse, for God would still provide. Trusting him, we could accept any setback and turn it into an asset that would help us to show others that they could get over the same fears. Our material condition didn’t matter as much as our spiritual condition did (S12, p. 122). Material things continued to matter, but they didn’t matter excessively; we were not inordinately concerned with them. Reflecting this change in outlook, we discovered that being free from fear was more important than being free from want (ibid). Gradually, as we came to see what was really important in life, money ceased being our master and became our servant, love and service becoming a new means of exchange with those around us.
Here the 12& 12 echoes the Big Book, where we read that, “Although financial recovery is on the way for many of us, we found we could not place money first. For us, material well-being always followed spiritual progress; it never preceded it” (p. 127). A job, money, financial independence: these are all good and important things. It is right that we should strive for them, whether to secure them in the first place or to preserve them over the long term. But we come to see that we need to strive for them rightly, in right relation to other goods. We start to follow “good orderly direction” in this area of our lives.
We come to see work in spiritual terms as primarily an opportunity for service, and not just a way to make money. Sharing a similar perspective, Dorothy Sayers observed that work is the gracious expression of creative energy in the service of others. Service is the first thing, the higher good; money is second, a lesser and derivative good. Embedded in Step 12, the principle of service says that the greater value lies in giving rather than in receiving. Doing good for others comes before doing well for ourselves. The latter is a by-product of the former. As we read in some versions of the St. Francis Prayer, as our two texts remind us time and time again, and as Bill W. recognized in “Emotional Sobriety,” it is in giving that we receive.
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